John Demjanjuk, Convicted Death Camp Guard, Dies

John Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. autoworker who was convicted of being a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp despite steadfastly maintaining over three decades of legal battles that he had been mistaken for someone else, died Saturday, his son said.He was 91.
Demjanjuk, convicted in May of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to five years in prison, died a free man in a nursing home in the southern Bavarian town of Bad Feilnbach.

He had been released pending his appeal.

John Demjanjuk Jr. said in a telephone interview from Ohio that his father died of natural causes.

Demjanjuk had terminal bone marrow disease, chronic kidney disease and other ailments.
"The court is convinced that the defendant ... served as a guard at Sobibor" from March 27, 1943, until mid-September 1943, Alt said in his ruling.

Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer, who researches at the Yad Vashem memorial, said Demjanjuk's story showed an important moral lesson.

"You don't let people, even if they were only junior staff, get away from responsibility," Bauer said.

Despite his conviction, his family never gave up its battle to have his U.S. citizenship reinstated so that he could live out his final days nearby them in the Cleveland area.

One of their main arguments was that the defense had never seen a 1985 FBI document, uncovered in early 2011 by The Associated Press, calling into question the authenticity of a Nazi ID card used against him.

Demjanjuk maintained that he was a victim of the Nazis himself — first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.

"I am again and again an innocent victim of the Germans," he told the panel of Munich state court judges during his 18-month trial, in a statement he signed and that was read aloud by his attorney Ulrich Busch.

He said after the war he was unable to return to his homeland, and that taking him away from his family in the U.S. to stand trial in Germany was a "continuation of the injustice" done to him.

"Germany is responsible for the fact that I have lost for good my whole reason to live, my family, my happiness, any future and hope," he said.

His claims of mistaken identity gained credence after he successfully defended himself against accusations initially brought in 1977 by the U.S. Justice Department that he was "Ivan the Terrible" — a notoriously brutal guard at the Treblinka extermination camp.

In connection with the allegation, he was extradited to Israel from the U.S. in 1986 to stand trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, convicted and sentenced to death.
But the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993 overturned the verdict on appeal, saying that evidence showed another Ukrainian man was actually "Ivan the Terrible," and ordered him returned to the U.S.

The Israeli judges said, however, they still believed Demjanjuk had served the Nazis, probably at the Trawniki SS training camp and Sobibor.

But they declined to order a new trial, saying there was a risk of violating the law prohibiting trying someone twice on the same evidence.

Demjanjuk returned to his suburban Cleveland home in 1993 and his U.S. citizenship, which had been revoked in 1981, was reinstated in 1998.

Demjanjuk remained under investigation in the U.S., where a judge revoked his citizenship again in 2002 based on Justice Department evidence suggesting he concealed his service at Sobibor.

Appeals failed, and the nation's chief immigration judge ruled in 2005 that Demjanjuk could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine.

Prosecutors in Germany filed charges in 2009, saying Demjanjuk's link to Sobibor and Trawniki was clear, with evidence showing that after he was captured by the Germans he volunteered to serve with the fanatical SS and trained as a camp guard.

Though there are no known witnesses who remember Demjanjuk from Sobibor, prosecutors referred to an SS identity card that they said features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk and that says he worked at the death camp.

That and other evidence indicating Demjanjuk had served under the SS convinced the panel of judges in Munich, and led to his conviction.

He was ordered tried in Munich because he lived in the area briefly after the war.

It was not yet known whether he would be brought back to the U.S. for burial.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk (dehm-YAHN'-yook) had steadfastly denied any involvement in the Nazi Holocaust since the first accusations were levied against him more than 30 years ago.

"My father fell asleep with the Lord as a victim and survivor of Soviet and German brutality since childhood," Demjanjuk Jr. said.

"He loved life, family and humanity. History will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian POWs for the deeds of Nazi Germans."

His conviction helped set new German legal precedent, being the first time someone was convicted solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of being involved in a specific killing.

Presiding Judge Ralph Alt said the evidence showed Demjanjuk was a piece of the Nazis' "machinery of destruction."
Demjanjuk, who was removed by U.S. immigration agents from his home in suburban Cleveland and deported in May 2009, questioned the evidence in the German case, saying the identity card was possibly a Soviet postwar forgery.

