Munich - John Demjanjuk, the 89-year old accused of herding Jews to the gas chambers at a Nazi death camp in 1943, was arrested Tuesday in Munich on accessory-to-murder charges after being delivered to Germany by US federal agents. After being flown from the US overnight, he was taken by ambulance from Munich Airport to a city jail, where doctors gave him a checkup.
Jochen Menzel, the deputy governor of Stadelheim Prison, said his health condition was "stable."
Charlotte Knobloch, president of the German Central Council of Jews, said putting him on trial would now be "a race against time."
"We can issue an indictment within weeks if he cannot offer any exculpatory evidence," said senior Munich prosecutor Anton Winkler. That would allow a trial to commence before the year is out.
German prosecutors say they will interview Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who lived in Germany from 1945 to 1952, before making any decision to indict him for his alleged role in killing 29,000 people during 1943 at Sobibor death camp near Lublin in occupied Poland.
The camp was set up in 1942 and was used to kill up to 250,000 people, initially Polish Jews and later Jews from Germany, France, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands. About 300 prisoners managed to escape in an uprising at the camp in October 1943.
The camp was operated by about 30 Germans from the Nazi Party's SS paramilitary force and 90 to 120 auxiliaries, known as the Travniki, who were mostly eastern Europeans. The camp commandant, Franz Stangl, was jailed for life in 1970 in Germany and died in prison.
A German court had tried 11 other Sobibor SS guards in 1965-66, imprisoning six, one for life. One committed suicide during trial.
A trial of Demjanjuk might be the last major war-crimes case from the Second World War. Knobloch said it was important to show there was no expiry date to bring prosecutions for such crimes.
"He is one of the last if not the last person accused of these crimes to be brought to justice," she said in an interview. "From this trial, if it really does happen, we will get an insight into the murderous misdeeds of the Nazi regime."
Demjanjuk, who was stripped of his US nationality, was removed from his Ohio home Monday and flown to Germany on a specially chartered plane outfitted with medical equipment, including oxygen and a defibrillator.
His expulsion from the United States was delayed for weeks by a series of legal challenges citing his advanced age.
Guenther Maull, the Munich lawyer defending Demjanjuk, said it was possible the accused might be declared too infirm to go on trial.
"That would mean we have one more aged person for the German taxpayer to look after. The United States won't take him back and no one else wants him either. He is stateless," said Maull.
The accused lived in Germany from 1945 to 1952 using his Ukrainian name Ivan Demjanjuk, then emigrated to the United States and converted his first name to its English equivalent, John.
German investigators say Demjanjuk was a Soviet soldier taken prisoner by the Germans in 1942 who agreed to serve in the Travniki.
Kurt Schrimm, the prosecutor who heads Germany's national war crimes office in Ludwigsburg and led the investigation, said a Nazi ID card proved that a man named Ivan Demjanjuk was assigned to Sobibor for several months of 1943.
Schrimm said there was other paper evidence, but it was up to Munich prosecutors to decide whether to reveal the documents.
The Flossenbuerg concentration camp memorial in Germany said that Demjanjuk was transferred in October 1943 from Sobibor to that concentration camp, where he also worked as a guard. He is not being tried for his actions at Flossenbuerg.
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.
