May 12



GERMANY:

Demjanjuk deported to Germany


Nazi war crimes suspect John Demjanjuk was deported to Germany on
Monday evening after he was removed from his Cleveland, Ohio-area home in
the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers earlier
in the day.

An ambulance transported him to an airstrip at the Cleveland airport. The
plane carrying Demjanjuk departed at 7:13 p.m.

Demjanjuk, 89, is wanted by German authorities for his alleged involvement
during World War II in killings at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland.

His deportation closed a chapter in one of the longest-running pursuits of
an alleged Holocaust perpetrator in history. It also sets the stage for
what likely will prove to be an extraordinary German war crimes trial.

The Supreme Court last Thursday denied a stay of deportation for
Demjanjuk. Justice John Paul Stevens without comment refused to intervene
in the planned transfer from the United States.

Federal courts have all rejected his appeals, and the order from Stevens
cleared the way for the Justice Department to move ahead with the
deportation.

Demjanjuk's lawyers had asked the high court to consider their claims that
he is too ill and frail to be sent overseas. They also raised human rights
and other legal issues in their last-minute appeal.

A German court last Wednesday had also ruled against a request for a
stay. Officials in Berlin have issued an arrest warrant charging
Demjanjuk with being an accessory to the murder of about 29,000 civilians
at Sobibor in 1943.

The native Ukrainian has long claimed he was a prisoner of war, not a
death camp guard.

Immigration officers previously entered Demjanjuk's Cleveland-area home
April 14, and carried him out in his wheelchair to a waiting van. He was
held for a few hours and then returned to his residence after a federal
appeals court ruled temporarily in his favor.

Demjanjuk had appealed unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court last year.

He was once accused by the United States and Israel of being a notoriously
brutal S.S. guard at the Treblinka camp known as "Ivan the Terrible."
After appeals, that allegation was eventually dropped by both countries,
but later other allegations were made against him.

(source: CNN)

******************



Demjanjuk's health a key issue for any trial


John Demjanjuk, the retired Ohio autoworker deported to Germany, was set
to arrive Tuesday to face a warrant accusing him of being a guard at a
Nazi death camp where 29,000 Jews and others were killed.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier who was
captured by the Nazis, spent the rest of the war as their prisoner and
never hurt anyone.

There are Nazi-era documents that suggest otherwise including a photo ID
identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at the Sobibor death camp and saying he
was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki. Both sites were
in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Still, the key to the 89-year-old Demjanjuk's fate may not lie with the
evidence but rather on a German court's decision about whether he is
medically fit to stand trial. In any case, Demjanjuk, who has been without
a country since the U.S. stripped him of his citizenship in 2002, is
likely to spend the rest of his life in Germany, either in jail or in a
home for the elderly.

One of his German lawyers, Guenter Maull, told AP Television News on
Monday that after the plane carrying him from Cleveland, Ohio, to Munich
lands, he will be taken to the Stadelheim prison and meet a judge who will
read the lengthy arrest warrant.

"As far as I know the warrant is 21 pages long," Maull said.

Demjanjuk is not expected to say anything.

"On the issues of him saying something or not, I will put pressure on him
not to say anything, because we need to talk in peace first and digest
everything that is in the arrest warrant," Maull said.

As for his health, a doctor will examine Demjanjuk and a decision will be
taken as to whether he should remain at Stadelheim or be sent to an area
hospital.

"If he is sick they first have to try to cure him. If he is incurably sick
they have to find a place for him to live," Maull said, adding that were
Demjanjuk to be deemed unfit for trial, it is likely the German government
would have to pick up the cost for his care.

Dramatic photos last month showed Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-YAHN'-yuk)
wincing in apparent pain as he was removed by immigration agents from his
home in Seven Hills, Ohio. However, images taken only days earlier and
released by the U.S. government showed him entering his car unaided
outside a medical office.

Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said Monday that his father is dying
of leukemic bone marrow disease.

"It is not a question if he is sick but how sick he is, there are enough
diagnoses confirming his illness, the only question is how fast his
sickness is progressing," Maull told AP Television News.

On Monday evening, Demjanjuk arrived in an ambulance at Cleveland Burke
Lakefront Airport after spending several hours with U.S. immigration
officials at a downtown federal building. He was carried in a wheelchair
onto a jet that departed for Germany.

The deportation came four days after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to
consider Demjanjuk's request to block deportation and about 3 1/2 years
after he was last ordered deported.

Earlier Monday, John Demjanjuk Jr. said an appeal in a U.S. court would go
ahead even if his father isn't in the country.

"Given the history of this case and not a shred of evidence that he ever
hurt one person let alone murdered anyone anywhere, this is inhuman even
if the courts have said it is lawful," Demjanjuk Jr. said.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, a founder of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal
Center, said Demjanjuk deserves to be punished and that this will probably
be the last trial of someone accused of Nazi war crimes.

