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Demjanjuk Trial to Break Legal Ground in Germany

The court stipulated that they were not to mention so much as a word about the case. Instead, Vera Demjanjuk, 84, told her husband John, 89, what she had planted in their garden at home. The telephone conversation, which lasted 20 minutes, was the only conversation to date between the Stadelheim Prison in Munich and Cleveland, Ohio. An official interpreter listened in on the conversation. "She hopes and believes that he will somehow return home," says John Demjanjuk, Jr., the couple's son.

That is unlikely to happen. His father is being detained in Bavaria, waiting for his trial to begin. US authorities deported Demjanjuk in early May, when he was flown to Munich on a chartered flight. When he arrived, a German investigating judge handed Demjanjuk the arrest warrant, which stated that the accused was "under strong suspicion" of aiding and abetting the murders of at least 29,000 people.

Demjanjuk is alleged to have worked in 1943 as a guard in the Sobibor death camp, and to have helped the Nazis commit mass murder against thousands of Jews. He has repeatedly denied the charges, and his family insists that it is the victim of a prosecution-obsessed justice system.

Read entire article at Spiegel Online