Ohioan’s extradition requested

November 11, 2008 at 12:00a.m.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s top Nazi hunter asked prosecutors Monday to request the extradition of a retired Ohio autoworker accused of serving as a concentration camp guard during World War II.

There is sufficient evidence to prove that John Demjanjuk, 88, of suburban Cleveland, bears responsibility for the deaths of 29,000 Jews at Poland’s Sobibor concentration camp while he worked there as a guard in 1943, said Kurt Schrimm, head of the special German prosecutors’ office that has hunted Nazis since 1958.

“We believe that it’s enough,” Schrimm said of the evidence, which his office compiled using transport lists of prisoners that arrived by train at Sobibor during Demjanjuk’s seven-month tenure at the camp.

Murder is the only World War II-era crime on which the statute of limitations has not lapsed in Germany. Because the alleged crimes were committed outside Germany by a non-German, no German prosecutors’ office had automatic jurisdiction for the case.

Schrimm said that he asked Munich prosecutors to file the extradition request because Demjanjuk lived there briefly after the war.

Munich prosecutors’ spokesman Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld said Schrimm’s request had not yet arrived.

Schrimm said if Munich declines the case, he will appeal to Germany’s highest federal court.

Demjanjuk emigrated to the U.S. in 1952 and gained citizenship in 1958.

He denies involvement in war crimes, saying he served in the Soviet army and became a prisoner of war when he was captured by Germany in 1942.

A native of Ukraine, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986, when the U.S. Justice Department believed he was the sadistic Nazi guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp.

He spent seven years in custody before the Israeli high court freed him after receiving evidence that another Ukrainian, not Demjanjuk, was that Nazi guard.

Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an e-mail Monday to The Associated Press that his father is in very poor health and could not defend himself at another foreign trial.

Demjanjuk is No. 2 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “most wanted” list of Nazi war criminals — below only the brutal SS doctor Aribert Heim, whose whereabouts are undetermined.