Extradited octogenarian accused of serving as guard in notorious Sobibor camp
AN AILING 89-year-old man goes on trial in Munich this morning, accused of herding to their deaths 27,900 European Jews in a Nazi death camp.
Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk faces charges of crimes against humanity for allegedly serving as a guard in the notorious Sobibor prison camp in 1942-43 in what was then Nazi-occupied Poland.
However, Mr Demjanjuk’s lawyers argue the ailing octogenarian, extradited from the US to Germany earlier this year, is the victim of mistaken identity.
Munich judges have ruled that Mr Demjanjuk is fit for trial, taking place this morning in an intense media glare. As a concession to his advanced age and ill health, however, testimony has been limited to two 90-minute sessions daily.
Nearly seven decades on, there are no surviving witnesses from Sobibor, and most of the evidence will be documentary. Watching closely in court will be numerous relatives of those killed in the Sobibor gas chambers.
The key item of evidence is a Sobibor ID and an SS index card, placing Mr Demjanjuk in the camp at the time its gas chambers were in operation.
Demjanjuk’s lawyers deny this, saying the papers are forgeries and that he served in the Soviet army before being captured by the Nazis in 1942.
Dubbed the “last major Nazi trial” by the world’s media, the state prosecutor and Nazi hunters involved agree that this trial is of major significance – Mr Demjanjuk currently heads the Simon Wiesenthal Centre list of most wanted Nazi war criminals. But those involved in the case say at least eight further Nazi trials are in the pipeline.
“There has never been a year in Germany’s post-war history when there haven’t been Nazi investigations,” says historian and Nazi trial expert Dr Edith Raim of Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History. “I wouldn’t rule out that there are still others out there.” Investigating Nazi-era crimes has continued throughout Germany’s post-war history, even in eras like the 1950s when the public appetite for such probes was not there.
In the post-war decades, West Germany conducted 172,000 investigations, held 16,000 trials and convicted over 5,000 people for Nazi-era crimes. In East Germany, 16,000 people stood trial for Nazi-era crimes.
Now, six decades after the end of the war, this trial will be a chance for younger Germans to learn about crimes from the Nazi era, otherwise consigned to history books and television documentaries.
There has been lively discussion in Germany ahead of the Demjanjuk trial, with some suggesting that, even if he was a prison guard, he was a tiny cog in the Nazi machinery who is being punished for still being alive.
“Certainly there is an impression of public fatigue, a feeling of ‘enough’ around these trials,” said Prof Wolfgang Wippermann, a historian at Berlin’s Free University. “But new facts and evidence continue to turn up and there is a legal obligation to investigate.”
There is no statute of limitations for Nazi-era crimes in Germany and, judging by the hundreds of accredited journalists, no end either to media interest.
“I know there is huge media interest, but I just deal with the cases as they come. This is just another case for me,” said Dr Hans-Joachim Lutz, the lone state prosecutor who deals with Nazi-related crimes in Munich justice.
As in all Nazi cases, Dr Lutz’s brief came from Germany’s “Central Office for Investigating National Socialist Crimes” near Stuttgart. In the 51 years since such activities were centralised, the agency has conducted 7,400 investigations, working closely with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
Today’s trial in Munich is the end of a long road for Mr Demjanjuk that began in the Bavarian capital in 1952. After living in a refugee camp, he emigrated to the US in 1952 where he lived in Cleveland and worked in the car industry.
In an interview with German authorities before his departure, Mr Demjanjuk said he served in the “Sobobor” (sic) camp.
The case only came about by coincidence, when German Nazi investigator Thomas Walther saw a news report in 2007 that the US authorities were stripping Mr Demjanjuk of his citizenship.
Mr Walther recognised Demjanjuk’s name because of a 1988 trial in Israel, when he was sentenced to death for being the sadistic Nazi guard known as “Ivan the Terrible”.
After a televised trial, and five years on death row, Demjanjuk was released after Israel’s highest court overturned the ruling: the Israelis had the wrong man.
Anxious to repeat history, and ignoring German media criticism that they were dragging their feet, Bavarian authorities proceeded carefully with their investigation into Mr Demjanjuk’s past.
“This trial has been a long time coming,” said state prosecutor Hans-Joachim Lutz. “I want to make sure I work meticulously. I think it’s important not to rush the case, but to get it right.”