Germany: The last Nazi war trial

Germany's bid to bring the world's most wanted Nazi war crimes suspect to justice began inauspiciously yesterday: a Red Cross ambulance took John Demjanjuk on a stretcher and with tubes protruding from his nose to Munich's Stadelheim prison where he was meant to await trial, but nobody would open the prison door.

Visibly embarrassed, a plain-clothed policeman escorting the 89-year-old Ukrainian retired car worker from Munich airport, rang the bell at the prison's towering steel south gate and waited impatiently for a response from the entry phone. Nothing happened.

Mr Demjanjuk, clad in a black leather jacket and baseball cap, lay in the back of the ambulance and said nothing. After his deportation and subsequent transatlantic flight from his adopted home in Cleveland, Ohio, he stayed motionless with his mouth half open and his hands folded on his lap.

Then, after what seemed like an eternity, the entry phone spluttered into life. Mr Demjanjuk was driven round the block and taken into the prison, where, incidentally, Adolf Hitler was briefly held in 1922, through another entrance. His reception committee, it seems, had chosen the wrong gate.

Thus ended what could be Mr Demjanjuk's last attempt to escape trial for his alleged complicity in the murder of some 29,000 Jewish inmates at the Sobibor Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland during the latter stages of the Second World War.

Mr Demjanjuk has protested his innocence all along. He was even doing so as US agents removed him from his family home in Ohio on Monday and placed him aboard a private Lear jet which was flown to Munich early yesterday morning. Hours earlier, Mr Demjanjuk had lost a final appeal to remain in America on grounds of illness.

After Mr Demjanjuk, still breathing through a nasal tube, was read his 21-page arrest warrant yesterday, his lawyer, Günther Maull, immediately filed a challenge to the charges , arguing that the evidence was flimsy, and that Germany's jurisdiction in the case was doubtful.

But Munich state prosecutors say they have amassed a wealth of documents which prove Mr Demjanjuk's Nazi background, including an SS identity card which shows that he was posted to Sobibor in 1943.

They say they have obtained testimony from several witnesses including survivors from the camp.

One of them described Mr Demjanjuk as the "Angel of Death" and said his main task at the camp was to push Jews into the gas chambers.

Thomas Blatt, an 82-year-old Sobibor survivor, who could be a key witness at the trial said yesterday that Mr Demjanjuk belonged to a group of Ukrainian death camp guards recruited by the Nazis who were feared for their brutality.

"They were the ones who shot the old and the sick who couldn't walk any more," he said.

"They used their rifle bayonets to herd the naked into the gas chambers."

"We have no doubt he is responsible for the death of over 29,000 Jews," said Kurt Schrimm, the German state prosecutor heading the investigation.

"For the first time we have even found lists of names of the people Demjanjuk personally led into the gas chambers."

Mr Demjanjuk was yesterday confined to the medical unit in Stadelheim where he will undergo a series of tests to establish whether he is fit enough to stand trial.

His family, which claims that he is far too frail to attend court and suffering from bone marrow and kidney ailments, is attempting to prevent his case from ever being heard.

German prosecutors maintain that Mr Demjanjuk has been effectively on the run since the end of the Second World War. Born in Ukraine in 1920, he joined the Red Army at the beginning of the war and fought until he was captured by German troops in 1942.

He then claims to have joined an anti-Soviet Russian unit funded by the Nazis. He says he fought with them until the end of the war.

In 1952 he emigrated to the US as a "displaced person" claiming that he was a homeless former prisoner of war who had been held by the Russians. But in 1977 the American authorities opened an investigation into his case.

In 1986 he was extradited to Israel to stand trial on charges that he was "Ivan the Terrible", a brutal Ukrainian guard at the Treblinka Nazi death camp. However in 1993, evidence emerged which proved that the charges were a case of mistaken identity.

But in 2002 the US authorities unearthed fresh evidence which showed Mr Demjanjuk had worked in Nazi death camps. It was not until November last year that German prosecutors produced evidence sufficiently incriminating for America to extradite him.

Last month, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre put Mr Demjanjuk at the top of its list of most wanted surviving Nazi war crimes suspects. But whether his trial will actually take place is still a matter of conjecture. Doctors will determine whether he is fit to give evidence in a process that could take weeks.

If they decide he is not, he is unlikely to appear before judges. But his extradition from America is final and whatever the outcome, Mr Demjanjuk will almost certainly spend the rest of his days in Germany, in prison or in hospital.

Thomas Blatt said yesterday that it was immaterial whether he was sent to prison.

"For me a trial is the most important thing. I want the truth," he said.

- INDEPENDENT