TRIER, Germany (RNS/ENI) The head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany is urging that the extradited 89-year old alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk be put on trial as soon as possible.

“We are dealing with a race against time,” said the council’s president, Charlotte Knobloch. Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk arrived in Munich from the United States on May 12 after a protracted bid to fight his deportation from the United States.

After his arrival, Demjanjuk was taken by ambulance to the Stadelheim prison in Munich. The state prosecutor will charge him with having been an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where he is alleged to have been an SS-guard.

Demjanjuk claims he was a captured Soviet Army soldier. He says he was later a forced laborer and that he harmed no one.

Citing Demjanjuk’s failing health, Knobloch said, “Now is the time to do everything legally possible, to put Demjanjuk on trial as soon as possible.”

Knobloch is a survivor of the Holocaust and some of her family perished in Nazi death camps.

Demjanjuk’s lawyer, Ulrich Busch, told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper that Demjanjuk was suffering psychologically from his imprisonment.

“His detention is a violation of our constitution and of human dignity,” said Busch. Demjanjuk’s lawyers have asserted that Germany is not competent to try him.

Knobloch said that putting Demjanjuk on trial would serve a symbolic purpose: “It is not about revenge, but about justice for those crimes, that the state prosecutor is putting to the alleged war criminal. Especially for the survivors of the Shoah (Holocaust), it is unbearable having to see how alleged Nazi war criminals that showed no mercy for their victims, demand mercy for themselves, or equate a deportation with torture. (It is) a comparison that is totally improper.”