Alleged Nazi Death Camp Guard Faces Trial

Eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk, accused of being a guard at a Nazi death camp, was due in court in Germany on Monday for the opening of what is likely to be the last major Holocaust trial.

If convicted, the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk will almost certainly spend the rest of his days behind bars. If not, he will face an uncertain future as he has no passport and no country wants him.

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With his family saying he is suffering from serious health problems, Demjanjuk, who turns 90 in April, was expected to be wheeled into the courtroom in Munich in southern Germany in a wheelchair.

"He's not going to survive this," said his son John Demjanjuk Jr.

After losing a decades-long battle in May against deportation from the United States, where he had moved to after World War II, photos and television footage appeared to show him in very poor health and in great pain.

This contrasted with secretly filmed surveillance videos released by the US Justice Department which showed him getting out of a car without apparent difficulty.

Medical experts have judged him fit to stand trial, although proceedings will be limited to two 90-minute sessions per day.

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Demjanjuk is charged with assisting in the murder of 27,900 Jews and others at Sobibor, one of a network of camps erected by Hitler's Germany in Eastern Europe during World War II with the sole purpose of mass extermination.

Demjanjuk denies being at Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland but prosecutors say they have an SS identity card bearing his name and transfer orders. He is accused of being a guard there from March to September 1943.

More than 30 co-plaintiffs were expected to be in Munich, most of whom lost family members at Sobibor. There are no living eyewitnesses who saw Demjanjuk there, so prosecutors will rely heavily on testimony by people now dead.

Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier captured in 1942 by the Germans and then moved around various prisoner-of-war camps, but Israeli and US courts have already established he was at Sobibor, one of many non-German guards.

Demjanjuk's lawyer, Ulrich Busch, said that even if it could be proved his client was there, he would have been there under duress could not now be held responsible for the atrocities carried out there.

"We know in our hearts that my dad never harmed anyone. And we know based on the evidence that there is absolutely no evidence that he harmed even one person," his son told AFP.

It is not the first time barrel-chested, round-faced Demjanjuk has found himself in court over his past.

He was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 for being "Ivan the Terrible", a particularly sadistic Nazi guard, but after five years on death row the conviction was overturned when it emerged that Israel had the wrong man.

"All I want is for justice to be done. Nothing else," Kurt Gutmann, a co-plaintiff whose mother and brother were murdered at Sobibor, told AFP.