FACTBOX-Five facts about accused Nazi guard John Demjanjuk

Fri Jul 3, 2009 2:14pm BST
 
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(Reuters) - Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk has been deemed fit enough by medical experts to stand trial in Germany for helping to kill 29,000 Jews in World War Two, the state prosecutors office in Munich said Friday.

Following are five facts about Demjanjuk:

* Born on April 3, 1920, in Kiev, Ukraine, 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 emigrated to the United States in 1951 and became a naturalized citizen in 1958.

* He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel, where he was sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors said he was the notorious guard "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka where 870,000 people died.

* The Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction and death sentence in 1993 and freed him after newly-released records from the former Soviet Union showed another man, Ivan Marchenko, was probably the Treblinka guard.

* He returned to his home near Cleveland in 1993 and, in 1998, the United States restored his citizenship. But the U.S. Justice Department the following year refiled its case against him, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps and had hidden the facts when he emigrated.

* A federal judge rescinded his citizenship in 2002 and he was ordered to be deported in 2005. He fought deportation for years in a number of courts but Germany finally issued an arrest warrant charging him with complicity in the death of 29,000 Jews and requested his deportation.

 

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