Germany has indicted Ivan the Terrible - John Demjanjuk - on more than 29,000 counts of accessory to murder and will seek his extradition from the United States. He is charged with being involved in thousands of murders at the Nazi Sobibor death camp in 1943, when he was a guard.
"In this capacity, he participated as an accessory to murder of at least 29,000 people of the Jewish faith," Munich prosecutors stated.
Demjanjuk has denied the charges, arguing that he served in the Soviet army and was captured by Germany in 1942.
Known by Holocaust survivors as "Ivan the Terrible," the Ukrainian native emigrated to the U.S. in 1952 and was naturalized as a citizen six years later. He now lives in a Cleveland, Ohio suburb. He was extradited to Israel in 1986 for suspicion of involvement in the murders but was released after seven years when the High Court ruled in his favor on evidence that a different Ukrainian was the Nazi guard.
A legal battle between the U.S. Justice Department and Demjanjuk lasted for several years after the government in 1998 said that he was another Nazi guard, and therefore could be deported. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeal against deportation, but it has not been clear which country would accept him.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem-based top Nazi Hunter, Ephraim Zuroff, told the Associated Press, “We hope that the process can be expedited to ensure that this Holocaust perpetrator will finally be appropriately punished. We are on our way to a victory for justice today."