Demjanjuk's Health a Key Issue for Any Trial

John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker who was deported Monday to Germany, is accused of being a guard at a death camp were 29,000 Jews and others were killed.

FILE - In this Monday, Feb. 28, 2005 file photo, John Demjanjuk arrives at the federal building in...

FILE - In this Monday, Feb. 28, 2005 file photo, John Demjanjuk arrives at the federal building in Cleveland for an immigration hearing. U.S. immigration officers are ready to make another attempt to deport John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old Ohio man sought in Germany to answer in court for an alleged past as a guard at a Nazi death camp _ the latest episode in a complex 32-year case linking him to World War II atrocities. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan, File)

(AP)

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier who was captured by the Nazis, spent the rest of the war as their prisoner and never hurt anyone.

There are Nazi-era documents that suggest otherwise — including a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at the Sobibor death camp and saying he was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki.

Still, the key to the 89-year-old Demjanjuk's fate may not lie with the evidence but rather on a German court's decision about whether he is medically fit to stand trial. In any case, Demjanjuk, who has been without a country since the U.S. stripped him of his citizenship in 2002, is likely to spend the rest of his life in Germany, either in jail or in a home for the elderly.

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Questions have been raised about Demjanjuk's health.

Dramatic photos last month showed him wincing in apparent pain as he was removed by immigration agents from his home in Seven Hills, Ohio. However, images taken only days earlier and released by the U.S. government showed him entering his car unaided outside a medical office.

Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said Monday that his father is dying of leukemic bone marrow disease and may not even survive the flight from Cleveland to Munich.

Timing is everything in the case, according to Jonathan Drimmer, who served as the lead lawyer in the 2002 U.S. case against Demjanjuk.

"This case is not about the strength of the evidence, it is about how quickly this guy can be put on trial," Drimmer said Monday. "The evidence against him is so strong."

Demjanjuk Jr. said his father was never involved with the Nazis.

"He was a Ukrainian POW nearly killed in combat against the Nazis," he said in an e-mail to The Associated Press Monday.

Throughout three decades of court action in the U.S. and Israel, Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-YAHN'-yuk) has insisted he was an innocent victim.