BERLIN (AFP)---The trial Monday of accused Nazi guard John Demjanjuk is likely to be the last major case of its kind in Germany, which is pursuing aging war criminals with renewed zest in a race against the clock.
The 89-year-old Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk faces charges from Monday in the southern city of Munich that he helped murder 27,900 people in the Nazi death camp Sobibor between March and September 1943.
Although Demjanjuk lived in Germany for a short period after the war, he is effectively stateless as he never obtained German nationality and his US citizenship was stripped when he was found to have lied on immigration forms.
This makes the trial especially rare in Germany, which has tended to focus on its own nationals accused of war crimes, said historian Hans-Juergen Boemelburg of the University of Giessen.
"Germany only got interested in these cases" -- involving eastern European suspects -- "in the 1990s, when it developed a certain trust toward eastern European countries" as a source of evidence after the collapse of communism, he said.
Before that, he said, German society "was never particularly interested in such prosecutions and airing its dirty laundry," Boemelburg told AFP.
In fact, since the high-profile Nuremberg trials just after the war, where several top Nazis were sentenced to death, German authorities have examined more than 25,000 cases but the vast majority never came to court
But now, as the suspected war criminals approach their nineties, there has been a flurry of arrests and court cases dealing with war-time atrocities, in what Nazi-hunters say is a welcome change of policy in Berlin.
In August, a court sentenced 90-year-old Josef Scheungraber to life behind bars for ordering a massacre of Italian civilians in 1944.
His troops gunned down a 74-year-old woman and three men in the street before forcing 11 males aged between 15 and 66 into the ground floor of a farmhouse which they then blew up. Only the youngest one survived.
Last month, Heinrich Boere, an 88-year-old former Nazi hit man, appeared in court, accused of gunning down three Dutch resistance fighters in 1944 – a crime he freely admitted.
A verdict in this trial is expected on December 18. However, experts believe proceedings will in fact last much longer, given Boere's state of health.
And in a third recent case, German prosecutors charged this month a 90-year-old former SS soldier with 58 counts of murder for the killing of Jewish forced labourers in the final weeks of World War II.
A court in the western city of Duisburg now has to decide whether the trial of the man, Adolf Storms, can go ahead.
Speaking about the Demjanjuk case, Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, which tracks suspected Nazi criminals, said he welcomed the fact the trial was being held in Germany.
"This is a country which has recently changed its policy ... and accepted in the last 18 months that all Nazi criminals should be brought before a court," he told AFP
"For years, Germany only judged high-level officers and dignitaries of the Nazi regime," he added
However, as the years advance, the opportunities to prosecute Nazi criminals is diminishing rapidly.
"Given the passage of time, Germany's case against Demjanjuk probably will be the last major Nazi war crimes trial," said Jonathan Drimmer, a US lawyer who prosecuted Demjanjuk in 2002 during his citizenship hearing.
Ulrich Sander, from the Nazi victims' association VVN-BdA, said there were dozens of other suspects who will spend their twilight years with little fear of the law, despite the international attention given to the Demjanjuk case.
"You could have another 60 cases or so in Germany but they never come to trial," Sander said.
"In Germany, you investigate and investigate... and then finally there is simply a biological solution -- they die."