Washington - A justice on the US Supreme Court has dealt a severe setback to an accused Nazi war criminal by declining to hear a motion to stay his deportation. Justice John Paul Stevens declined to hear John Demjanjuk's effort to block his deportation to Germany to stand trial as an accessory to the murder of 29,000 people.
German authorities allege that the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, then 23, worked from March-September 1943 as a guard in Nazi-occupied Poland at the Sobibor concentration camp, where at least 29,000 Jews were executed during that time. Prosecutors in Munich issued an arrest warrant for him in March.
Just last week, a US federal appeals court denied a motion by Demjanjuk, age 89, to block his deportation.
The Supreme Court move was seen as one of the last ways to prevent his being taken to Germany. However, under court rules, his lawyers may still submit applications for a stay to the court's other eight justices. Demjanjuk attorney John Broadley could not be immediately reached for comment.
The court dismissed arguments by Demjanjuk's lawyer that transporting him to Germany would pose an undue risk to his health. The court accepted US government assurances that he would receive sufficient medical care during the trip.
At one point in the struggle over his legal status in the US, federal immigration agents arrived at his house in Seven Hills near Cleveland Ohio and were pushing him in his wheelchair to a van to transport him. They were stopped by a new round of court orders.
A German tribunal earlier on Thursday ruled that the German government is under no duty to oppose Demjanjuk's expulsion from US soil to Germany.
It threw out an application by Demjanjuk's German lawyer for an injunction that would have required the Germans to put Demjanjuk straight back on a plane to the United States.
Tribunal officials said the judge had ruled that expulsion by the United States was an act that could take place even without German consent. Once Demjanjuk was on German soil, he would have to be arrested and kept there under the warrant.
Following World War II, Demjanjuk lived in Germany as a refugee until 1952 when he changed his first name from Ivan to John and moved to the United States.
Demjanjuk was acquitted in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court of charges that he worked at a different death camp, Treblinka, saving him from the death sentence of a lower court in Israel. But when he returned to the US, he was stripped of his US citizenship.
