The FINANCIAL — John Demjanjuk, the alleged Nazi death camp guard went on trial in Germany on November 30, to face charges of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews in 1943 at the Sobibor death camp in then German-occupied Poland.
Demjanjuk, 89, who is accused of being a guard at the Sobibor death camp between March and July 1943, was wheeled into the courtroom, covered in a light blue blanket and wearing a baseball cap after being examined by a doctor, Times Online reports. Demjanjuk’s family, whose family says he is terminally ill, refused to answer the judge’s questions about his personal details, repeatedly opening his mouth, apparently wincing in pain.
According to the same source, the state prosecutor has said that Demjanjuk was a Red Army soldier who was taken prisoner by the Germans in May 1942 after a battle on the Crimean peninsula.
Prosecutors are confident the evidence – documents and statements from former guards – will place Demjanjuk inside the camp, Daily Mail reports. 'The totality of evidence is over-whelming,' said Barbara Stockinger, speaking for Germany's state prosecutor, Hans-Joachim Lutz. A guilty verdict from the three judges could result in a maximum 15 years in jail, which would effectively be a life sentence.
Demjanjuk, who was extradited from the US in May after months of legal wrangling, denies involvement in the Holocaust, according to the same source. His defence team says he is a fail and feeble old man, the victim of a Kafkaesque plot hatched long ago by vengeful KGB agents. 'His physical condition alters by the day, even by the hour,' said defence lawyer Guenther Maull. 'He is an old man suffering from a range of ailments. 'His mood swings, too. Sometimes you think he as an old man who is mentally absent but you don't know if it's a general condition or an illness.'
Demjanjuk’s case has been closely watched since a Munich court issued an arrest warrant for him in March and he was deported from the U.S. two months later, Bloomberg wrote. About 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and Germany has been criticized for allowing too many perpetrators to escape punishment.
“People are looking for the historic dimensions that transcend the narrow legal issues of the case,” Thomas Henne, a German legal historian currently teaching at Tokyo University, said in an interview, according to the same source. “The question is whether a criminal court is the right place to find historic answers. It’s difficult enough to judicially determine an individual’s guilt six decades after the fact.” There is no evidence of his participation in any killings, Demjanjuk’s lawyers claim. “My father has never hurt anyone anywhere,” Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an e- mailed statement.
About 30 relatives of victims have joined the prosecution case. In Germany it is possible for the families to join the prosecution case as co-plaintiffs, representing named individuals who died in the death camps, CNN reports. If Demjanjuk is found guilty, it will not be only for 27,000 anonymous murders, but for the murders of victims specifically named by the co-plantiffs.
Demjanjuk's defenders say he was a Soviet prisoner of war at the Trawniki camp, where Nazis trained prisoners to assist with the extermination of about 2 million Jews in occupied Poland, the same source informs. Those prisoners of war had no choice but to assist, the defense said.
Thomas Blatt, whose younger brother and parents were killed at Sobibor, travelled from his American home to see the trial, according to Daily Mail. 'It is important to hear the testimony of those times, for young people to truly know the meaning of the hell on earth that was Sobibor,' the 88-year-old told the Daily Mirror.
The accusations against Demjanjuk date to the late 1970s, when the U.S. Justice Department accused him of being a Nazi guard known as "Ivan the Terrible." His U.S. citizenship was revoked in 1981, and he was extradited to Israel in 1986, CNN reports. Demjanjuk was convicted in an Israeli court in 1988 and sentenced to death, but that conviction was overturned in 1993 amid evidence that someone else was "Ivan the Terrible."
A federal court restored Demjanjuk's citizenship, ruling the government withheld evidence supporting his case, according to the same source. But his citizenship was revoked again in 2002 after a federal judge ruled his 1952 entry into the United States was illegal because he hid his past as a Nazi guard.
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