Report: No living witnesses left for John Demjanjuk trial

BERLIN - The trial of alleged war criminal John Demjanjuk, 89, will likely proceed without any prosecution eyewitnesses, the news magazine Focus reported yesterday.

Due to start on November 30, the trial of Demjanjuk, who was extradited from the United States in May and accused of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, is likely to be the last major war-crimes trial from the World War II period.

Focus reported that 23 witnesses named in Ukraine-born Demjanjuk's indictment, some of whom had given evidence against him to Soviet authorities as long as 30 years ago, had since died.

Demjanjuk had been prosecuted by Israeli authorities in the 1980s on the charge that he had been "Ivan the Terrible," a death-camp guard at Treblinka, but his conviction was later overturned on the basis of reasonable doubt as to that identification.

Guenther Maull, defense lawyer for Demjanjuk, told the magazine: "The men were questioned 30 years ago. It is questionable whether their statements now have any value."

In October, Germany's Constitutional Court cleared the way for the ailing former auto-worker to stand trial, after his lawyer had claimed that Germany had no legal authority to try Demjanjuk and that his client had already spent more than seven years in prison in Israel.

Demjanjuk, who is stateless, is being kept at Stadelheim prison in Munich. Germany says it has jurisdiction in the case because some of the Jews killed at Sobibor were German citizens.