U.S. agents took accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk from his Ohio home on Tuesday to deport him to Germany where he faces charges in the deaths of 29,000 Jews.
Demjanjuk, 89 and in frail health according to his family, was removed from his house in a wheelchair as his weeping wife stood by, to be flown eventually to Munich.
Prosecutors there accuse him of being an accessory in 1943 killings at Sobibor death camp where over 200,000 people were murdered. He is alleged to have personally led Jews to the gas chambers at the camp located in Polish territory then occupied by Nazi Germany,
Immigration agents arrived at Demjanjuk's suburban home, brought in a doctor and after a check loaded him in a van. A priest was present briefly before he was removed.
Ed Nishnic, his former son-in-law, said the family had been told he was being taken to a federal building in Cleveland initially and it was not known when he would be put on a plane.
"He understood he was being taken against his will ... it's disappointing to watch a human being treated like that," Nishnic said.
His removal came even as his family was trying to win a new stay from a federal court.
The Ukraine native was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 as the sadistic guard "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka where 870,000 people died.
Israel's highest court later ruled he probably was not "Ivan" but U.S. officials then stripped him of his citizenship saying he had worked at three other camps and hid that information at his U.S. entry in 1951.
Demjanjuk was originally scheduled to be deported on April 5 but won an 11th-hour stay, saying he had spinal problems, kidney failure and anemia, was very weak and needed help to stand up or move about. His son says he has life-threatening problems and sending him to Germany would amount to torture.
The U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals last week revoked a stay that had prevented his deportation.
THREE CONTINENTS, SEVEN DECADES
His deportation is the latest and perhaps last phase of a story played out on three continents for nearly 70 years.
The retired auto industry worker had denied any role in the Holocaust. He said he was drafted into the Russian army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war a year later and served at German prison camps until 1944.
He was first stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 when he was extradited to Israel for trial as "Ivan" of Treblinka but returned to his home near Cleveland in 1993 when that case collapsed and his citizenship was restored in 1998.
It was revoked again in 2002 after U.S. Justice Department Nazi hunters said he worked at other camps. He was ordered deported in December 2006 but remained in the country through legal challenges and for lack of demands from other countries to receive him.
Last year Germany's chief Nazi war crimes investigator Kurt Schrimm asked prosecutors in Munich, where Demjanjuk lived before he emigrated to the United States, to charge him with involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews.
Schrimm said his office had evidence Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor and personally led Jews to the gas chambers.
In March, Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Demjanjuk and asked the United States to deport him so he could stand trial.
His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said recently: "Given the amount of suffering and death that was meted out by Nazi Germany, it seems inconceivable that the Germans, who nearly killed my father in combat and again later in POW camps, now want to take him -- so elderly and weak he is unable to care for himself."