A United States court today cleared the way for the deportation of Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, who is to be tried in Munich in connection with the murder of 29,000 Jews HY”D at a concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The ruling by a federal appeals court in Ohio may end a 28-year legal fight that turned on allegations of mass murder and mistaken identity and on wartime documents long hidden in European archives. He could appeal to the US supreme court.

The 89-year-old former auto worker was arrested on April 14 and federal agents prepared to put him on a plane to Germany, but the court delayed the deportation. His family had argued he was too old and sick to travel, while the government said it had surveillance video showing he could walk on his own.

The court today ruled the deportation could proceed. It noted that the US government said it would fly Demjanjuk to Germany in an aircraft equipped as an air ambulance with attendant medical staff.

“The court cannot find that [Demjanjuk’s] removal to Germany is likely to cause irreparable harm sufficient to warrant a stay of removal,” the court said.

Should it go through, the deportation will begin the latest part in a tale that began 50 years ago and has spanned three continents and been heard in courts in three nations with a keen interest in prosecuting the few surviving Nazi war criminals.

US prosecutors say Demjanjuk was conscripted into the Soviet army in 1940 and captured by the Germans two years later. After stays in prisoner of war camps, prosecutors said Demjanuk joined German forces and served at five concentration camps, including the Sobibor camp, where the killings in which he is charged took place. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates 167,000 people were murdered at the camp by the Germans and their auxiliaries between spring 1942 and autumn 1943. German prosecutors say Demjanjuk personally led Jews to their death in gas chambers there.

Demjanjuk arrived in the United States in 1952 and was granted US citizenship six years later after denying he had aided the Nazis. In 1981, he was accused of having lied about his second world war past and stripped of his US citizenship. Extradited to Israel soon after, he was sentenced to death after Holocaust survivors identified him as a sadistic concentration camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible”. But the Israeli supreme court freed him in 1993 when newly released Soviet records pointed to another man. He returned to the United States and in 1998 regained an American passport.

The following year, United States prosecutors, aided by war crimes investigators, sought again to revoke his citizenship. The government argued that he had lied about his second world war activities when he first entered the United States, even if he was not in fact “Ivan the Terrible”, and said his service at concentration camps rendered him ineligible for admission into the US. Prosecutors introduced as evidence a worker identification card from concentration camp Trawniki, which bore Demjanjuk’s photograph, nationality, father’s name and other items and wartime documents from archives in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania and Germany. Demjanjuk says he was a prisoner of war, not a Nazi collaborator.

A federal judge in 2002 again revoked Demjanjuk’s citizenship and ordered him to surrender his passport and certificate of naturalisation. Demjanjuk lost appeals and was ordered deported in 2005. He has fought the order since, arguing that that his age and infirmity make deportation tantamount to torture.

(Source: Guardian.uk)