Update (4/3/09): Demjanjuk's extradition welcomed.  More

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New York, NY, March 24, 2009 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today called on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to take action, based on an arrest warrant issued in Munich, to extradite Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk so that he may face murder charges in Germany.

"After too many years of delay, Demjanjuk is now under a final order of deportation," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor.  "He should be put on a plane to Germany and removed immediately."

The Munich Prosecutor's Office issued an arrest warrant on March 11 for Demjanjuk, 89, on 29,000 counts of accessory to murder for his time as a guard at the Nazi Sobibor death camp in Poland from March through September 1943.

In a letter to Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security Secretary, ADL urged the U.S. to act quickly, given Mr. Demjanjuk's advancing age and physical condition and the horrific nature of the crimes he is accused of committing.

"There is absolutely no doubt about the facts that Demjanjuk was trained as a "Wachmann" by the SS at its Trawniki training camp and served the Nazi regime at the Sobibor death camp and the Flossenburg concentration camp," wrote Mr. Foxman.  "The evidence of Demjanjuk's active participation in the Holocaust has also been reviewed and confirmed by courts in the United States and in Israel."

A retired autoworker from Ohio, Demjanjuk lost his final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court last year to avoid deportation for having lied on his citizenship papers about his role as a Nazi guard.

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.