Germany to demand Demjanjuk extradition from US
Office for Prosecution of Nazi War Crimes says it has fresh evidence that Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor death camp in Poland and had personally led Jews to the gas chambers
BERLIN – Berlin is expected to demand that John Demjanjuk be extradited to Germany so it can put him on trial for his alleged role in the murder of thousands of European Jews during World War II.
Germany's Central Office for the Prosecution of Nazi War Crimes has asked prosecutors to launch legal proceedings aimed at extraditing Demjanjuk from the US.
It said it had evidence that Demjanjuk, 88, had been a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland and had personally led Jews to the gas chambers there in 1943.
"We have managed to obtain hundred of documents and have also found a number of witnesses who spoke out against Demjanjuk," Kurt Schrimm, the office's chief investigator, told Reuters.
"For the first time we have even found lists of names of the people who Demjanjuk personally led into the gas chambers. We have no doubt that he is responsible for the death of over 29,000 Jews."
Schrimm said his Ludwigsburg-based office had handed the results of their preliminary investigation to prosecutors in Munich earlier on Monday.
The court in Munich will decide in the next few days whether to take on the case and seek Demjanjuk's extradition.
Reports that Germany was considering to prosecute Demjanjuk surfaced some two months ago. A source familiar with the case told Yedioth Ahronoth that the report submitted to prosecutors in Munich was based on new evidence, but also on testimonies that had already been presented in previous legal proceedings against Demjanjuk.
Conviction overturned
According to the source, the fresh evidence includes the incriminating testimony of a former Ukrainian guard at the Sobibor death camp.
Ukraine-born Demjanjuk, now living in Ohio, is on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of the top 10 World War Two criminals.
Demjanjuk denies any involvement in war crimes. He said he served in the Soviet army and became a prisoner of war in 1942. He emigrated to the United States in the 1950s and worked in the car industry.
Stripped of his US citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at the Treblinka death camp, he 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 the notorious "Ivan" at Treblinka.
He returned to his home near Cleveland in 1993 and the United States restored his citizenship in 1998.
But 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 and hid these facts when he immigrated.
