Suspected death camp guard John Demjanjuk went on trial in Germany today accused of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews.
The start of the hearing in Munich opens the final chapter of 30 years of efforts to prosecute the retired US car worker.
The 89-year-old was deported in May from his home in Ohio and has been in German custody since.
Prosecutors at the Munich state court say he served as a guard under the SS at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland. He could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
About 35 relatives of the camps' victims have registered as co-plaintiffs for the trial. Demjanjuk was deemed fit for trial, although his family says he is terminally ill.
In deference to his fragile health, his trial has been limited to two 90-minute sessions per day. Demjanjuk was taken by ambulance to the court.
The trial opened with his lawyer filing a motion against the judge and prosecutors, accusing them of bias.
Demjanjuk became a household name in the 1980s when he was extradited by the United States for trial in Israel on charges that he was the notoriously brutal guard at Treblinka who earned the moniker “Ivan the Terrible” for his deeds.
He was convicted in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and spent seven years in prison until Israel’s Supreme Court in 1993 overturned the conviction. It ruled that another person, not Demjanjuk, was actually “Ivan the Terrible.”
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, a former Soviet Red Army soldier, is now accused of volunteering to serve as a guard under the SS after being taken prisoner by the Nazis in 1942.
According to the indictment, he served as a simple “wachmann,” or guard, under the SS. As such, he is the lowest-ranking person to go on trial for Nazi war crimes.
The prosecution argues that, even with no living witnesses who can implicate Demjanjuk in specific acts of brutality or murder, just being a guard at a death camp means he was involved in the Nazis’ machinery of destruction.
Before that, however, the prosecution must prove that Demjanjuk, who is being tried in Munich because he lived in the area briefly after the war, really did serve at the camp.
Demjanjuk questions the authenticity of one of the main pieces of evidence - an SS identity card that prosecutors say features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk and that says he worked at the death camp.
He claims to be a victim of mistaken identity and says he was a Red Army draftee from Ukraine captured during the battle of Kerch in the Crimea in May 1942 and himself held prisoner until joining the so-called Vlasov Army of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others. That army was formed to fight with the Germans against the encroaching Soviets in the final months of the war.