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A former SS trooper accused of being a concentration camp guard known as “Ivan
the Terrible” may finally face justice as Germany prepares
to stage what would probably be its last Nazi war crimes
trial.
State prosecutors say that they can finally conduct the trial of John Demjanjuk,
88, who was for decades one of the world’s most wanted
war crime suspects. “There is sufficient evidence from
our point of view,” Kurt Schrimm, head of the Ludwigsburg
Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, said.
A dossier has been handed to the state prosecutor in Munich,
where Mr Demjanjuk had his last known address in Germany,
who can then recommend his extradition from the United
States.
For years the Ukrainian-born Mr
Demjanjuk has existed in legal limbo. He lives in Cleveland,
Ohio, but when his alleged role as a death camp guard emerged
he was stripped of his American citizenship.
However, neither Ukraine nor Poland
– the country where his alleged crimes took place – will
accept or try him, and he cannot be extradited to a country
that does not want him. As a result he has been classified
as a stateless alien, unable to claim social security.
Mr Demjanjuk has been on trial once before, in Israel in 1988, when five witnesses
identified him as the notoriously sadistic Treblinka guard
known as Ivan the Terrible. They testified that he had
sliced off the breasts of women inmates with his bayonet
and that he once ordered a prisoner to rape a 12-year-old
girl.
Mr Demjanjuk was sentenced to death but fresh evidence emerged that shed some
doubt on whether he and Ivan the Terrible were really the
same man, and the verdict was overturned by Israel’s Supreme
Court in 1993. Embarrassed, Israel let the man return to
the United States, emphasising that freeing him did not
amount to an acquittal.
Prosecutors will now try to prove
that Mr Demjanjuk served in Sobibor, in Nazi-occupied southeastern
Poland, from the end of March to mid-September 1943. As
many as 200,000 were killed in the extermination camp.
“The Americans are strongly interested
in getting rid of Demjanjuk,” Dr Schrimm said. “This is
a great chance for us to call Demjanjuk to book and make
him face up to the responsibility for his crimes.”
Dr Schrimm’s research alleges
that 29,000 Jews, many of them women and children, were
killed during Mr Demjanjuk’s tour of duty. Crucial to the
latest case is that 1,900 of them were German Jews: German
law allows the prosecution of those accused of killing
German citizens, even if the crime was committed elsewhere.
“It is now possible to give the
precise names and birthdates of the victims,” Dr Schrimm
added. The oldest victim during Mr Demjanjuk’s alleged
stint in Sobibor was a 99-year-old Dutch Jew; the youngest
were babies born on the deportation trains who were gassed
soon after arrival.
Mr Demjanjuk denies involvement
in war crimes, saying that he served in the Soviet Army
and became a prisoner of war when he was captured by Germany
in 1942.
The fundamental problem in mounting
new Nazi trials has been the passage of time: defendants
can argue that they are not physically or mentally fit
to stand trial, and the testimony of witnesses, blurred
by age and emotion, can be called into question.
The youngest suspects are more
than 80 years old, and these days Nazi hunters are thin
on the ground. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem
operates on a shoestring budget; the Ludwigsburg Centre
has a staff of 19, compared with 130 two decades ago.
On top of the list of the most
wanted Nazi war criminals is Dr Aribert Heim, a camp doctor
in Mauthausen, who has been pursued doggedly by the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre. Nicknamed “Doctor Death” the 94-year-old
has yet to be captured – he may not even be alive – and
it is unlikely that he will ever be put in the dock.
The most recent big Nazi trial
in Germany was in 1992, when the SS officer Josef Schwammberger
was jailed for life for murder and being an accomplice
to murder in 650 cases. He died in prison in 2004.
If the Demjanjuk trial takes place
it will be an important landmark for Germany, a final historical
reckoning in the courtroom.
Tracking down Nazis
— Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal
died in 2005 aged 96. He tracked down Adolf Eichmann –
the architect of Hitler's “final solution” – and saw him
hanged in 1961
— Elliot Welles directed the B'nai
B'rith AntiDefamation League's Nazi war criminals task
force for two decades before his death in 2006
— Dr Efraim Zuroff, a New Yorker
of Jewish descent, now runs the Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem.
Its reward for information has grown from $10,000 to $25,000
— Serge and Beate Klarsfeld pursued
Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons”. They found him in
1972, but it took ten years for Bolivia to extradite him
to France. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died
in 1991 of leukaemia
timesonline.co.uk
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