MUNICH — John Demjanjuk’s lawyer filed a challenge today to the German arrest warrant that led to the 89-year-old’s deportation, arguing that the evidence against him was not solid and Germany’s jurisdiction was questionable.
Guenther Maull filed the challenge, a standard step in the German legal system, after the retired Ohio autoworker was formally placed into investigative custody in Germany.
Demjanjuk arrived today in Munich after being deported from the United States to face allegations of being an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews and others as a Nazi guard at the Sobibor death camp.
Under the German legal system, suspects are placed in investigative custody pending the formal pressing of charges.
A judge read Demjanjuk the 21-page arrest warrant outlining the charges today. If Demjanjuk is found fit to stand trial, it would be the culmination of a legal saga that began in 1977 and has involved courts and government officials from at least five countries on three continents.
Maull said the warrant was read to Demjanjuk as he was sitting in a wheelchair and getting oxygen through a nasal tube.
“He understood what was being read to him,” Maull said.
Maull said it may turn out that, for example, Demjanjuk can only be tried for a half-hour each day.
The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier who spent World War II as a Nazi POW and never hurt anyone.
But Nazi-era documents obtained by U.S. justice authorities and shared with German prosecutors suggest otherwise. They include a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at the Sobibor death camp and saying he was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki. Both sites were in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Demjanjuk’s case is an example of how difficult it has become to bring alleged Nazi war criminals to trial more than six decades since the end of World War II.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, praised U.S. and German authorities for bringing Demjanjuk in.
“I think this is an extremely important day for justice and the fact that Demjanjuk, who actively participated in the mass murder of 29,000 Jews at Sobibor, will be put to trial is of great significance and reinforces the message that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the murderers,” he said from his office in Jerusalem.
Yet the key to Demjanjuk’s fate may lie not with the evidence but rather with a German court’s decision about whether he is medically fit to stand trial. In any case, Demjanjuk, who has been without a country since the U.S. stripped him of his citizenship in 2002, is likely to spend the rest of his life in Germany.
Germany’s main Jewish leader urged authorities to act quickly.
“It is a race against time,” Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor, said in a statement.
“For survivors of the Shoah, it is intolerable to watch how a suspected Nazi war criminal, who knew no mercy for his victims, seeks sympathy and compares his deportation to torture,” she said. Shoah is the Hebrew term for Holocaust.
Demjanjuk insists he is innocent and fought bitterly for decades against efforts to strip him of his U.S. citizenship and later deport him.
Dramatic photos last month showed Demjanjuk wincing in apparent pain as he was removed by immigration agents from his home in Seven Hills, Ohio, in an earlier attempt to deport him to Germany. However, images taken only days earlier and released by the U.S. government showed him entering his car unaided.
Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said Monday his father is dying of leukemic bone marrow disease and claimed he would not survive a trans-Atlantic flight.
The deportation came four days after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider Demjanjuk’s request to block deportation.
Among the documents obtained by the Munich prosecutors is an SS identity card that features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk along with his height and weight, and says he worked at Sobibor.
German prosecutors also have a transfer roster that lists Demjanjuk by name and birthday and also says he was at Sobibor, and statements from former guards who remembered him being there.
The case dates to 1977, when the Justice Department moved to revoke Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship, alleging he hid his past as a Nazi death camp guard.
Demjanjuk had been tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka death camp in Poland. He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity but the conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.
That decision came after Israel won access to Soviet archives, which had depositions given after the war by 37 Treblinka guards and forced laborers who said “Ivan” was a different Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko. Some identified Marchenko in photographs.
A U.S. judge revoked Demjanjuk’s citizenship in 2002 based on U.S. Justice Department evidence showing he concealed his service at Sobibor and other Nazi-run death and forced-labor camps.
A U.S. immigration judge ruled in 2005 he could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in March.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
