May 20, 2010
Demjanjuk’s ill health postpones trial
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The trial of accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk was postponed for the third day due to his ill health.
Demjanjuk, 90, has been in a Munich hospital since Tuesday, when he was admitted with chest pains, the Associated Press reported. He is reported to have dangerously low hemoglobin levels.
His trial, which began in December 2009, has been postponed due to illness previously.
Demjanjuk is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 29,700 Jews at the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1943. He has denied the charges, saying he was a Soviet prisoner of war in a German camp.
In 2002, the U.S. Justice Department charged Demjanjuk with being a guard at Sobibor and revoked his citizenship for lying about his Nazi past in order to gain citizenship. He was extradited to Germany in May.
In the early 1980s, Demjanjuk was accused of being the notorious guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka death camp. He was deported to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death in 1988. But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1993 after finding reasonable doubt that he was the guard in question.
New evidence allowed the current charges to be brought.