"His work at the Sobibor death camp was to push men, women and children
into the gas chamber," Hier said in a statement. "He had no mercy, no pity
and no remorse for the families whose lives he was destroying."

The center was established to locate and help bring to justice Nazi war
criminals.

Throughout three decades of court action in the U.S. and Israel, Demjanjuk
has insisted he was an innocent victim.

Among the documents obtained by the Munich prosecutors is an SS identity
card that features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk along with
his height and weight, and says he worked at Sobibor.

German prosecutors also have a transfer roster that lists Demjanjuk by his
name and birthday and also says he was at Sobibor, and statements from
former guards who remembered him being there.

The case dates to 1977 when the Justice Department moved to revoke
Demjanjuk's U.S. citizenship, alleging he hid his past as a Nazi death
camp guard.

Demjanjuk had been tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was
the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.
He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, a
conviction overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

A U.S. judge revoked his citizenship in 2002 based on U.S. Justice
Department evidence showing he concealed his service at Sobibor and other
Nazi-run death and forced-labor camps.

An immigration judge ruled in 2005 he could be deported to Germany, Poland
or Ukraine. Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in March.

(source: Associated Press)






ISRAEL:

Pope at Yad Vashem / Benedict's speech showed verbal indifference and
banality


Pope John Paul II was received in Israel with enthusiasm that sometimes
bordered on the excitement generally reserved for pop stars. He radiated
warmth. Pope Benedict XVI, in contrast, comes across as restrained, almost
cold.

In the best-case scenario, Benedict will leave behind indifference, not
hostility. The speech he gave yesterday at Yad Vashem was surprising
mainly because one would have expected the Vatican's cardinals to prepare
a more intelligent text for their boss. Someday, maybe in 500 years, when
the Vatican archive is opened to researchers examining the preparations
for this visit, we will be able to learn from early drafts how the final
speech came to appear so forced.

There is nothing easier than expressing real horror when talking about the
Holocaust, than identifying with its suffering, pain and grief. If that is
not done, it is a sign that there was a deliberate decision not to do so.
No church bell would cease to ring had the pontiff said something about
Christian anti-Semitism, even if he fell short of explicitly saying that
without it, the Nazis would not have won the support of the German people.
What he said about the Holocaust sounded too calculated, too diplomatic
and professional - he advised "compassion," a prescription that is to
priests what aspirin is to general practitioners.

Yad Vashem officials rushed to express "disappointment" at Benedict's
failure to mention the Germans, and naturally they attributed that
omission to his own background. The truth is that the Israeli culture of
memory has itself struggled hard with the question of whether and how to
identify the murderers.

Sometimes this identity is not mentioned at all, as in the "El maleh
rachamim" funeral prayer recited before the pope's address. Yesterday,
President Shimon Peres referred to the genocide as "Hitler's Holocaust," a
highly problematic term he would do well not to use again. The intention,
of course, is to avoid insulting the German people as a whole. Yad Vashem
ceremonies generally use the term "the Nazi Germans and their helpers."
How simple and fitting it would have been had the Vatican adopted that
terminology, just as it inserted the Hebrew term "Shoah" into the pope's
text, a tribute to the Israeli view of the destruction of the Jews.

Benedict is aware of the historical responsibility that rests on his
shoulders as both a German and a Christian. He supports annulling the
statute of limitations on prosecuting Nazi criminals in Germany and has
visited Yad Vashem once before. On more than one occasion, he has
expressed empathy for Jews and for Israel.

But in last night's speech, he inexplicably said Jews "were killed," as if
it had been an unfortunate accident. On the surface, this may seem
unimportant: Israelis often use the same term, and they do not need the
pope to tell them about the Holocaust, which today is a universal code for
absolute evil.

But the word the pope used is significant because someone in the Holy See
decided to write "were killed" instead of "murdered" or "destroyed." The
impression is that the cardinals argued among themselves over whether
Israelis "deserve" for the pope to say "were murdered" and decided they
only deserve "were killed." It sounded petty. Even the recurring use of
the term "tragedy" seemed like an attempt to avoid saying the real thing.

The verbal stinginess Benedict displayed last night also diminishes the
impact of anything he might say about Palestinian suffering. Had he said
what he needed to on the Holocaust, he could have said more to condemn
Israel's systematic violation of the human rights of residents of the West
Bank and Gaza.

The Yad Vashem speech emphasized the Holocaust's universal lessons, which
are obviously important. Israel has yet to learn to do this sufficiently
well. The legacy of the Holocaust obligates every person to fight racism
and protect human rights. It obligates every soldier to refuse a patently
illegal order.

But Benedict chose to phrase even the universal lessons of the Holocaust
in abstract terms. These may still have a place in the lecture hall of a
German theology professor, but in the Internet age, they are little more
than empty banalities.

(source: Ha'aretz)