He reiterated his contention that after he was captured in Crimea in 1942, he was held prisoner until joining the Vlasov Army — a force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets in the final months of the war.

Demjanjuk was born April 3, 1920, in the village of Dubovi Makharintsi in central Ukraine, two years before the country became part of the Soviet Union.

He grew up during a time when the country was wracked by famines that killed millions, and a wave of purges instituted by Stalin to eliminate any possible opposition.

As a young man Demjanjuk worked as a tractor driver for the area's collective farm.

After being called up for the Soviet Red Army, he was wounded in action but sent back to the front after he had recovered, only to be captured during the battle of Kerch Peninsula in May 1942.

After the war, Demjanjuk was sent to a displaced persons camp and worked briefly as a driver for the U.S. Army.

In 1950, he sought U.S. citizenship, claiming to have been a farmer in Sobibor, Poland, during the war.

Demjanjuk later said he lied about his wartime activities to avoid being sent back to Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union.

Just to have admitted being in the Vlasov Army would also have been enough to have him barred from emigration to the U.S. or many other countries.

He came to the U.S. on Feb. 9, 1952, and eventually settled in Seven Hills, a middle-class suburb of Cleveland.

He was a mechanic at Ford Motor Co.'s engine plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park and with his wife, Vera, raised three children — son John Jr. and daughters Irene and Lydia.

Russia hands over Katyn files

The Russian prosecutor’s office has handed over 11 volumes of declassified documents to Poland, containing information about 20,000 Polish prisoners of war massacred in western Russia in 1940.

They contain the conviction and burial certificates and lay to rest Soviet claims that the German were responsible, RIA Novosti reported.

In the 1990s, Russia handed over to Poland copies of archive documents from the top-secret File No.1, which placed the blame solely on the Soviet Union. In September 1990, Russian prosecutors also launched a criminal case into the massacre, known as “Case No.159”. The investigation was closed in 2004.

In November 2010, lawmakers from the lower house of Russia’s parliament approved a declaration recognizing the Katyn massacre as a crime committed by Josef Stalin’s regime. Poland has hailed the move.

Troy Man To Be Deported For Helping Nazis Kill Jews

DETROIT, USA -- An immigration judge today ordered the deportation of a man accused of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II.
U.S. Immigration Judge Elizabeth Hacker, sitting in Detroit, ordered John Kalymon removed to Germany, Ukraine, Poland or any country that will take him, the Executive Office for Immigration Review said. Details of Hacker’s decision weren’t available.

Kalymon’s lawyer, Elias Xenos of Birmingham, said he hadn’t seen the ruling and couldn’t comment in any detail, but said he likely will appeal. There was no immediate comment from the Justice Department.

Kalymon, 89, of Troy, a former Chrysler factory worker, was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 2007 for shooting Jews and killing at least one in the 1940s during round-ups in what is now L’viv, Ukraine. He served in the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, but denies he ever took part in such activities.

He was the last Nazi-era defendant prosecuted by the Justice Department.

Last fall, Hacker declined Xenos’ request to hold a mental competency hearing for Kalymon, who suffers from dementia and prostate cancer.

Kalymon is under no immediate threat of removal because his case could be appealed for several years.

And it’s unclear whether any country would accept him. The Ukraine and Poland haven’t accepted any Nazi-era deportations in several years, and Germany has accepted them only rarely.

Ukraine Honors Victims Of Nazi Massacre

KIEV, Ukraine -- Hundreds of people gathered in the Ukrainian capital on Wednesday to mark the 69th anniversary of the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews.
President Viktor Yanukovych, government officials and relatives of the victims laid flowers at the monument to those killed by the Nazis in the Babi Yar ravine in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

More than 33,700 Jews were shot in Babi Yar over the course of two days, beginning Sept. 29, 1941, one of the most horrific killings of the Holocaust.

In the ensuing months, the ravine was filled with some 100,000 bodies, including those of non-Jewish Kiev residents and Red Army prisoners of the Nazis.

Mourning events also were being held nationwide.

