Munich, Germany - Eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk takes the stand on Monday over the gas chamber deaths of thousands of Jews in what will likely be the last major Nazi war crimes trial.
The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk is expected to be pushed into the Munich court in a wheelchair to face 27 900 individual charges of assisting murder while a Nazi guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland between March and September 1943.
If found guilty the infirm old man will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison. If cleared, he will face a trial of a different kind as he has no passport and no country wants him.
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Demjanjuk, who was deported from the United States in May after a decades-long cat-and-mouse game with justice and has already been sentenced to death once in Israel in a separate case, denies all charges.
'He is the most wanted Nazi criminal' He denies even being at Sobibor, where an estimated 250 000 men, women and children went to their deaths in the gas chambers.
Prosecutors have an SS identity card bearing Demjanjuk's name and his transfer orders from Trawniki, a sadistic training camp for Nazi guards, to Sobibor.
He says he was a Red Army soldier captured in 1942 by the Germans and then moved around various prisoner-of-war camps. After the war, he moved to the United States, where he was a car worker in Ohio.
"We know in our hearts that my dad never harmed anyone. And we know based on the evidence that there is absolutely no evidence that he harmed even one person," his son, John Demjanjuk Jr, told AFP.
Demjanjuk's lawyer, Ulrich Busch, said that even if it could be proved his client was at Sobibor, he would have been there under duress and can not now be held responsible for the atrocities carried out there.
Courts in Israel and the United States have already established he was in Sobibor.
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