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Suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk - Source: Reuters -
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German prosecutors charged suspected Nazi death camp guard John
Demjanjuk with helping to kill about 28,000 Jews in World War Two,
in what will be one of Germany's last big Nazi-era war crimes
cases.
"State prosecutors in Munich have today charged the 89-year-old
John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder in a total of 27,900
cases," prosecutors said in a statement.
Prosecutors said Demjanjuk, who has been held in a jail in southern
Germany since May 12 after he was deported from the United States,
would be tried at a court in Munich.
The court could not give details on when the trial would take
place, though lawyers for the prosecution and the defence have
previously said autumn could be feasible.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who denies any role in the Holocaust, was
deemed fit by medical experts to stand trial despite protestations
from his family that he is too frail.
"Doctors recommend that the hearings should be restricted to two
sessions of 90 minutes per day," prosecutors said.
Demjanjuk tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of its 10
most-wanted suspected war criminals.
They say he pushed men, women and children into gas chambers at
the Sobibor death camp in what is today Poland.
The retired auto worker has said he was drafted into the Soviet
army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war and later became a
guard in German prison camps.
Demjanjuk was stripped of his US citizenship after he was accused
in the 1970s of being Ivan the Terrible, a notoriously sadistic
guard at the Treblinka death camp.
He was extradited to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death in 1988,
but Israel's Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new
evidence showed another man was probably Ivan.
The accused regained his citizenship, but the US Justice Department
refilled its case against him in 1999, arguing he had worked for
the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps.
His citizenship was stripped from him again in 2002.
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