One survivor of the massacre, Viktor Stadnik, said that his mother thought they might be sent to Palestine as the Nazis rounded them up. "It would be great if we were taken to Palestine - it's warm there," he recalled his mother as saying as the Nazis were leading them to Babi Yar. Stadnik, who was seven at the time, managed to escape, thanks to his Ukrainian neighbors.

"I cannot think about those days without tears. This crime against innocent people should never be forgiven," said Tamara Kovalenko, a 73-year-old Ukrainian whose aunt was killed together with her Jewish husband. Kovalenko said that her mother had been hiding a Jewish girl during the Nazi occupation.

The exact death toll at Babi Yar remains unknown. In 1943, as the Red Army approached to free Ukraine, the Nazis ordered Jewish prisoners to dig up the corpses and burn them.

For decades, the Soviets maintained silence about what happened in Babi Yar. Only after Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko drew international attention to the massacre with his 1961 poem "Babi Yar" did the Soviets put up a monument.

Ukraine, Poland Honor Katyn Victims

KIEV, Ukraine -- The president of Poland and Ukraine's prime minister joined victims' relatives to honor thousands of Polish officers killed by the Soviet secret police 70 years ago in the Katyn massacre.
Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski and Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov on Saturday laid wreaths at a former prison building in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, where many of the officers were murdered.

Other officers were shot in the Katyn forest of western Russia, and the killings have become known as the Katyn massacre. An estimated 22,000 Polish officers, taken prisoner by the Soviets after the September 1939 invasion of Poland, were shot in the killings that began in April 1940.

"I would like very much for us to have the possibility here in Kharkiv, as well as in other places, to retain both personal and collective memory of those killed by this totalitarian regime," Komorowski said.

Some 400 relatives of the Polish victims joined the commemoration, which included visiting a cemetery where about 3,800 of the victims are buried.

The Nazis discovered the mass graves of the officers in the Katyn forest during their march on Moscow in the fall of 1941. Soviet propaganda blamed the deaths on Adolf Hitler and punished anyone speaking the truth with harsh prison terms.

In 1990, Moscow acknowledged that dictator Josef Stalin's feared NKVD secret police -- the precursor to the KGB -- were responsible.

Katyn inadvertently drew international attention this April when then-Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria and all 94 other top Polish civilian and military officials heading for a Katyn commemoration died in a plane crash near Smolensk airport.

German Citizens Take Part In Ukraine Apology

KIEV, Ukraine -- Around 200 Germans have arrived in the Ukrainian capital to take part in actions aimed at apologising for the Nazis’ crimes in the World War II.
A mourning procession from the German city of Tubingen walked along the so-called “death road” to the monument near Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, the site of one of the most horrific chapters of the Holocaust.

Processions by German people were held in 15 other cities in Ukraine yesterday.

More than 33,700 Jews were shot at the ravine over 48 hours beginning on September 29, 1941.

In the ensuing months, the ravine was filled with some 100,000 bodies, including non-Jews.

One of the march participants, Anke Krueger, said: “I am a representative of a new generation that cannot keep silence anymore.”

Russia's Heroine Kosmodemyanskaya

On September 13, during the celebration of 87th anniversary since her birth a proposal was made that Russian Orthodox Church should canonize Zoya. In the absence of any evidence that Kosmodemyanskaya chose death rather than renouncing her faith or even that she was a believing Christian, the Russian Orthodox Church has not yet taken any action on this proposal

In Petrischevo Zoya managed to set fire to horsestables and a couple of houses. However, one Russian collaborationist had noticed her and informed his masters. They rewarded his service with a bottle of vodka. The Germans caught Zoya as she started to torch another house. She was tortured and interrogated throughout the night but refused to give up any information. The following morning she was marched to the center of the town with a board around her neck bearing the inscription 'Houseburner' and hanged.

Her final words were purported to be "Comrades! Why are you so gloomy? I am not afraid to die! I am happy to die for my people!" and to the Germans, "You'll hang me now, but I am not alone. There are two hundred million of us. You can't hang us all."

The Germans left Zoya's body hanging on the gallows for several weeks and mutilated her body several times with bayonets and by cutting off her left breast. Eventually she was buried just before the Soviet liberation in January 1942.

