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Nazi Guard, Sick Old Man or Both?

The wife of the alleged concentration camp guard is petite and rather friendly. She's wearing a blue-green checkered blouse, and her long hair is pulled back in a bun. Standing there at the door of her yellow farmhouse in Seven Hills, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, she seems a bit lost.

Vera Demjanjuk speaks a mishmash of German and English. She looks exhausted as she explains that everything is starting over again and that, once again, she will have to fear for the fate of her 88-year-old husband, John. Her family, she says, has neither the energy nor the means for a new court case, especially not in far-off Germany. "We are poor and have no money," she says.

It was 1977 when American Nazi hunters first set their sights on her husband. At that time, the retired Ford auto worker was stripped of his US citizenship and extradited to Israel. The Israelis wanted to hang him. They accused him of being "Ivan the Terrible," the barbarous operator of the gas chambers at the Treblinka concentration camp.

Read entire article at Spiegel Online