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'Nazi Guard' Demjanjuk to be Deported to Germany
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by Rachel Nixon | April 2, 2009 at 09:30 am
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Alleged Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk is to be deported from the US to Germany on Sunday.
The deportation follows an arrest warrant issued in Germany in March which accused Mr Demjanjuk of being an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor death camp between March and September 1943.
He is expected to arrive in Germany on Monday, Justice Ministry spokesman Ulrich Standigl said.
Munich state prosecutors will question him with a view to bringing charges against him, they said in a statement on March 11.
German authorities studied an identification card provided by the U.S. Office of Special Investigations, and concluded it was genuine, before issuing the warrant, the statement said.
Mr Demjanjuk, a retired car factory worker living in Ohio, says he was a prisoner of war of the Nazis and denies any involvement in the crimes.
Demjanjuk, 88, has been fighting charges of Nazi war crimes for well over two decades. He was extradited from the United States to Israel, where he was convicted in 1986 of being "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at the notorious Treblinka extermination camp. The conviction was overturned by Israeli courts on appeal and he returned to the United States.
The United States filed new charges against him in 1998, again alleging that he had been a concentration camp guard.
A federal judge found in 2002 that Demjanjuk had been a guard at the Sobibor death camp, where a quarter of a million people were killed during World War II, and at two other concentration camps.
Prosecutors argued that Demjanjuk concealed his history when he came to the United States in 1952.
Mr Demjanjuk's American lawyer had claimed that he was too ill to travel.
Demjanjuk's health is so bad that deportation to Germany for trial would be an "inhuman act," claims his American lawyer John Broadley, citing the UN Convention Against Torture.
However the appeal was not heard, and Mr Demjanjuk, originally from Ukraine, is scheduled to arrive in Germany on Monday.
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at 11:03 on April 15th, 2009
I have no sympathies for murderers, Nazi or otherwise. Nevertheless, I think the pursuit of individuals who were lowly pawns in institutionalised murder on the scale of that seen in the Holocaust is a futile exercise. I can't see it has anything to do with 'justice'. What good will it do? On BBC news just now, a historian of the Holocaust suggested that while Demjanjuk might be old, there were 'younger' men, men who were in their teens when serving in killing units,who could still profitably be sought out to pay for their crimes. Really? Why? Because they went with the tide and followed orders that an entire country was executing, or because they failed to be Hollywood superheroes placing morality above self-preservation?
Niemoller's poem is worth remembering here:
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.
The crime of silence can now be seen to be a grave one in the context of the Holocaust, but chasing the old and the feeble who may be guilty of nothing more than being sheep does not make the hunt any more moral or just. True, these men that are sought may be cold, evil.. bloodthirsty.. but how can that be proven, especially in the context of orders followed by boys in their teens at the time? Will it undo the horror of the death camps, or bring back the dead?