The story of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became popular after a Pravda article which was written by Pyotr Lidov, was published on January 27, 1942. The journalist had heard about Zoya's execution from an elderly peasant, and was impressed by the young woman's courage. The witness recounted: "They were hanging her and she was giving a speech. They were hanging her and she was threatening them." Lidov travelled to Petrishchevo, details were collected from local residents and published in an article about the then-unknown partisan girl. Soon after, the article was noticed by Stalib who proclaimed: "Here is the people's heroine", which started a propaganda campaugn honouring Kosmodemyanskaya. In February, she was identified and was immediately awarded the order of Hero of the Soviet Union.

John Demjanjuk Tells Court He Is A Victim Of Hitler

MUNICH, Germany -- John Demjanjuk, accused of helping to murder nearly 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp, has told a German court he is "one of Hitler's victims".
Mr Demjanjuk was "forcibly deported to Germany" and used as "slave labour" he said in a statement read out in court.

The family of the Ukrainian-born former US carworker says he is in poor health and is unlikely to survive the trial.

Mr Demjanjuk, who is 89, denies being a camp guard at Sobibor, in Nazi-occupied Poland.

"I find it an unbearable injustice that Germany is trying to make me, a prisoner of war, into a war criminal with this trial," Mr Demjanjuk said in a statement read out by his lawyer to the court in the southern city of Munich.

"I am grateful to my medical staff who have helped to reduce the worst pain and allowed me to get through this trial which I feel is torture."

The statement went on: "Germany is to blame for the fact that I have lost my whole reason for living, my family, my happiness and any future or hope."

The statement is his first since the trial began in November 2009.

Mr Demjanjuk lay motionless on a stretcher while the statement was read out.

Doctors say he is fit to stand trial but have asked for limited hearings.

This is the second time John Demjanjuk has appeared in court.

Two decades ago, he was sentenced to death in Israel, convicted of being Ivan the Terrible, a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.

But that ruling was overturned after new evidence showed that another Ukrainian was probably responsible.

Russia's Putin invites Tusk to Katyn massacre event

Russian PM Vladimir Putin has invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, to a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre.
It is the first Russian ceremony to mark the murdering by Soviet secret police of more than 20,000 Polish prisoners of war in April 1940.
The invitation is being hailed in Poland as a breakthrough that could lead to improved bilateral ties.
Mr Putin said he understood the significance of the massacre to Poles.
He told Mr Tusk in a telephone call that their joint appearance at the ceremony in April would be an important symbolic gesture, said a Polish government spokesman.
A former Polish foreign minister, Adam Rotfeld, who now heads a committee tackling difficult issues between the two countries, hailed Mr Putin's invitation as an important event in the normalisation of Polish-Russian relations.
The mass execution of Polish army and police officers in the forests of Katyn and other sites has long been one of the most difficult issues between the two countries.
For half a century the Soviet Union blamed the killings on the Nazis.
In 1990, Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted Soviet responsibility.
More recently, Moscow's refusal to declassify the archives, and a Russian court ruling that the massacre did not warrant the term genocide, has angered many in Poland.

John Demjanjuk Trial To Break Legal Ground In Germany

The trial against suspected concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, is a legal first for Germany. For the first time, a person who was low on the chain of command is to be indicted, even though there is no proof of his having committed a specific offence. Other alleged henchmen have gotten off far more lightly.

