View technical infoView page as text onlyView video preview page
Use the panel below to add single clips to your clipbin or basket
John Demjanjuk, the man accused of helping to kill 29,000 Jews in a Nazi concentration camp, arrives in Germany after being extradited from the U.S.
Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk arrived from the United States on Tuesday (May 12) to face charges he helped kill 29,000 Jews in 1943, and what is likely to be Germany's last major Nazi trial.
His plane landed at Munich airport in southern Germany around 09:15 a.m. (0715 GMT). After a medical examination the 89-year-old was whisked off to Stadelheim jail, where Hitler was held after a failed 1922 coup attempt.
Pictures showed Demjanjuk lying in an ambulance wearing a baseball cap, with tubes coming out of his nose.
"He is sitting in a wheel chair and is being given oxygen. He is certainly conscious and he says he understood what he is accused of in the arrest warrant," Demjanjuk's Munich lawyer, Guenther Maull told reporters outside the Stadelheim prison.
Demjanjuk tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of its 10 most-wanted suspected war criminals. Munich prosecutors want him tried for assisting in the murders at Sobibor extermination camp, in what is now Poland.
The Wiesenthal Center says Demjanjuk pushed men, women and children into gas chambers.
Demjanjuk, born in Ukraine, has denied any role in the Holocaust and a court could decide he is unfit to stand trial.
"The question is whether it is necessary to prosecute a man of his age and health. But that's not a judicial question but rather one of politics, of philosophy and mercifulness," Maull said.
Munich prosecutors plan to charge him in a few weeks. They said an investigating judge would read the 21-page warrant to Demjanjuk later in the day and a medical expert had been asked to assess his fitness to stand trial.
Demjanjuk 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 until 1944.
He was stripped of his U.S. 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".
He regained his citizenship in 1998, but the U.S. Justice Department refiled 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.
Clip Ref: RTV857409 118
Clips On Demand
Clip Ref: RTV857409 2675
Clips On Demand
Licence & Pricing
Corporate Use - Internal, One Country, UK for Five Years Edit this Licence
Making a fraudulent declaration as to your intended use may constitute an offence Terms & Conditions
Your basket is empty