2:22PM GMT 30 Nov 2009 telegraph.co.uk
'Last Nazi' trial: why we must listen to Demjanjuk's story
The trial of John Demjanjuk will be an unsatisfactory mish-mash which will end with an invalid spending the rest of his life in a prison hospital, says Harry de Quetteville. But it still matters.

There are some crimes so ghastly that they seem to demand the norms of justice be overturned. Innocent until proven guilty? Sure, until the charge is herding 30,000 Jews into the gas chambers, then instinct wants the defendant locked up, reasonable doubt be damned.

And when the defendant is John Demjanjuk, an 89 year-old Ukrainian turned US auto worker who, American courts have ruled, definitely worked at some level in the Nazi death machine, why not throw away the key too?

Why bother with the legal hooplah? Why bother with extended extradition processes that have taken almost a quarter of a century? Why bother, above all, with the trial today of a man who has less than a year to live and is faced with a prosecution which has not a single witness to testify against him personally?

Whatever way you look at it, the last great Nazi war crimes trial (lest we forget, in the Hague, the war crimes trial is currently underway of a man, Radovan Karadzic, accused of overseeing the deaths of 7,000 people in Europe not 65 years ago but 14) is a washout.

If you want a normal case, with conviction secured only on the basis of watertight evidence, you seem very unlikely to get one. If you prefer the Mossad method of a bullet in the back of the head on some quiet foreign street (“everyone knew he was guilty…”), that’s not going to happen either.

Instead we have an unsatisfactory mish-mash which will inevitably end with an aging invalid spending the rest of his life in a prison hospital, no matter the merits of the case.

For surely the few survivors of the Sobibor camp, at which Demjanjuk is accused of having been a guard, alive to see his case open in Munich today, will not be forced to suffer the grotesqueness of another mistrial.

Demjanjuk, after all, already has one trial to his name, in 1993, after which the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that he was not Treblinka’s ‘Ivan the Terrible’.

So who does this proceeding benefit, so long after the event it is examining, with so few of the victims left? Of course, Jewish campaigners are happy – like Ephraim Zuroff, the indefatigable Nazi hunter whom I last spoke to last year, when he was in Chile trying to hunt down Aribert Heim, the Nazi ‘Dr Death’ who killed his victims by injecting petrol into their hearts.

Zuroff said the Demjanjuk trial “sends a very powerful message” that it is not just officers – like Heim – who can get punished. The lowly agents of the Holocaust, he insists, must be forced to take responsibility too.

That, of course, is true. But ultimately, such trials are about more than the defendants, more even than the victims.

Instead, this kind of trial is about humanity remembering, trawling through the memory banks, wracking its brains and saying: “Did this happen? Could it have really happened? How? How could we have let this happen?”

As Thomas Blatt, the 82 year-old Sobibor survivor who is at the trial, said today: “I don't know Demjanjuk in person. I'm here to tell the way it was years ago.”

He is one of the few who can. And now we have an opportunity to listen.

telegraph.co.uk