The court stipulated that they were not to mention so much as a word about the case. Instead, Vera Demjanjuk, 84, told her husband John, 89, what she had planted in their garden at home. The telephone conversation, which lasted 20 minutes, was the only conversation to date between the Stadelheim Prison in Munich and Cleveland, Ohio. An official interpreter listened in on the conversation. “She hopes and believes that he will somehow return home,” says John Demjanjuk, Jr., the couple’s son.That is unlikely to happen. His father is being detained in Bavaria, waiting for his trial to begin. US authorities deported Demjanjuk in early May, when he was flown to Munich on a chartered flight. When he arrived, a German investigating judge handed Demjanjuk the arrest warrant, which stated that the accused was “under strong suspicion” of aiding and abetting the murders of at least 29,000 people.Demjanjuk is alleged to have worked in 1943 as a guard in the Sobibor death camp, and to have helped the Nazis commit mass murder against thousands of Jews. He has repeatedly denied the charges, and his family insists that it is the victim of a prosecution-obsessed justice system.On July 3, prosecutors said that doctors had determined that Demjanjuk, who has been held in custody in Munich since May 12, was fit to stand trial. However, they imposed one condition, saying that his court appearances be limited to two 90-minute sessions a day. State prosecutors said that formal charges could be expected this month and that a trial could commence as early as the autumn.The case against this alleged member of the SS is a first for the German legal system. For the first time, a foreign henchman from the lowest rung of the chain of command will be prosecuted, not because of his particularly gruesome behavior as a perpetrator of so-called “excessive acts,” but because he helped keep the killing machinery running smoothly.That won’t be easy. Will the prosecution in the case, the Munich public prosecutor’s office, be able to provide sufficient proof of his guilt? Can it demonstrate that he participated voluntarily in the campaign of murder?A number of documents suggest that Demjanjuk was part of a group of about 5,000 foreign helpers — people from the Baltics, Ukrainians and ethnic Germans living in other countries — who the Nazis trained at the Trawniki training camp, east of the Polish city of Lublin, to commit mass murder in occupied regions.Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Demjanjuk killed out of murderous intent or greed. Instead, he was probably an ordinary henchman, like thousands of others. But German courts have been extremely lenient in the past when it has come to putting these Nazi helpers on trial. In fact, even their superiors almost always got off lightly.In other words, the judiciary is planning nothing less than a radical break with a decades-long practice which was often perceived as offensive.Responding to a complaint against Demjanjuk’s detention filed by his attorney Ulrich Busch, the Munich Regional Court explained that the established practice of German courts in cases relating to SS overseers and guards in extermination camps “does not create a precedent.” In the arrest warrant, it states that Demjanjuk, as a guard, was not compelled to participate in mass murder. “He could have deserted, as many other Trawniki men did,” is the argument in the warrant.For Demjanjuk’s defense attorney, this line of argument “upends the entire postwar legal practice in Germany.” The court must conduct its proceedings on the basis of evidence, and yet it presumably also wants to avoid being accused of inaction or perhaps even leniency toward former Nazis. All of this creates the impression that the German judiciary is using the Demjanjuk case, which has become well-known because of its previous history, to make up for past omissions.Relatively Safe Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, is not the first presumed Nazi helper that the United States has deported to Germany. More than 100 men have had their US citizenship revoked for concealing their Nazi past, and 27 of them ended up in Germany.Dmytro Sawchuk, for example, traveled to Germany voluntarily in 1999 when he was about to be deported. US investigators accused the man, born in Poland of Ukrainian parents, of having participated in brutal ghetto evacuations after being trained in Trawniki, and of having supervised Jewish forced laborers in the Belzec extermination camp as they dug up thousands of bodies and incinerated them.The public prosecutor’s office in Heidelberg, to which the case was assigned, terminated the proceedings against Sawchuk after three years, arguing that Germany could only prosecute the case if the “Republic of Poland, as the criminal investigation authority principally responsible for criminal prosecution,” dispensed with extradition. Poland investigated the case itself, but later suspended its investigation. Sawchuk died in 2004.Liudas Kairys, who also trained at Trawniki and was a senior guard at the Treblinka camp, was a rank above Demjanjuk’s presumed rank in Sobibor. There was a lot of evidence against him from survivors and documents. He was sent to Germany in 1993, as he had hoped, after US authorities revoked his passport. From Kairys’s perspective, it was the right decision. Investigation proceedings launched against the native Lithuanian in 1993 for murder were suspended six years later by the prosecution in the western city of Darmstadt. Kairys had died in the meantime.In February 1982, the US attorney general asked his counterpart in Bonn for a stronger commitment. He wanted Germany to petition for the deportation of Nazi collaborators from Lithuania, Ukraine and Latvia who had been tracked down in the United States, and put them on trial in Germany.But Bonn’s justice minister turned down the request, arguing that deportation was only allowable in the case of crimes “that had been committed on the territory of the country submitting the request.” And because of the statute of limitations, he argued, only murder cases could be prosecuted anyway.The former Trawniki men living in Germany could also feel relatively safe, as long as there was no evidence of their having been Exzesstäter, in other words, people who committed excessively cruel acts. One such Exzesstäter was Treblinka guard Franz Swidersky, who was sentenced to a seven-year prison term in Düsseldorf. Another former guard in Belzec, who had held the rank of Zugwachmann, or platoon member, is spending his retirement in an idyllic village in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. He had testified about the Nazi death camps in two trials, but he was unwilling to talk about his experiences with SPIEGEL.Those at the lower ends of the chain of command, and their supervisors, invoked the principle of Befehlsnotstand, a legal term applied to those who carried out a criminal command because they would otherwise have endangered their lives. The historian Jochen Böhler characterizes the defense as being the justice system’s “top favorite for acquittals”: Almost all of the accused alleged that they would have suffered if they had refused to follow orders — and that they had only killed on command.Sadists or Pitiful Old Men?In the trials conducted in Hagen, West Germany, in 1965-66, against former SS men who had served at Sobibor, only one defendant was given a life sentence: Karl Frenzel, the camp director, a gruesome sadist who had whipped a dying prisoner and shot him personally. Five defendants received prison terms of between three and eight years, and five others were acquitted.Karl Streibel, the commandant of the Trawniki training camp, was tried in a Hamburg court from 1972 to 1976. He and five other defendants, all senior members of the camp administration, went unpunished. The judges argued that the Trawniki trainers had not been aware of the purpose for which they were training the foreign workers — a somewhat dubious interpretation of their tasks.If it was already so difficult to bring to justice the men who had been higher up the chain of command, how are the courts expected to deal with a man like Demjanjuk, a captured member of the Red Army who was apparently recruited by the SS in 1942?The Trawnikis — as the men trained at the camp of that name are known — were undoubtedly among the “most notorious offenders of World War II,” says Hamburg historian Frank Golczewski. Many profited shamelessly from the death camps, using money and gold taken from the murdered prisoners to pay for sex with women in the surrounding villages.And yet, says Peter Black, chief historian at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, one cannot conclude that these men volunteered to commit mass murder. The conditions in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camps were so horrific, according to Black, that the men “had limited options.” The non-German volunteers were at the lowest end of the hierarchy. If they refused to cooperate, says Black, “they could be shot on the spot,” at least until the spring of 1943.Helge Grabitz, a well-known Hamburg criminal prosecutor who has since died, also believed that the Trawnikis were “coerced.” They volunteered, according to Grabitz, “to escape certain death from starvation, freezing to death or epidemics in the camps.” The “proven inhuman atrocities” could hardly be attributed to individual offenders, she wrote, making criminal prosecution “relatively difficult.”Neither Canada nor Britain nor Australia managed to convict former Trawnikis who had immigrated to those countries.In the Demjanjuk case, Germany now hopes to improve on that record, while at the same time establishing stricter benchmarks

