In what is being billed as the last big Nazi war crimes trial, John Demjanjuk was brought before a German court in Munich on Monday. Born Ivan Mykolayovych Demyanyuk, the 89-year old autoworker from Ohio is being accused of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor, a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland.

Demjanjuk, a former Ukrainian soldier in the Red Army, has pleaded not guilty to all charges, claiming that he was held as a prisoner of war after his capture in the battle of Kerch at Crimea in 1942, after which he joined the anti-communist Vaslov Army with the Germans towards the end of the Second World War. The prosecutors, however, have produced a German SS identity card which they claim shows a young Demjanjuk and which states that he worked at Sobibor.

Demjanjuk is being defended by Ulrich Busch, who was formerly a Senior Prosecutor and the Head of Department for prosecution of bribery and crimes against competition in the Prosecutor's Office Frankfurt. Busch opened the trial on Monday by filing a motion accusing the judge and prosecutors of bias. He then went on to paint Demjanjuk as a victim, equating him to the Jews gassed in the Nazi death camps, on the grounds that failing to co-operate with the Germans would have resulted in Demjanjuk's death. The argument was received unfavourably by the court and the spectators watching the trial.

Cornelius Nestler, Special Prosecutor, who is representing the 30 plaintiffs, some of them relatives of victims killed in Sobibor, dismissed Busch's claims, saying that it was disgusting to compare the guards, who had certain amount of mobility and freedom, to the Jews, who were there only to die.

This is not the first war crimes tribunal to try Demjanjuk. In 1986, he was extradited to Israel to stand trial as Ivan the Terrible, a sadistic Ukranian camp guard, and was convicted by an Israeli court in 1988. However, the conviction was overturned in 1993 on grounds of mistaken identity. If convicted, Demjanjuk may receive consideration for the seven years he spent in the Israeli prison.

The prosecution's case is anticipated to face some difficulty- all of the 23 witnesses who helped build the case against Demjanjuk have died, leaving the prosecution with no eyewitnesses. The ID card and the statements of the dead witnesses are expected to be the main pieces of evidence against Demjanjuk. Reportedly suffering from a marrow disease, he appeared in court on Monday in a stretcher. Doctors have asked the court to limit the trial to two 90 minute sessions each day. The case against Demjanjuk relates to 15 transport trains which arrived at Sobibor between in 1943 from the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, carrying 29,579 people. Prosecutors have charged Demjanjuk on 27,900 counts of murder based on the discounting that some must have died in transit or were spared to work at the camp, reports the New York Times.

The trial has attracted the attention of the international community. Several legal experts have pointed out that the trial differs significantly in several aspects from Nuremberg and other war crime tribunals constituted immediately after the War, especially since the judges and lawyers involved in the case grew up in the 1950s and 1960s and hence approach the trial with a different mindset. More than sixty years have passed since the end of the Second World War, but the pursuit of justice is still going strong.