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  • Sunday, 22 November 2009
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Accused Nazi Camp Guard Arrives in Germany from US

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Alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk has arrived in Germany after a flight from the United States.

He is expected to stand trial in Germany on charges of helping to murder 29,000 Jews.

Demjanjuk arrived in Munich Tuesday after a flight from the northern U.S. city of Cleveland, Ohio.  Immigration officials took the 89-year-old Demjanjuk to the airport from his house in an ambulance.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal against extradition to Germany.  His family unsuccessfully argued that the flight would further endanger his poor health.

Germany has charged the former auto worker with being an accessory to 29,000 murders at the Nazi-run Sobibor concentration camp in Poland during World War II.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk has said he is innocent, insisting he was a German prisoner of war.

The Demjanjuk case has been dragged out in U.S. courts for more than 30 years.  The Justice Department says it has evidence Demjanjuk was a Nazi guard, and it stripped him of his U.S. citizenship.

U.S. authorities say Demjanjuk lied about his past when he first came to the United States in 1952.  They extradited him in 1986 to Israel, where he was sentenced to death on charges that he was "Ivan the Terrible," the notoriously sadistic Treblinka death camp guard.

Israel's supreme court overturned his death sentence when new evidence raised doubts that he was Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk returned to the United States in 1993.

It is not yet clear when his trial in Germany will open.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.

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