Thursday, June 19, 2008

Nazi Guard Caught! Extradition to Germany....

AP reports on the latest findings of Nazi war criminals. John Demjanjuk is a former autoworker from suburban Cleveland who was thought to have been Ivan the Terrible and was extradited to Israel in 1986. After receiving evidence another Ukrainian was the real Ivan, the Israeli high courts freed him and his U.S. citizenship was restored in 1998. although Germany is seeking extradition the defense is claiming he's too old to be deported.

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said there are allegations from a fellow guard that Demjanjuk played "an active part in the mass murder of Jews deported to the Sobibor death camp."

"I very much welcome the decision made by the German authorities to seek the extradition of Demjanjuk and hope that it will be expedited so that he can be prosecuted in Germany and punished for his crimes," Zuroff said.

He noted that Demjanjuk is No. 2 on the center's "most wanted" list of Nazi war criminals — below only the brutal SS doctor Aribert Heim, whose whereabouts are unknown.

"The issue is that he was involved in mass murder; for some of our suspects, we have proof that they were responsible for individual murders, but here we are talking about someone who participated in the process that led to the annihilation of a quarter million Jews" at Sobibor, Zuroff said.


1 comment:

Batya said...

He had a great lawyer here in Israel.