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LUDWIGSBURG, Germany -- Prosecutors here have assembled a case against a retired
autoworker living in Ohio that could lead to Germany's
last major Nazi war crimes trial.
The Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, based for the past half-century
in this southwestern German town, recently recommended
the filing of murder charges against John Demjanjuk, 88,
a Ukrainian by birth who immigrated to the United States
in 1952. Demjanjuk has long been accused of working for
the Nazis as a death camp guard, but his conviction on
similar charges in Israel was overturned in 1993 by that
country's Supreme Court.
It has been seven years since
Germany last convicted a former Nazi of committing atrocities
under Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Although prosecutors
say they are pursuing other targets, the Demjanjuk case
could be Germany's final opportunity to bring a major Nazi
figure to justice.
The few former Nazis still alive
are in their late 80s or 90s, raising doubts about their
ability to stand trial. The trails of many fugitives went
cold decades ago. In other cases, there are no surviving
eyewitnesses.
"Our job is very difficult,
and our success rate is not high," said Kurt Schrimm, director of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg. "We don't know exactly how long we'll be able to stay open. Our job will end when
we don't know what to do next."
Germany set up its Nazi investigation office in 1958 in response to criticism
that it had been too lax in pursuing Third Reich criminals
after the end of the war. Since then, the Central Office
has investigated more than 7,000 cases, though the number
of active files has dwindled substantially of late.
Schrimm said he spends 90 percent of his time these days working as a "historian or a detective," with little practical hope of bringing anyone to trial. He said that his staff,
which includes seven investigators, is pursuing a handful
of cases but that only Demjanjuk is close to being ready
for prosecution.
"It's getting more
and more difficult with each passing year," he said.
German prosecutors hope to win
a rare conviction against a former Nazi in an ongoing trial
in Munich, where Josef Scheungraber, 90, stands accused
of murdering 14 Italian civilians in Tuscany in June 1944.
His trial began in September and is expected to continue
for months.
In April, prosecutors in Dortmund
indicted Heinrich Boere, 87, a confessed SS commando accused
of killing three Dutch civilians during the war. But the
case has been repeatedly delayed over questions of whether
Boere is fit to stand trial.
Critics have complained that Germany's
efforts to bring Nazis to justice have been hamstrung by
a slow-moving bureaucracy and a reluctance among some officials
to try elderly citizens for crimes committed more than
six decades ago.
"The race against time
has been lost," Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said
in a speech last month commemorating the 50th anniversary
of the Nazi investigation office in Ludwigsburg. "An unknown number of grave crimes remain unpunished."
Knobloch praised the work of the Central Office but criticized the German government
for not giving it more authority. Under German law, the
Central Office can only investigate cases; it is up to
state prosecutors to decide whether to press charges.
The Central Office, for example, announced in November that it had assembled
enough evidence against Demjanjuk to warrant a trial. But
prosecutors in Munich, who have jurisdiction over the case,
have moved more cautiously and say they have not made a
final decision.
"We will examine whether
the evidence is sufficient during the coming weeks and
months," said Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld, a deputy spokesman for the Munich prosecutors'
office.
Demjanjuk lived briefly in Munich
before he immigrated to the United States. Germany's high
court ruled in December that his past residency in the
city gives prosecutors there the authority to pursue a
case against him.
Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter for
the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of its Jerusalem
office, said there was plenty of justification for a trial.
"There's no question
that there's enough evidence against Demjanjuk, no question
at all," Zuroff said in a telephone interview. The decision on whether to press charges,
he said, was "primarily a political issue, to be honest."
John H. Broadley, a lawyer in Washington who represents Demjanjuk, declined to
comment on the German investigation. He said Demjanjuk
needs blood transfusions twice a week and questioned his
fitness to stand trial. "He's in very poor health," Broadley said.
Demjanjuk lives outside Cleveland and for decades was an autoworker for Ford.
He became a U.S. citizen in 1958. The U.S. government has
since stripped him of his citizenship and is seeking to
deport him, charging that he covered up his Nazi past on
immigration forms. But U.S. officials lack jurisdiction
to try him.
"He's stateless. We
can put him on an airplane as soon as a country is willing
to take him," said Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations, which oversees Nazi war-crime cases.
So far, however, no country has
been willing to accept Demjanjuk. Neither Poland, where
he allegedly served as a concentration camp guard, nor
his native Ukraine, which became an independent state only
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has shown interest.
Demjanjuk is among five aging
former Nazis whom the U.S. government is seeking to deport.
U.S. officials have criticized Germany for its unwillingness
so far to accept or prosecute the men, most of whom were
non-Germans who worked for the Third Reich.
"The two countries
have not always seen eye-to-eye on this," Rosenbaum said. "Clearly, time is our biggest enemy. We have to work as fast as we responsibly
can. It is still possible to achieve justice in some of
these cases."
U.S. officials and investigators from the Central Office
in Ludwigsburg said that Demjanjuk served as a guard
at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland,
for six months in 1943. During that time, they said,
29,000 people were killed at the camp.
Demjanjuk has denied wrongdoing,
saying he was captured by the Germans in 1942 while serving
in the Soviet army.
He has successfully contested
past efforts to prosecute him. In 1986, the United States
extradited him to Israel, where he faced charges that he
had been a Nazi guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the
Treblinka concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.
He was convicted in Israel and
sentenced to death. But he was freed in 1993 on appeal
after evidence emerged that investigators had confused
him with another Ukrainian guard at Treblinka.
In this case, the Nazi hunters
in Ludwigsburg say, there is stronger evidence against
Demjanjuk, including his identity card from the Sobibor
camp. They also note that he admitted on his immigration
application to the United States a half-century ago that
he had been in Sobibor. At the time, details about the
camp were not well known to U.S. officials.
Schrimm said there are no surviving
eyewitnesses to testify against Demjanjuk. But he said
he was confident that prosecutors in Munich could still
win a conviction.
"We know that he was
a guard at Sobibor, and we know that all guards at Sobibor
had to do the same work," he said. "All of them had to bring the people from the trains and to the gas chambers and
to remove the corpses afterward."
Special correspondent Shannon
Smiley in Berlin contributed to this report.
washingtonpost.com
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