BERLIN - Germany's Constitutional Court turned down an appeal from suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk on Wednesday, clearing the way for the trial to start next month of the man charged with helping to kill 27,900 Jews.
The trial of the 89-year-old retired U.S. auto worker is set to start on Nov. 30 in Munich and is likely to be Germany’s last major Nazi-era war crimes trial.
Demjanjuk, long wanted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center which hunts Nazi war crimes suspects, was deported from the United States in May and has been in jail near Munich ever since.
Demjanjuk’s lawyer had filed a complaint to the Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest court, arguing he had already spent years in custody during a previous trial in Israel after he was extradited there in 1986.
“The complaint will not be heard by the Constitutional Court,” the court said in a statement. In July, the high court had turned down another appeal by Demjanjuk that his deportation from the United States infringed his basic rights.
The Wiesenthal Center says Demjanjuk pushed men, women and children into gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp in what is now Poland. Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk denies any role in the Holocaust and his family argues he is too frail to stand trial.
Demjanjuk says he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war and served at German prison camps until 1944. He emigrated to the United States in 1951 and became a naturalised U.S. citizen.
He was stripped of his citizenship after being accused in the 1970s of being “Ivan the Terrible”, a sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.
He was extradited to Israel, tried and in 1988 sentenced to death but Israel’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction based on new evidence showing another man was probably “Ivan”.
Demjanjuk returned to the United States and regained his citizenship but was again deprived of it in 2002 after the U.S. Justice Department refiled its case against him, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at Sobibor and three other death camps.
