Alleged Nazi John Demjanjuk Will Stand Trial in Germany
Germany's highest court rules that deportation of the alleged Nazi was legal.
PASSAU, Germany, July 8, 2009 — -- Alleged Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk lost yet another legal battle today.
His attempt to legally challenge his recent deportation from the United States to Germany, where he is to stand trial on charges that he was an accessory to the murder of Jews during World War II, was denied by Germany's highest court.
The German Constitutional Court refused to take up Demjanjuk's challenge.
"Mr. Demjanjuk's appeal is not substantiated," court spokeswoman Anja Kesting said. "The court has out-ruled his claim that his basic rights have been violated by his deportation from the United States as unfounded and therefore it has decided it will not accept his appeal for review."
Munich-based prosecutors accuse 89-year-old John Demjanjuk of Cleveland of being an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews and others at the Sobibor death camp in what was then Nazi-occupied Poland. They say they have proof that he was also trained at a facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki, also in Poland.
Demjanjuk's photo identification card, which puts him at the Sobibor camp at the time, was recently verified by German investigators and it will serve as an important piece of evidence in the upcoming trial.
Prosecutors, however, also found witnesses who will testify that he was a member of the so-called Vlasov Army, a group of Russian volunteers who did the Nazis' dirty work in the death camps in the occupied areas of Eastern Europe during World War II.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. autoworker, has denied the German prosecutor's charges from day one.
He says he's innocent of the charges against him and that he has never been to the Sobibor camp. He says he was a Red Army soldier who spent World War II as a Nazi prisoner of war and never hurt anyone.
