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Germans try to overturn US reprieve for Nazi camp guard
Allan Hall in Berlin15 Apr 2009
GERMAN prosecutors were today pressing American authorities to extradite an accused Nazi concentration camp guard.
Customs officials took John Demjanjuk, 89, from his home in Cleveland, Ohio, to fly to Munich last night, but they learned that his appeal to stay in the US had been successful while on the way to the airport.
Demjanjuk is believed to have taken part in 29,000 murders as a guard at Sobibor extermination camp in Poland in the Second World War where 250,000 people died. He was tried and sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 for being a guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka death camp, also in Poland, but his sentence was lifted when it was revealed that incriminating documents could have been faked by the KGB.
During his trial witnesses placed him in Sobibor instead. German authorities say they have independently verified that Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk's SS identity card is authentic.
The American court temporarily blocked Demjanjuk's deportation yesterday, arguing that he was too frail to travel and stand trial but German authorities are hopeful their case against him will succeed and that he will stand trial in Munich, where he briefly lived after the war ended.
The Central Office for the Prosecution of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, also has its sights on four other men who may have committed murder or been accessories to murder for the Germans, and who, like Demjanjuk, emigrated to the US.
A preliminary investigation is under way against Ivan Kalymon, 87, who lives in Michigan. Kalymon once worked for the Germans in Lvov, Ukraine, with the Ukrainian auxiliary police.
In August 1942 he wrote a short-handwritten note to his superiors to report on a mission. The document reads: "I employed my weapon in the line of duty during the 'Jewish Action' on 14 August 1942 at 7pm, using four rounds of ammunition, wounding one person and killing another."
Johann Breyer, 83, was born in Slovakia and lives in Philadelphia. He has admitted to being a guard at Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps.
The US deported 83-year-old Josias Kumpf last month to Austria, from where he had emigrated to America. Kumpf is said to have been at Trawniki concentration camp in Poland in November 1943 when the SS shot about 8,000 Jews in a few days.
Lithuanian Algimantas Dailide, 87, who moved to Germany after emigrating to the US, is said to have been in the Lithuanian secret police.
Reader views (2)
He was a guard following orders, not giving them. The witch hunt is unjustified.
- Brandon Thomas, SW7, London UK, 15/04/2009 18:34
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I can't see how Germany can try anyone associated with acts committed by the Nazis during the 12 years that the Nazi Party formed the legal government of Germany. The U.S. has the right to try him, also say Poland, but how can a German who was carrying out the German Government policy at the time be tried in a German courtroom now?
- Phil Jones, London UK, 15/04/2009 13:56
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