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Demjanjuk pronounced fit to stand trial in Germany
2009-07-03
BERLIN (Reuters) - Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk has been deemed fit enough by medical experts to stand trial for helping to kill 29,000 Jews in World War Two, the state prosecutors office in Munich said Friday. Demjanjuk, 89, deported to Germany from the United States, has been held in a jail near Munich since May 12. His trial is expected to be Germany's final major Nazi-era war crimes case. After examining Demjanjuk, medical experts placed only one condition on their stamp of approval for the trial to proceed -- that court appearances be limited to two 90-minute sessions a day, the state prosecutors office said in a statement. They said they expect charges to be raised against Demjanjuk in July. Both prosecutors and Demjanjuk's defense attorney, Guenther Maull, said the trial may begin by the autumn. Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of its 10 most-wanted suspected war criminals. But he denies any role in the Holocaust, in which about 6 million Jewish people died, and his family has fought efforts to put him on trial, arguing he was too frail. His son criticized the decision and said German doctors had found Demjanjuk had only about 16 months to live due to an incurable leukemic bone marrow 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 percent politically-motivated effort to blame Ukrainians and Europeans for the crimes of the Germans," said John Demjanjuk Jr. in a statement. When he arrived in Germany, pictures showed Demjanjuk lying on a stretcher in an ambulance with tubes coming from his nose. He has been treated for gout since being held at Stadelheim jail, where Hitler was held after a failed 1922 coup attempt. Munich prosecutors want Demjanjuk tried for assisting in murders at Sobibor extermination camp, in what is now Poland. The head of the Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, Efraim Zuroff, said he was satisfied with the decision. "It is important that the man who actively participated in the Final Solution will at last receive appropriate punishment," Zuroff said in a statement. Demjanjuk has said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war and later became a guard in German prison camps. He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp. He was extradited to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death in 1988, but Israel's Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably "Ivan." He regained his citizenship, but the U.S. 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 from him again in 2002. (Additional reporting by Sarah Marsh; Editing by Matthew Jones)
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