By Jan Lopatka
PRAGUE, Feb 3 (Reuters) - A Russian survivor of the Sobibor
Nazi death camp says he can identify accused guard John
Demjanjuk, Czech Radio reported on Wednesday, offering
potentially crucial evidence for the former soldier's trial.
Demjanjuk, who fought in the Red Army before being captured
and recruited as a Nazi camp guard, is on trial in Munich,
accused of participating in the killing of 27,900 Jews at the
extermination camp in occupied Poland.
He denies a role in the Holocaust.
Former Sobibor prisoner Aleksei Weizen told Czech public
radio in an interview that he remembered Demjanjuk. "I remember
him as a guard, I saw him before he took a group of detainees to
work in the woods," the 87-year-old Russian told the station.
This would be the first time someone could identify the
accused directly, the radio station said. The report did not
mention Weizen had any evidence other than his own memory.
Demjanjuk's lawyer Guenther Maull told Reuters he had heard
of Weizen in conjunction with Sobibor before, but that he was
not aware of the claims made in the Czech radio report.
Weizen is listed online as a survivor of the Sobibor camp by
the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem. His name has also been
transliterated from Russian as Alexei Vaytsen.
Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to
death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors said he was the sadistic
guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka camp where
870,000 people died.
The Israeli Supreme Court overturned that conviction in 1993
and freed Demjanjuk after fresh evidence showed another man was
probably the Treblinka guard.
The central office of the state justice administration for
the investigation of National Socialist crimes, Germany's main
agency for probing Nazi atrocities, said it had not been aware
of Weizen and that he was a potential witness.
A spokesman for the office said it would pass on details of
Weizen to prosecutors in Munich, but that it was for the court
to decide whether they wanted to hear his testimony.
"He could be brought in at any time," Kurt Schrimm,
Germany's chief Nazi war crimes investigator, told Reuters.
The radio said Weizen was in Sobibor from 1942 until an
uprising there in 1943. A reporter interviewed Weizen last week
in the city of Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, the station said.
Defence lawyers dispute that Demjanjuk was at Sobibor and
say that even if he had been there as a "Trawniki" -- a prisoner
of war trained to perform duties at camps -- he would have done
so under duress and to save his own life.
He denies being at Sobibor, which prosecutors say was run by
20-30 Nazi SS members and up to 150 former Soviet war prisoners.
But he has in the past acknowledged being at other camps.
His trial is expected to be the last major Nazi-era war
crimes case and is being followed closely abroad.
Demjanjuk emigrated to the United States in 1951 and worked
in the auto industry. He was extradited from the United States
last May. If found guilty, he could spend the rest of his life
behind bars. His family argues he is too frail to stand trial.
(Additional reporting by Jana Mlcochova, Dave Graham and Sarah
Marsh)
