Former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, 89, arrived in Germany on Tuesday following his deportation from the United States. He appeared in a Munich courtroom after arrival, where a translator read him a 21-page warrant for his arrest in his native Ukrainian.
The warrant accuses Demjanjuk of acting as an accessory to the murder of 29,000 people at the Sobibor death camp in Poland in the 1940s.
Demjanjuk has claimed that he was a prisoner of war at Sobibor. However, evidence against him includes a photograph, an ID card and a transfer roster indicating that he was a guard at the camp, as well as eyewitness testimony from other former guards.
Demjanjuk has also been accused of being “Ivan the Terrible,” a notoriously savage SS guard at the Treblinka death camp. However, his conviction for crimes committed by Ivan the Terrible was overturned by Israel's Supreme Court in 1993 after the court ruled that there was some doubt as to the murderer's true identity. Demjanjuk will now be tried for crimes committed at a different camp.
Prison doctors who examined Demjanjuk ruled that he is sufficiently healthy to remain in jail until his trial. The doctors said the Demjanjuk, who has claimed to suffer from a variety of health problems that prevent him from traveling, is unusually healthy for his age.
The Demjanjuk family has fought attempts to deport him from the United States for years, claiming that his health problems made the transfer to Germany equivalent to torture.
German Jews Praise Move
Jewish leaders in Germany praised the move to deport Demjanjuk and put him on trial. Charlotte Knobloch of the Central Council of Jews in Germany said the move would send a message to other Nazi criminals.
Nazis “must be held accountable for their inhumane actions,” Knobloch said in a statement released Tuesday. The Demjanjuk case shows that Nazis will be held responsible for their crimes “regardless of their age,” she said.
"This is not about revenge,” she added, “but rather about justice.”
Knobloch expressed disgust with Demjanjuk's arguments in hearings regarding his deportation. “Particularly for survivors of the Shoah, it is unbearable to have to watch Nazi war criminals who showed no mercy to their victims demanding sympathy for themselves or to even compare their deportation to torture,” she said.