The trial
of John Demjanjuk, which starts on Monday, is
likely to be the last major case of its kind
in Germany, in what has become a race against
the clock to bring elderly war criminals to justice.
On Monday the 89-year-old Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk faces charges in Munich that
he helped murder 27,900 people in Sobibor, a
Nazi death camp, between March and September
1943.
Although Demjanjuk lived in Germany for a short period after the war, he is effectively
stateless as he never obtained German nationality
and his US citizenship was stripped from him
when he was found to have lied on immigration
forms.
This makes
the trial especially rare in Germany, which has
tended to focus on its own nationals accused
of war crimes, said Hans-Juergen Boemelburg,
at the University of Giessen.
"Germany
only got interested in these cases" - involving eastern European suspects - "in the 1990s, when it developed a certain trust toward eastern European countries" as a source of evidence after the collapse of Communism, he said.
Before that,
he said, German society "was never particularly interested in such prosecutions and airing its dirty laundry".
In fact, since
the high-profile Nuremberg trials just after
the war, where several top Nazis were sentenced
to death, German authorities have examined more
than 25,000 cases but the vast majority never
came to court.
But now, as
the suspected war criminals approach their nineties,
there has been a flurry of arrests and court
cases dealing with war-time atrocities, in what
Nazi-hunters say is a welcome change of policy
in Berlin.
In August,
a court sentenced 90-year-old Josef Scheungraber
to life behind bars for ordering a massacre of
Italian civilians in 1944.
His troops
gunned down a 74-year-old woman and three men
in the street before forcing 11 males aged between
15 and 66 into the ground floor of a farmhouse,
which they then blew up. Only the youngest survived.
Last month,
Heinrich Boere, an 88-year-old former Nazi hit
man, appeared in court, accused of gunning down
three Dutch resistance fighters in 1944 - a crime
he admitted.
A verdict
in this trial is expected on December 18. However,
experts believe that proceedings will last much
longer, given Boere's state of health.
And in a third
case, German prosecutors charged a 90-year-old
former SS soldier with 58 counts of murder this
month for the killing of Jewish forced labourers
in the final weeks of World War II.
A court in
the western city of Duisburg has to decide whether
the trial of the man, Adolf Storms, can go ahead.
Speaking about
the Demjanjuk case, Efraim Zuroff, head of the
Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, which tracks
suspected Nazi criminals, said he welcomed the
fact the trial was being held in Germany.
"This
is a country which has recently changed its policy
... and accepted in the last 18 months that all
Nazi criminals should be brought before a court," he said.
"For
years, Germany only judged high-level officers
and dignitaries of the Nazi regime," he added.
However, as
the years advance, the opportunity to prosecute
Nazi criminals is diminishing rapidly.
"Given
the passage of time, Germany's case against Demjanjuk
probably will be the last major Nazi war crimes
trial," said Jonathan Drimmer, a US lawyer who prosecuted Demjanjuk in 2002 during his
citizenship hearing.
Ulrich Sander,
from the Nazi victims' association VVN-BdA, said
that there were dozens of other suspects who
will spend their twilight years with little fear
of the law, despite the international attention
given to the Demjanjuk case.
"You
could have another 60 cases or so in Germany
but they never come to trial," Sander said. "In Germany, you investigate and investigate... and then finally there is simply
a biological solution - they die."
telegraph.co.uk
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