Accused Nazi Guard Loses A Bid To Stop Deportation

Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk on Thursday lost a bid for the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his deportation to Germany, where he faces charges in the deaths of 29,000 Jews.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens rejected a request from the 89-year-old retired Ohio autoworker for a stay of deportation while Demjanjuk pursues his legal appeals.It was not known what other legal steps Demjanjuk's lawyer might take to try to stop the deportation, the subject of a legal battle battle with the U.S. Justice Department that has lasted decades. His lawyer could ask another Supreme Court justice for a stay.A Justice Department spokeswoman said the U.S. government will continue to work in cooperation with Germany to carry out the deportation but declined to provide details "on any possible timing of a potential removal."A U.S. appeals court in Ohio had cleared the way on May 1 for Demjanjuk's deportation, lifting a stay that had halted his removal at the last minute two weeks earlier after U.S. agents had taken him from his suburban Cleveland home in a wheelchair.Prosecutors in Munich, Germany have issued an arrest warrant to put the Ukraine-born Demjanjuk on trial for assisting in the deaths of 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp during World War Two.The appeals court said the argument that sending Demjanjuk to Germany amounted to torture was unlikely to succeed and lifted the stay that had prevented his deportation.In seeking a stay of deportation from the Supreme Court, Demjanjuk's lawyer said his client suffered from "a number of physical ailments that present real and immediate risks to his life."Demjanjuk denies any role in the Holocaust and claims he was drafted into the Russian army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war a year later and served at German prison camps until 1944.

