Germany's top Nazi hunter ...

Discussion in 'Politics' started by ZZZzzzzzzz, Nov 10, 2008.

  1. BERLIN — Germany's top Nazi hunter on Monday asked Munich prosecutors to request the extradition of an 88-year-old Ohio man accused of bearing responsibility for the deaths of 29,000 Jews at a concentration camp in Poland.

    Kurt Schrimm, head of the special German prosecutors' office that has hunted Nazis since 1958, said he believes transport lists of prisoners that arrived at Sobibor during John Demjanjuk's seven-month tenure at the camp can be used as evidence of his alleged involvement in their deaths.

    "We believe that it's enough," Schrimm said. "We believe that we will get a trial."

    Munich prosecutors were asked to file the extradition request because Demjanjuk lived there briefly after the war.

    Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker who emigrated to the United States in 1952, denies involvement in war crimes, saying he served in the Soviet army and became a prisoner of war when he was captured by Germany in 1942.

    A native of Ukraine who settled in suburban Cleveland, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986, when the U.S. Justice Department believed he was the sadistic Nazi guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp.

    He spent seven years in custody before the Israeli high court freed him after receiving evidence that another Ukrainian, not Demjanjuk, was that Nazi guard.

    Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that his father is in very poor health and could not defend himself at another foreign trial.