By Kim Palmer
CLEVELAND (Reuters) - Suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk left his Ohio home Monday by ambulance amid indications he was about to be deported to Germany for trial in the deaths of 29,000 Jews, local media reports said.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper reported that Demjanjuk was taken to a federal building in Cleveland housing an immigration office and that he would be flown by private jet to Germany from Cleveland's Burke lakefront airport sometime after 7 p.m. EDT (midnight British time).
The German Justice Ministry had said it expected him to arrive in Germany Tuesday.
Live television from outside the home of the 89-year-old former autoworker showed only a person shielded by a bed sheet being taken from the home and put in the ambulance, which then drove off under escort, leaving reporters present unable to verify it was Demjanjuk.
Demjanjuk, listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre as No. 1 on its list of "Most Wanted Nazi War Criminals," had been told last week to surrender for deportation.
An earlier effort to remove him forcibly took place at his house on April 14, but he was returned home later that day after a court intervened. Last week, however, the U.S. Supreme court refused to reinstate a stay preventing him from being deported.
"I'm sorry that it took so long," Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, told Reuters there. "At last we have a minor bit of justice with regard to Demjanjuk. Let's look forward to him having a just trial in Germany. It symbolizes that the world is still aware and we cannot set it aside."
Demjanjuk has spinal problems, kidney failure, anaemia, is very weak and needs help to stand up or move about, according to court filings.
But U.S. government Nazi hunters filed with the courts a recent video purporting to show Demjanjuk walking around under his own power.
APPEALS TO BE PURSUED
His son John Demjanjuk Jr told Reuters in an e-mail earlier Monday that long-term legal appeals would be pursued in the United States regardless of whether his father was still in the country. He called his father's treatment "inhuman."
The elder Demjanjuk was to be flown to Munich where prosecutors have accused him of being an accessory in killings during 1943 at Sobibor death camp, an area in Poland then occupied by Nazi Germany.
The Ukraine native was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988, accused of being a sadistic guard "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka where 870,000 died. That country's highest court later ruled he was not "Ivan," but U.S. officials then stripped him of his citizenship, saying that he had worked at three other camps and hid that information upon his U.S. entry in 1952.
His deportation would mark the latest twist in a tale spanning nearly 70 years, touching three continents.
He has denied any role in the Holocaust, saying 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" but he 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 said he worked at other camps. He was ordered deported in December, 2006, but remained in the country through legal challenges and no demands from other countries that he be sent to them.
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.
(Writing by Mike Conlon, Editing by Philip Barbara)
