JOHN DEMJANJUK

Charged over WWII killings

07-14-2009 | AP

Panama Star MUNICH. Retired auto worker John Demjanjuk was formally charged Monday with 27,900 counts of acting as an accessory to murder — one for every person who died at Sobibor during the time he is accused of serving as a guard at the Nazi death camp.

The charges by prosecutors a Munich state court are one of the final steps before an expected autumn trial for the 89-year-old, who has been fighting a variety of Nazi-era charges since 1977.

Demjanjuk and his family have argued that he is in poor health, yet German doctors cleared the way for formal charges this month when they declared that Demjanjuk was fit to stand trial so long as court hearings do not exceed two 90-minute sessions per day.

The state court must now set a date for the trial, which court a spokesperson said was unlikely to start until the autumn.

The defendant's, John Demjanjuk Jr., described the charges as “a farce” in an e-mail, writing that, “as long as my father remains alive, we will defend his innocence as he has never hurt anyone.”

Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, says he was a Red Army soldier who spent the war as a prisoner of war and never hurt anyone.

But prosecutors say Nazi-era documents include a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943 and saying he was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki, Poland. US and German experts have declared the ID genuine.

"This is obviously an important step forward," Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi-hunter at Jerusalem’s Simon Wiesenthal Center, said. "The effort to bring Demjanjuk to justice sends a very powerful message that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrator."

Charges of accessory to murder carry a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison in Germany.