BERLIN — John Demjanjuk of Seven Hills, Ohio, born Ivan Demjanjuk
in Ukraine in 1920, was deported for the second time by
the United States on Monday, accused of crimes committed
as a Nazi death-camp guard.
The first time was 23 years ago, and he was bound for worldwide notoriety, accused
of being the unfathomably cruel “Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka,”
one of the Holocaust’s most infamous sadists. He was convicted
and sentenced to death in Israel, before new evidence won
him a reprieve and eventually a trip back to the United States
and the return of his stripped citizenship.
But the wheels of justice began to grind again, and the whole process has repeated
itself step by step. Monday night, a frailer Mr. Demjanjuk,
now 89 and once again stateless, boarded a special medically
equipped airplane, this time bound for Germany, federal officials
said, where he is accused of being an accessory in the murder
of 29,000 Jews while working as a guard at the Sobibor death
camp in eastern Poland.
Investigators say that the documentary
evidence is strong and that they will be able to prove that
Mr. Demjanjuk was a living cog in a killing factory, where
some 250,000 people were put to death in just one and a half
years of operation. His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., says that
his father, an old man with bone-marrow and kidney diseases,
is being hounded by the United States Justice Department’s
Office of Special Investigations and German prosecutors in
an inhumane fashion.
Mr. Demjanjuk’s guilt will be decided
in a Munich courtroom, assuming he lives long enough and
is deemed fit to stand trial. But throughout the recent months
of courtroom battles over appeals and stays of deportation,
the gulf between the enormity of the crimes Mr. Demjanjuk
is accused of and the frail old man he is now has grown more
apparent.
Ultimately Mr. Demjanjuk’s advanced
age and poor health serve as reminders, regardless of the
outcome in court, of how the living memory of the crimes
committed during World War II is on the verge of disappearing.
Mr. Demjanjuk’s case might well be the last major war crimes
trial in Germany, marking the end of an era that began in
Nuremberg in 1945.
Thomas Blatt, 82, who was a prisoner
at Sobibor at the same time Mr. Demjanjuk has been accused
of having worked there as a guard, said the trial itself
was more important than meting out any punishment. “I don’t
care if he is released; I do care about his testimony,” said
Mr. Blatt, who now lives in California and has written two
books about his experiences. “There’s many people right now
who say the Holocaust never happened.”
Mr. Blatt said he did not remember
Mr. Demjanjuk from Sobibor, but he pointed out that he also
could not recall the faces of his parents who were killed
at the death camp along with his younger brother. Mr. Blatt
was one of the few prisoners to escape Sobibor, in an uprising
there in October 1943.
Mr. Demjanjuk was a soldier in the
Soviet Army, fighting against the Germans, until he was captured
in the Crimea in 1942. Mr. Demjanjuk says he spent most of
the remainder of the war as a prisoner. But according to
prosecutors, he went to an SS training camp in Trawniki,
Poland, where foreign nationals were trained to take part
in the Holocaust.
After the war, Mr. Demjanjuk moved
to the United States, where he became an autoworker and raised
a family. But in 1977, several Holocaust survivors identified
him as Ivan the Terrible.
Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced
to death by an Israeli court in 1988.
But the conviction was overturned
in 1993, and he was freed by Israel’s Supreme Court after
evidence surfaced suggesting that another man was most likely
Ivan the Terrible. An identity card from Trawniki indicates
that Mr. Demjanjuk was sent to serve at Sobibor.
His family has maintained his innocence
throughout the three-decade legal odyssey. “Now at the age
of 89, when alleged witnesses are now dead, he’s faced with
having to defend himself again, when with the pain and suffering
he’s no longer capable,” his son said on Monday in a telephone
interview. “You would have thought that after the mistake
they made in nearly sending him to the gallows, they would
have just let this go.”
The United States Supreme Court declined
to hear Mr. Demjanjuk’s latest appeal last week, and a Berlin
court declined an appeal on Monday.
“The only reason not to put someone
like Demjanjuk on trial is if he is not capable to stand
trial,” said Cornelius Nestler, a professor of criminal law
at the University of Cologne, who is advising possible co-plaintiffs
in the case. “I think in the same way that the grief of the
people who left their parents, very often their whole family,
in Sobibor will not be over until their death, the responsibility
of the people who did it will not be over until they’re dead.”
nytimes.com
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