Munich - The Holocaust murder trial of John Demjanjuk, 89, is set to start on November 30 in Munich, a lawyer said Tuesday. He has been indicted as an accessory to 27,900 murders in a Nazi death camp in Poland in 1943. Born in Ukraine and a longtime resident of the US state of Ohio, Demjanjuk was expelled to Germany in May.
Stefan Schuenemann, representing Holocaust survivor Thomas Blatt, confirmed the date to the German Press Agency dpa, but a court spokeswoman declined to discuss the date. Scheunemann said the court was scheduled to sit on the case till May 6 next year.
The court spokeswoman said the venue would be a downtown Munich courtroom. Some lawyers had expected the trial to take place in a prison auditorium because of Demjanjuk's health. He is staying in a prison sick bay.
Germany alleges Demjanjuk was an auxiliary, or low-ranking foreign-born guard, in the SS and that he worked for several months at Sobibor camp while Jews were killed in the camp gas chambers.
The lawyer said the first sessions of the court would consider how fit Demjanjuk was to stand trial and his client, Thomas Blatt, was not scheduled to testify till January.
Blatt, who is the only former Sobibor prisoner on the witness list, has said in the past he does not remember Demjanjuk personally.
"He wants to look Demjanjuk in the eyes," said Schuenemann.
Doctors said earlier Demjanjuk was mentally and physically fit enough to attend a trial for two sessions of 90 minutes each per day.
A trial could be lengthy, especially because the principal state evidence will be an SS personnel card in Demjanjuk's name.
German law does not require an accused to enter a plea. Demjanjuk has declined to answer questions about the case.
Unlike the Nazi concentration camps where inmates were put into forced labour, Sobibor had the sole purpose of killing inmates.
The state case is that Demjanjuk was a Red Army soldier captured in 1942 who consented to undergo training by the SS at Travniki, and was then seconded as a guard to the Sobibor death camp, followed by work at the Flossenbuerg concentration camp.
The German-language SS record card contains the name Iwan Demjanjuk, a black-and-white photograph, a physical description, a list of issued clothing and a list of deployments ending with a move to Sobibor in 1943.
After the war he stayed in Germany as a displaced person, then obtained US permission to resettle in the United States in 1952. He was later stripped of his US citizenship and is now stateless.