U.S. Court Clears Deportation Of Ukraine-Born Senior Citizen Suspected Of Being Nazi Death Camp Guard

CHICAGO, USA -- A federal appeals court cleared the way on Friday for U.S. authorities to deport accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk to Germany, dropping a stay that halted his removal at the last minute two weeks ago.
"The U.S. Government will continue to seek the removal of Mr. Demjanjuk to Germany," a Justice Department spokeswoman said, and refused to comment further.But there was no indication when U.S. officials, frustrated in their last attempt, would again move against Demjanjuk.Prosecutors in Munich, Germany have issued an arrest warrant to put the Ukraine-born Demjanjuk on trial for assisting in the deaths of 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp during World War Two.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that Demjanjuk's argument -- that moving the ailing 89-year-old former U.S. auto worker amounted to torture -- was unlikely to succeed so they vacated the stay preventing his deportation.The court said U.S. authorities planned to fly him in a jet equipped as an air ambulance with medical personnel standing by, and Germany had shown no intention of torturing him.Demjanjuk's son, John Jr., responded that the family was considering its options and may appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has refused their appeals in the past. Earlier this week, the family filed suit in Germany to seek to stop the country from accepting Demjanjuk.On April 14, U.S. agents carried Demjanjuk out of his suburban Cleveland home in a wheelchair and had a government-owned jet ready to take him to Germany but the Cincinnati appeals court intervened.The family sought to block his deportation with the Arlington, Virginia, Board of Immigration Appeals, saying he suffered from numerous life-threatening ailments and moving him would violate the United Nations' Convention Against Torture. The board refused to reopen the case.Government prosecutors fired back that the torture claims were ridiculous and they filed medical assessments and even videos that they said showed Demjanjuk walking and in decent health.NUMEROUS TWISTSDemjanjuk's case has had numerous twists and turns since he emigrated from Germany in 1951.He was deported from the United States to Israel and sentenced to death in 1988 as the sadistic guard "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka where 870,000 died. Israel's highest court later ruled that he was not "Ivan" of Treblinka.After spending years in an Israeli prison, he returned to his home near Cleveland in 1993 and his citizenship was restored in 1998. At the time, the appeals court in Cincinnati reprimanded the Justice Department for concealing evidence that would have exonerated him in the Ivan case.U.S. Justice Department Nazi hunters reopened the case, and a U.S. court convicted him in 2002 of working at three other camps and he was stripped of his citizenship a second time. Then German prosecutors moved to try him.Demjanjuk has denied any role in the Holocaust. He said he was drafted into the Russian army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war a year later and served at German prison camps until 1944.

'Nazi Guard' Deportation Blocked

WASHINGTON, DC -- A US judge has blocked an order to deport an alleged Nazi concentration camp guard, two days before he was due to be extradited to Germany.
John Demjanjuk, 89, is accused of involvement in the deaths of 29,000 Jews at a camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.He denies any involvement and has asked for asylum in the US, arguing that deportation would constitute torture.An immigration judge said the block would stay until a decision had been reached on whether to re-open his case.Lawyers for Mr Demjanjuk say his health is far too poor for him to make the journey.In March, Germany issued an arrest warrant for the Ukraine national over the deaths of thousands of Jews at the Sobibor camp during World War II.But Mr Demjanjuk, who migrated to the US in 1952, says he was a prisoner of war of the Nazis rather than a prison guard.In 1986, he was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death for war crimes, after being identified by witnesses as "Ivan the Terrible" - a notorious prison guard at the Treblinka camp.But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction, when new evidence emerged suggesting he was not the same guard.He returned to the US but was accused of lying on his immigration application about working for the Nazis.In 2002, a US immigration judge ruled that there was enough evidence to prove Mr Demjanjuk had been a guard at several Nazi death camps and stripped him of his citizenship.German authorities now say they have new evidence linking him to the crimes of which he has been accused.