DEMJANJUK (IVAN THE TERRIBLE), NEVER TOO OLD FOR JUSTICE?

A wheel chair-confined octogenarian invalid and suspected Nazi war criminal, John Demjanjuk 89, was deported to Germany to face his past. He was boarded in a wheelchair onto a jet that flew him to Germany to be tried for his alleged role in the murders of Jews and others at a Nazi death camp during World War II. The deportation came on the heels of four days of the U.S. Supreme Court refusal to consider his request to block his deportation order and about 3 1/2 years after he was last ordered deported? Icheoku says, the long grinding wheel of justice has finally come screeching to a halt for Mr. Demjanjuk; an example of someone never being too old for justice?

Born in Ukraine, Demjanjuk is wanted on a Munich arrest warrant that accuses him of 29,000 counts of accessory to murder as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk denies the Germany's accusations, saying he was held by the Germans as a Soviet prisoner of war and was never a camp guard? But Rabbi Marvin Hier, a founder of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center which tracks holocaust perpetrators, said Demjanjuk deserves to be punished and his will probably be the last trial of someone accused of Nazi war crimes? According to him, "His work at the Sobibor death camp was to push men, women and children into the gas chamber. He had no mercy, no pity and no remorse for the families whose lives he was destroying." Icheoku says, could this be a case of vendetta, an eye for an eye according to the venerate law of Moses?

The case dates to 1977 when the United States Justice Department moved to revoke Demjanjuk's U.S. citizenship, based on information that he hid his past as a Nazi death camp guard. Demjanjuk was previously tried in Israel in 1988, accused of being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Poland. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, a conviction which was later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court. A U.S. judge however revoked his citizenship in 2002 based on U.S. Justice Department evidence showing he concealed his service at Sobibor and other Nazi-run death and forced-labor camps. An immigration judge ruled in 2005 that he could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine; following which, Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in March. Appeals followed until the Supreme court agreed with the deportation order.

Icheoku says, based on humanitarian grounds and empathy for his very advanced age of 89 years, Mr. Demjanjuk would have been spared deportation for whatever intransigence he may or may not have committed. The alleged Nazi-war criminal has very little time left here on earth and should have been allowed to live out whatever is left of his miserable life in his Seven Hills, Cleveland, Ohio, United States home. Sending him to Germany is being sent to a "foreign" country, accused of long gone crimes? What is done is done, and forgiveness is human. His now being dislocated from his equally aged wife of many years and the rest of his family is avoidable and could have been avoided. The man is just too old now to even feel the weight of whatever justice that might be meted to him as a result of his past alleged criminal activities. Instead, let his conscience deal with him and let God be the final arbiter.