How healthy is Demjanjuk?

The Justice Department has released this surveillance video of John Demjanjuk walking and getting into a car without much trouble, part of a court filing arguing that the 89-year-old accused Nazi war criminal is physically able to be deported to Germany.

Demjanjuk — who suffers from health problems including chronic kidney disease, anemia and a spine disorder — won an emergency stay of deportation from a federal appeals court last week, as he was on his way to the airport for deportation. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has more on the story:

Also Thursday, the family filed a video with the court. It was taken by a WKYC Channel 3 cameraman inside their home April 14 as agents helped carry out Demjanjuk. A woman cried in the background as she watched him being wheeled to the door.

"This is not right," she said. "This is not right. You don’t do this to animals. You don’t do this to humans."

His family said sending him to Germany would amount to torture. The WKYC video shows him wailing in pain as he is moved from his bed.

The government’s videos, however, "show [Demjanjuk] walking briskly, smiling and animatedly conversing and otherwise engaging in conduct that belies his health claims [and] offer further support for the conclusion that he is fit to fly," prosecutors said in documents.

Prosecutors also filed affidavits of immigration agents who helped Demjanjuk from his home and stayed with him much of the day on April 14. The agents said Demjanjuk appeared stiff when they tried to move him at his home. He continued to groan in the van when it struck bumps.

Later in the day, he walked and appeared to become more mobile at the federal building in downtown Cleveland, where he was held, the agents said. After the appellate court granted the reprieve hours later, Demjanjuk’s family prepared to take him home.

"I helped him climb into the pickup truck, a Ford F-150, with a rather high seat," immigration agent Aaron Roby wrote in an affidavit. "He had no more difficulty than I would expect from someone his age getting into the truck, and he scooted over once he climbed in."

Demjanjuk’s son, John Jr., called the videos "an act of desperation. Absolutely. If that’s the best they can do and that’s their best shot, then we’ll deal with it."

He said his father goes weekly to the doctor to get a shot that treats a blood disorder to keep him alive. That’s where agents videotaped him. He said the spinal pain can be horrific one day and better the next.

"Just because he can walk and talk has absolutely no bearing on whether he can fly at 30,000 feet," Demjanjuk Jr. said.

Prosecutors said Demjanjuk’s appeals are nothing but delay tactics to prevent him from being deported.

In Germany, Demjanjuk would face trial as an accessory in the deaths of some 29,000 Jews.

Demjanjuk was accused in the early 1980s of being the notorious Treblinka death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible," but he was released from jail in Israel after seven years after he could not be identified as "Ivan" beyond a reasonable doubt.

The U.S. Justice Department later reported that Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor and was liable for deportation because he lied about his Nazi past to obtain U.S. citizenship. American courts subsequently stripped him of his citizenship because he had lied about being a death camp guard. He and his family have appealed those orders for years.