Suspected Nazi guard to be deported to Germany

By Dave Graham

BERLIN (Reuters) - Suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk is likely to arrive in Germany on Monday to face charges of complicity in the murder of 29,000 Jews despite a last ditch effort to block his extradition, his German lawyer said.

"If nothing else happens between now and then that's how it will be," Munich-based lawyer Guenther Maull said on Thursday.

A petition filed by Demjanjuk to prevent his deportation from the United States was unlikely to change this. "This attempt seems to have failed," Maull said.

However, Demjanjuk's American lawyers filed two appeals on Thursday for the U.S. government to stay his deportation and to reopen his case, saying Germany had changed its standards and was seeking to try him for "guilt by association."

"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," his son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in a statement issued in Ohio.

He said Demjanjuk was examined by a U.S. immigration doctor to determine if he "could survive the transportation" and results are pending.

Prosecutors in Munich have accused Demjanjuk of being an accessory in the killings of Jews between March and September 1943 at the Sobibor death camp, now in Poland.

Born in Ukraine, Demjanjuk denies any involvement in war crimes. He has said he was in the Soviet army and a prisoner of war in 1942. He later went to the United States.