Germany charges accused Nazi guard Demjanjuk

German prosecutors have charged suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk with helping to kill about 28 000 Jews in World War Two, in what is expected to be one of Germany‘s last major Nazi-era war crimes cases.

The 89-year old Demjanjuk, who has been held in a jail in southern Germany since May 12 after he was deported from the United States, will be tried at a court in Munich, Reuters says.

The court, announcing the charges Monday, could not give details on when the trial would take place.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who denies any role in the Holocaust, was deemed fit by medical experts to stand trial despite protestations from his family that he is too frail.

Demjanjuk tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center‘s list of its 10 most-wanted suspected war criminals.

They say he pushed men, women and children into gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp in what is today Poland.

He has previously said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war and later became a guard in German prison camps.

He was stripped of his US citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being “Ivan the Terrible,” a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.

He was extradited to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death in 1988, but Israel‘s Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably “Ivan.”

He regained his citizenship, but the US Justice Department refiled its case against him in 1999, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps. His citizenship was stripped from him again in 2002.