What OSI was admitting was that its case against Demjanjuk, to see him hang from the gallows as "Ivan the Terrible," had been based on flimsy or falsified evidence and worthless or perjured testimony.

Replied the court, we don't do double jeopardy here in Israel.

Demjanjuk was released. And the grin of the jailer who opened his cell testified that many in Israel never accepted the charge that this simple man was some unrivaled devil of the Holocaust.

So, after 13 years, the last four on death row reflecting on his hanging for horrors he never committed, Demjanjuk came home to Cleveland, a free man. His citizenship was restored.

Though disgraced, OSI was not ready to throw in its hand. For it had been dealt a new card by its old comrades in the KGB.

The new evidence was a signed statement by one "Danilchenko," who claimed to have been a guard at Sobibor and had worked with Demjanjuk. As this document would have blown up the Treblinka case in Jerusalem, OSI had withheld it from the defense.

Another document turned up suggesting that Demjanjuk had indeed, after training at Trawniki camp, been assigned to Sobibor.

When the defense asked to interrogate "Danilchenko," to verify he had made and signed the statement and to question him on details, they were told this was not possible. Seems Danilchenko had died after signing. So, after the first 13 years of his ordeal took him right up to a gallows in Jerusalem, Demjanjuk has now been pursued for another 17 years by an OSI that will not rest until he has been convicted, somewhere, of genocide. And so we come to today. Demjanjuk is to be taken to Germany and prosecuted as an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews at Sobibor -- though not one living person can place him at that camp and not even the German prosecutor will say that he ever hurt anyone. One witness in Israel, who was at Sobibor and says he knew all the camp guards, says he never saw Demjanjuk there. If Friday's ruling is upheld, John Demjanjuk, who has been charged with no crime on German soil, is to be taken to Germany, home of the Third Reich, to be tried by Germans for his alleged role in a genocide planned and perpetrated by Germans. He is to serve as the sacrificial lamb whose blood washes away the stain of Germany's sins. But if Germans wish to prosecute participants in the Holocaust, why not round up some old big-time Nazis, instead of a Ukrainian POW. Answer: They cannot. Because the Germans voted an amnesty for themselves in 1969. So now they must find a Slav soldier they captured -- and Heinrich Himmler's SS conscripted and made a camp guard, if he ever was a camp guard -- to punish in expiation for Germany's sins. The spirit behind this un-American persecution has never been that of justice tempered by mercy. It is the same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago. Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.