Demjanjuk son: Federal authorities have freed my father

The son of John Demjanjuk says the accused Nazi death camp guard has been released from federal immigration custody, after a federal appeals court granted a stay of his deportation to Germany to face charges over the deaths of 29,000 Jews.

The court made the ruling shortly after the frail 89-year-old Ukraine native was removed from his suburban Cleveland home by six immigration officers in a wheelchair earlier Tuesday. Authorities then drove him to a federal building in downtown Cleveland.

Demjanjuk, 89 and in frail health according to his family, was to be flown overnight to Munich where prosecutors accuse him of being an accessory in 1943 killings at Sobibor death camp, an area in Poland then occupied by Nazi Germany.

The Ukraine native was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 as the sadistic guard "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka where 870,000 died. Israel's highest court later ruled he probably was not "Ivan" of Treblinka but U.S. officials then stripped him of his citizenship saying he had worked at three other camps and hid that information at his U.S. entry in 1951.

He was expected to arrive in Munich on Thursday after what would usually be an 8- to 10-hour flight. It was unclear whether he was being transported by commercial or private aircraft or whether stopovers were involved.

Demjanjuk was originally scheduled to be deported on April 5 but won an 11th-hour stay, saying he had spinal problems, kidney failure and anemia, was very weak and needed help to stand up or move about. His son says he has life-threatening problems and sending him to Germany would amount to torture.

The U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals last week revoked a stay that had prevented his deportation and his lawyers filed a last-ditch appeal with a federal court in Ohio to try to get it reinstated.

His deportation was the latest and perhaps last phase of a story played out on three continents for nearly 70 years.

The retired auto industry worker had denied any role in the Holocaust. 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 was first stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 when he was extradited to Israel for trial as "Ivan" of Treblinka but returned to his home near Cleveland in 1993 upon exoneration and his citizenship was restored in 1998.

It was revoked again in 2002 after U.S. Justice Department Nazi hunters said he worked at other camps. He was ordered deported in December 2006 but remained in the country through legal challenges and for lack of demands from other countries to receive him.

Last year Germany's chief Nazi war crimes investigator Kurt Schrimm asked prosecutors in Munich, where Demjanjuk lived before he emigrated to the United States, to charge him with involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews.

Schrimm said his office had evidence Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor and personally led Jews to the gas chambers.

In March, Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Demjanjuk and asked the United States to deport him so he could stand trial.

His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said recently: "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."

	U.S. agents taking John Demjanjuk, second from right, from his home in Ohio for deportation to Germany on Tuesday.
	Photo by: (AP)