Accused Nazi Guard Demjanjuk Arrives in Germany
John Demjanjuk, 89, in Munich to face war crimes charges.
PASSAU, Germany, May 12, 2009 — -- It was around 9 o'clock this morning when a private jet plane from Cleveland, Ohio, with John Demjanjuk onboard arrived at Munich airport.
Suspected Nazi guard Demjanjuk, 89, was deported to Germany by the U.S. immigration authorities after a legal tug of war. The proceedings began with a warrant that accused him of being an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews and others during World War II at a death camp in Sobibor, in then Nazi-occupied Poland.
But Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker, insists he's innocent.
He maintains he was drafted into the Russian army in 1941, later held by the Germans as a Soviet prisoner of war serving at German prison camps until 1944.
He says he was never at the Sobibor death camp, but Germany's chief Nazi prosecutor, Kurt Schrimm, says there is proof he was there.
Experts from the Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigation have recently verified the validity of Demjanjuk's identification card, which puts him in Sobibor during the period when the Nazis committed mass murders. The identification card is only one of the many pieces of evidence against him.
According to the evidence gathered by Central Office for the Investigation of Nationalist Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, which Schrimm heads, there's evidence that he was a member of a group known as the Trawniki, a band of about 5,000 "foreign volunteers" who did the Nazis' dirty work in the occupied areas of Eastern Europe.
Schrimm told German magazine Der Spiegel that "these henchmen of death participated in mass shootings and helped wipe out Jewish ghettos. In the death camps, they drove the prisoners from the trains to the areas where they were forced to undress and taken to the gas chambers."
In early 1945, Demjanjuk, according to the documents gathered by the agency, joined the Vlasov Army, a group of Russian volunteers allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviets.
After the war, he found a job as a truck driver in a displaced persons camp in Bavaria, where his SS past was never an issue.
He met his wife Vera and the couple had a daughter Lydia. The young family applied for permission to immigrate to America, where they arrived onboard the USS General Haan, a former troop transporter, in January 1952.
Demjanjuk gained U.S. citizenship in 1958. He moved his family to Ohio, where he began working for Ford. The couple had two other children, Irene and John Jr., and the family moved to a small house in the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, where they still live today.
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