German doctors examine death camp guard Demjanjuk

Doctors in a German jail were yesterday assessing if an 89-year-old deported from the United States can stand trial on charges he helped herd thousands of Jews into the gas chambers.

However, prosecutors warned that the medical checks on John Demjanjuk, born Ivan Demjanjuk, in Ukraine in 1920 and in prison in the southern German city of Munich since arriving from Cleveland on Tuesday, could take some time.

"I don't expect a decision this week. It will be next week at the earliest," Anton Winkler, spokesman for the Munich chief prosecutors' office, said yesterday.

His lawyer, Ulrich Busch, who plans to visit Mr Demjanjuk in the Stadelheim prison where he is being held at the weekend, his secretary told AFP, claims his client is too ill to go through the stress of a trial.

Mr Demjanjuk's family in the United States, where he was employed for several decades as an auto worker in Ohio, said he was too sick to travel but this week lost their long battle to prevent his deportation.

After arriving by a specially chartered plane in Germany, Mr Demjanjuk was taken to jail, given a hearty meal and was then read the charges against him: that he assisted in the murder of at least 29,000 Jews in the Sobibor death camp.

It is not the first time that the beefy-looking, bespectacled Demjanjuk has found himself in such a situation. He spent five years on death row in Israel before being acquitted in 1993 when the Jewish state overturned the verdict.

In that case, Mr Demjanjuk was suspected of being "Ivan the Terrible", a particularly brutal death camp guard who specialised in hacking at naked prisoners with a sword, but it was established that Israel had the wrong man.

This time, Munich prosecutors want to try him for being an active assistant in the Nazi killing machine as a guard at Sobibor in occupied Poland, walking children, women and men to their deaths.

Mr Demjanjuk's lawyer says his client says he was never there.

"But even if he had been there, he should still be acquitted. He comes from Ukraine and would have been a so-called foreign guard" forced into service by the Nazis, Dr Busch said.

"Given the history of this case and not a shred of evidence that he ever hurt one person let alone murdered anyone anywhere, this is inhuman even if the courts have said it is lawful," his son John wrote. But courts in both Israel and the US have previously stated he was a guard at Sobibor, accusations he had never previously challenged, and German television has reported that a Sobibor survivor could identify him.

Prosecutors also have an SS identity card with a photograph of a young man said to be Mr Demjanjuk and written transcripts of witness testimony placing him at the camp.

Mr Demjanjuk was suspect number three in the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's latest report on Nazi war criminals behind two others thought to be dead, and his trial could be one of the last dealing with the war crimes of more than 60 years ago.

Mr Demjanjuk is stateless having been stripped of his US citizenship for lying about his past. Munich prosecutors say it falls on the German city to try him because he had been registered as living there after World War II.

Timeline of attempts to bring Demjanjuk to justice

April 3, 1920: Iwan Demjanjuk is born in Dubovi Makharyntsi, Ukraine.

1952: Mr Demjanjuk gains entry to the US, claiming he spent much of World War II in a prisoner of war camp, and changes his first name to John.

1977: Holocaust survivors identify Mr Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible", a notorious gas chamber operator at the Treblinka extermination camp during a US Department of Justice investigation.

1981: Mr Demjanjuk is stripped of his US citizenship after a federal court found him to be "Ivan the Terrible."

1986: Mr Demjanjuk is extradited to Israel, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death in 1988.

1993: Israel's Supreme Court overturns his conviction after new evidence from KGB files in which Treblinka guards identified another man as Ivan the Terrible contradicts testimony from survivors.

1998: Mr Demjanjuk regains his US citizenship after an appeals court rules the government recklessly withheld exculpatory evidence.

2002: Mr Demjanjuk is again stripped of his citizenship after a judge rules there is proof he worked at several Nazi concentration camps.

2005: An immigration judge rules that Mr Demjanjuk can be deported but he remains in the US as his case is caught up in numerous appeals and neither Ukraine, Poland or Germany appear willing to accept him.

2008: US Supreme Court denies Mr Demjanjuk's appeal of his deportation order.

March 11, 2009: A German court issues an arrest warrant for Mr Demjanjuk. The US government soon moves to have him extradited and Mr Demjanjuk's lawyer files a series of emergency motions trying to block his deportation.

April 10: Mr Demjanjuk loses a bid for an emergency stay of deportation but vows to appeal the decision.

April 14: Mr Demjanjuk wins an 11th-hour reprieve when an appeals court stayed his deportation shortly after he was carried out of his suburban Cleveland, Ohio home in a wheelchair to be put on a flight to Munich.

May 1: The federal appeals court denies Mr Demjanjuk's attempt to block deportation on health grounds.

May 7: The US Supreme Court denies Mr Demjanjuk's appeal without comment.

May 11: Mr Demjanjuk is removed from his home on a stretcher and taken by private ambulance to the Cleveland, Ohio airport where he is loaded onto an overnight air ambulance flight to Munich.