11 March 2009: Munich Court Issues Arrest Warrant for Nazi Guard Demjanjuk

A Munich court issued an arrest warrant for John Demjanjuk, who is accused of being the brutal "Ivan the Terrible" guard at a Nazi death camp. He has been charged with 29,000 counts of accessory to murder.

German prosecutors claim that between March and late September 1943, the 88-year-old former US car worker sreved as a Nazi guard. He is implicated as an accessory to the murder of at least 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor camp, which is in present-day Poland.

The move by the Munich court on Wednesday, March 11, could represent the first steps in paving the way for the extradition of Demjanjuk from the United States, where he has lived since the 1950s.

"The accused is currently still in the United States," a court official said in a statement released in Munich. "As soon as he arrives in Germany he will be questioned and tried."

Demjanjuk is on a Simon Wiesenthal Center list of the most wanted Nazi war criminals still alive.

After a long battle with the American authorities the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was stripped of his US citizenship in 2008. Demjanjuk has denied being involved in the murders.

Largely on the basis of an identity card indicating Demjanjuk was in the SS paramilitary group that ran concentration camps, Demjanjuk was convicted - and sentenced to death - by an Israeli court in 1988.

But the Israeli Supreme Court freed him in 1993 over concerns that the card might have been a Soviet forgery. He returned to the US after his release.

The certificate contains Demjanjuk's photograph, an SS service number and notes of his service at two Nazi sites.

Demjanjuk lived in Germany as a refugee shortly after the end of the World War II before being resettled in the United States.

However, allegations that he worked at the death camp have dogged him since the late 1970s.