Madrid, Spain – 2 Holocaust Survivors Testify

Madrid, Spain – Two Spanish Holocaust survivors testified Monday about their Nazi concentration camp ordeals as a judge began gathering evidence in a lawsuit urging the United States to extradite four alleged former death camp guards for genocide.

Judge Ismael Moreno of the National Court heard from Ramiro Santisteban and Jesus Tello, who were both at the Mauthausen camp, for about four hours, according to a court official and the human rights group that filed the lawsuit.

Last July, Moreno agreed to consider the complaint from the Brussels-based group, Equipo Nizkor, which argues the four suspects should be extradited from the United States on charges of genocide under the so-called principle of universal justice.

The doctrine allows particularly heinous offenses – such as crimes against humanity, terrorism and torture – to be prosecuted in Spain even if they are alleged to have been committed elsewhere.

Spain has used it to go after former Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet in 1998 and Osama bin Laden in 2003, although extraditions and convictions have been extremely rare.

The complaint identifies the four suspects as John Demjanjuk, Anton Tittjung, Josias Kumpf and Johann Leprich, and says they worked as camp guards at Flossenberg and Sachsenhausen, in Germany, or Mauthausen in Nazi-occupied Austria.

Demjanjuk is also being sought by Germany.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, which worked with Equipo Nizkor to prepare the lawsuit, says Demjanjuk is No. 2 on its “most wanted” list of Nazi war criminals – behind only SS doctor Aribert Heim.

Moreno has to decide whether to file charges against Demjanjuk and the other three and seek their extradition. It is not clear how long he will take.

The four live in the United States and are in their 80s. Equipo Nizkor says U.S. authorities have tried for years to deport them after they lied on their immigration papers about their Nazi pasts, but they remain in the United States because no country wants to take them in.

Equipo Nizkor says its case in Madrid is bolstered by the fact that thousands of Spaniards were among the millions killed in Nazi concentration camps. It says more than 7,000 Spaniards were held at Mauthausen and at least 4,300 of them died.

Most Spaniards in Nazi camps were leftist Republicans who fled to France during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 and were captured while fighting German troops.

In Monday’s closed-door session with Judge Moreno, Santisteban and Tello were shown archive photos of Mauthausen and “talked about how the camps worked and how the extermination methods worked,” said Gregorio Dionis, a spokesman for Equipo Nizkor, whose lawyers were present during the testimony