PARIS (AFP)---The deportation of John Demjanjuk, who could face a trial in Germany, shows that Nazi criminals can be pursued until their deaths, French Nazi hunter and lawyer Serge Klarsfeld said Wednesday.
"The positive aspect is that Nazi crimes are being prosecuted until the very last breath of the last criminal," he told AFP.
"The Demjanjuk case upholds the idea of the rule of law, by showing that criminals should not go unpunished, whatever their age," he said.
Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate spent most of their lives chasing Nazis, and founded an association for the sons and daughters of deported French Jews.
Klarsfeld said he intended to file a complaint and a civil suit alongside the German case against Demjanjuk, who is accused of having taken part in the killing of 29,000 Jews as a guard at the Sobibor Nazi death camp.
Several thousand deported French Jews were among the dead.
"He held a minor position," Klarsfeld said.
"He was one of those whom the deportees saw when they arrived in the camp, those who shoved them into the death factory that were the gas chambers. He represents the last contact of deported people with Nazi brutishness".
"I wish Nazi leaders had been prosecuted at the time. Nowadays, only the small ones are left", he added.
Several thousand French Jews were deported and killed at Sobibor, but no French witness has come forward against Demjanjuk, Klarsfeld said.
"But there are written testimonies coming from the ex-Soviet block, such as that of Igor Danilchenko, a former SS guard at Sobibor", he added.
"In 1949, he described the role of his colleague Demjanjuk in the following way: 'As a SS guard, he participated in the mass destruction of Jewish civilians, stopping them from fleeing death, and escorting them to gas chambers, where these people were exterminated by suffocating them with gas'."
John Demjanjuk, 89, was deported from the United States to Germany on Tuesday after losing a marathon legal battle to stay in the US.
He is to be formally charged within weeks. He denies having worked in Sobibor, although he has admitted in the past that he was a guard in 1943.