The US government said yesterday it had sought travel documents to deport 88-year-old US resident John Demjanjuk to Germany to face charges that he helped murder at least 29,000 Jews as a Nazi death camp guard. The travel documents are one of the last steps required to deport the ailing Demjanjuk, who lives with his wife in a Cleveland, Ohio suburb.
Germany issued an arrest warrant for the retired auto worker two weeks ago, the culmination of years of legal proceedings that have attempted to link Demjanjuk with second World War atrocities.
“Following an order by a US immigration judge to deport John Demjanjuk and receipt of a warrant to arrest Demjanjuk, US immigration and customs enforcement contacted the government of Germany to secure travel documents to effectuate his removal,” immigration and customs enforcement spokesman Khaalid Walls said.
Prosecutors in Munich have accused Demjanjuk of being an accessory in the killings of Jews between March and September 1943 at the Sobibor death camp, now in Poland. Born in Ukraine, Demjanjuk denies any involvement in war crimes. He has said he was in the Soviet army and a prisoner of war in 1942. He later went to the US.
Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk jnr, said his father remained at his home near Cleveland, suffering from a bone disease, kidney failure and other ailments, and would probably die before the case was resolved.
Demjanjuk snr was stripped of his US citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being “Ivan the Terrible”, a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp and was first extradited to Israel in 1986.
He was sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors identified him as a guard at Treblinka. But the Israeli supreme court overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably "Ivan". Demjanjuk returned to the US in 1993 and his citizenship was restored in 1998. The US justice department refiled its case against him in 1999, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps. – ( Reuters)