BERLIN (JTA)
-- Whether in a wheelchair or on his own two
feet, John Demjanjuk will enter Munich District
Court on Nov. 30 to stand trial for World War
II-era crimes against humanity.
He is charged as an accessory to the murder of 29,700 Jews at the Sobibor death
camp in Poland.
The trial,
which some are billing as the last major Nazi
war crimes case, marks another landmark for Germany’s
confrontation with its Nazi past.
It will be
the second war crimes trial for Demjanjuk, 89,
who was born in Ukraine and immigrated to the
United States after the war.
In 1988, Israeli
courts convicted Demjanjuk and sentenced him
to death for murder and savagery at the Treblinka
death camp. But the sentence was overturned in
1993 when the Israeli Supreme Court determined
there was insufficient evidence that Demjanjuk
was the so-called guard named "Ivan the Terrible," and he was released.
Today, prosecutors
say they have all the proof they need that Demjanjuk
actively participated in the mass murder of Jews
in the gas chambers of Sobibor in 1943.
“The totality
of evidence is overwhelming,” said Barbara Stockinger,
spokeswoman for the state prosecutor in Munich.
An SS identification
card places Demjanjuk in the death camp, and
his number shows up on many documents related
to Sobibor.
The prosecution
alleges that Demjanjuk, after being captured
by the Germans in 1942, received training at
the Trawniki SS facility in occupied Poland,
which produced guards for several death camps.
Demjanjuk
insists he merely served in the Soviet army and
was captured by Germany in 1942.
Much of the
evidence against him was gathered by the U.S.
Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations
to prove that Demjanjuk had lied about his role
in the Holocaust to gain U.S. citizenship.
In October
2002, U.S. District Judge Paul Matia “found that
he had contributed to the mass murder of Jews
by asphyxiation with poison gas, and that he
had served voluntarily at the camps,” said Eli
Rosenbaum, director of the OSI, which had been
investigating Demjanjuk since 1977.
Demjanjuk,
an autoworker who lived in suburban Cleveland,
eventually was stripped of his U.S. citizenship
and, after exhausting his appeals, was deported
to Germany in May 2009. Germany has jurisdiction
to try Demjanjuk because 1,900 of his alleged
victims were German Jews, and because Demjanjuk
stayed in a Munich DP camp after the war.
If convicted,
Demjanjuk faces several years in jail -- reportedly
a maximum of seven. The trial itself could take
a couple of years.
For some in
Germany, the Demjanjuk trial is reminiscent of
the first major postwar trials of Nazis by Germans,
including the Auschwitz trials of 1963-65, when
Germany put 22 citizens on trial for their roles
as mid- and lower-level officials at Auschwitz.
The trials served to wake up the postwar generation
to the horrors their parents had tried to forget.
In contrast,
the Nuremberg trials, which took place immediately
after the war, were conducted by the Allies and
seen by many Germans as victors’ justice, Rosenbaum
said.
“I felt then,
and I feel now as an older man, that these trials
[in German courts] are important,” said Wolfgang
Benz, director of Berlin’s Center for Research
on Anti-Semitism.
As a history
student, Benz observed the trial of high-level
SS member Karl Wolff in Munich in 1964. Now his
daughter Angelika, a doctoral student and expert
on the Trawniki SS camps, is planning to attend
the Demjanjuk trial.
“There is
no statute of limitations for the crime of murder.
It doesn’t matter if this old guy is sick or
if he is nearly 90 years old,” Benz said. “The
issue of dealing with our past will never end,
and Demjanjuk is the case for today.”
While some
are hyping the Demjanjuk trial as the last major
Nazi war-crimes trial, Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff,
director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, said “That's been said for
years, so don't jump to hasty conclusions.”
Similar billing
was given to Nazi trials in the 1980s, Zuroff
said.
Rosenbaum,
who has been asked to testify in the Demjanjuk
trial, said he recently came across a Newsweek
story about the prosecution of Kurt Lischka in
Germany from 1979 with the headline, “The Last
Nazi Trial?”
In fact, “We
still have nine or 10 cases in the legal system
here,” Rosenbaum said.
Would-be perpetrators
must understand, he said, "that there is a real chance that they will be pursued - and not for months or
years but if necessary for decades, even into
old age and even into countries at great distances
from the ones in which they committed the crimes."
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