Munich - John Demjanjuk, the 89-year-old accused of herding Jews to the gas chambers at a Nazi death camp in 1943, was placed in investigative custody Tuesday in Munich on accessory-to-murder charges after being delivered to Germany by US federal agents. A jet flew him to Germany overnight. He was taken by ambulance from Munich Airport to a city jail, where doctors gave him a checkup before a first hearing to read aloud a 21-page charge sheet in German and pronounce his custodial status.
Interpreters speaking English and Ukrainian were present. Bavarian justice officials said Demjanjuk stayed lying down during the half- hour hearing. Jochen Menzel, the deputy governor of Stadelheim Prison, described him as in stable health after the trip.
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.
He allegedly worked during 1943 in Sobibor death camp near Lublin in occupied Poland during a period when 29,000 people were killed.
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.
In 1965-66 a German court had tried 11 other Sobibor SS guards, imprisoning six, one for life. One committed suicide during trial.
A US-based survivor of Sobibor, Thomas Blatt, aged 82, arrived in Munich and told his story to prosecutors.
Blatt's German lawyer, Stefan Schuenemann, said Blatt, who lives in California, could not identify any of the guards after so long.
But he had testified about the guards' duties, which included using rifle butts and bayonets to prod newly arrived prisoners along a barbed-wire-enclosed passageway to the gas chambers.
Blatt, aged 15 at the time, was kept alive for menial labour. His parents and brother were killed at Sobibor.
Researchers say Sobibor had very few long-term inmates and was mainly used to kill people immediately after arrival by train.
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. The US Justice Department hailed his deportation as an "historic moment" ending a decades-long court battle to have him removed from the country.
Guenther Maull, the Munich lawyer defending Demjanjuk, said it still 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 an office copy of a Nazi ID card proved that a man named Ivan Demjanjuk was assigned to Sobibor for several months of 1943.
That Demjanjuk had personnel number 1393 in the auxiliaries.
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 reported that Demjanjuk was then 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 has always insisted he was a prisoner of war, and has denied working at concentration camps.
He was acquitted in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court of charges that he had worked at a different death camp, Treblinka, saving him from the death sentence of a lower court in Israel.
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."
Schrimm cautioned that the Demjanjuk case might not be the last, saying his investigators were checking out other US residents.
"We are still working on it. There could be one or two more Nazi cases," he told the German Press Agency dpa, mentioning the case of another Ukrainian-born man, Ivan Kalymon, who has also been stripped of his US citizenship.
The Germans have traced a written application by Kalymon for rifle bullets from his Nazi masters with a note on it that he had used his last bullets to kill a Jew and wound another near the Ukrainian city of Lviv.
