BERLIN Alleged Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk is fit enough to stand trial in connection with the death of 29,000 Jews in the Second World War, the state prosecutor's office in Munich said yesterday.
BERLIN
Alleged Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk is fit enough to stand trial in connection with the death of 29,000 Jews in the Second World War, the state prosecutor's office in Munich said yesterday.
Demjanjuk, 89, who was deported to Germany from the US on May 12, has since been held in a jail near Munich. His trial is expected in the autumn and will be Germany's final major Nazi-era war crimes case.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk tops the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of the 10 most- wanted suspected war criminals. But he denies any role in the Holocaust, in which some six million Jewish people died, and his family has fought efforts to put him on trial.
His son, John Demjanjuk Jr, criticised the decision and said German doctors had found Demjanjuk had only 16 months to live due to an incurable leukaemic disease.
"With less than a year and a half for my father to live, a career-seeking German prosecutor is hastily pressing forward with a 100% politically-motivated effort to blame Ukrainians and Europeans for the crimes of the Germans," he said in a statement.
Munich prosecutors want Demjanjuk tried for allegedly assisting in murders at Sobibor extermination camp.
He has said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941, becoming a German prisoner of war and later a guard in German prison camps. He emigrated to the US in 1952 and was naturalised six years later. He was stripped of his US citizenship in the 1970s after being accused of being "Ivan the Terrible", a guard at the Treblinka death camp.
He was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death in 1988, but the supreme court there overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably "Ivan".
He regained his citizenship, 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. His citizenship was stripped again in 2002.
Meanwhile, defence lawyers have called for the acquittal of a 90-year-old German former army officer on charges that he ordered the killings of 14 Italian civilians during the war. Klaus Goebel, a lawyer for Josef Scheungraber, argued at Munich state court that it was no longer possible to apportion blame for the 1944 killings as many potential witnesses and other suspects were no longer alive or were unfit to appear in court.
