The Nazi war
crimes case is seen as a chance for Germany to
right a moral wrong, before the 89-year-old Demjanjuk
and other suspects die.
Reporting from Berlin - Martin Haas struggled to hold back tears as he recalled
how in 1943 his life was saved thanks only to
the actions of a quick-thinking family friend.
"I remember that it was a rainy day," the 73-year-old UC San Diego oncologist said in slow but measured German. "The woman hid me under her cape, and took me away just in time."
The 7-year-old
Haas found shelter with a Catholic family in
the Dutch countryside as the German Gestapo began
rounding up members of his family and other Jews
in the Netherlands, he said this week in a Munich,
Germany, courtroom.
He lost his
mother, sister and brother in Sobibor, a Nazi
death camp in Poland. His father died in Auschwitz.
Just yards
to the left of where the scientist sat in the
witness stand of Room 101 in the regional court
in Munich, a figure lay on a sickbed, an elevated
metal construction that dominated the room. The
accused, 89-year-old retired Cleveland autoworker
John Demjanjuk, covered by blankets with his
waxy face mostly concealed by a blue baseball
cap, went on trial this week.
Demjanjuk
is accused of helping kill 27,900 Jews at Sobibor
from March through September 1943, when he allegedly
worked there as a guard.
What some
observers described as an absurd piece of courtroom
drama -- which was adjourned Wednesday for three
weeks -- constitutes what could be the last major
Nazi war crimes trial in Germany.
As Haas and
five other witnesses whose relatives were killed
in Sobibor testified, it was impossible to know
whether Demjanjuk, who remained impassive and
shut-eyed throughout, was even listening.
Doctors vouch
for his mental and physical health, saying that
though he is frail -- he suffers from a bone
marrow illness and a heart murmur -- he is fit
to stand trial. The defense argues that he is
very sick, with less than a year to live.
Detractors
have accused Ukraine-born Demjanjuk of putting
on an act. They point to video of him getting
in and out of a car with relative ease and to
witnesses who saw him gardening at his home in
Cleveland, before his deportation to Stadelheim
Prison in Munich after a 30-year effort to bring
him to justice.
"Listen,
seeing him there in court he belonged to Hollywood,
not Sobibor, so great was the act he put on," said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
which lists Demjanjuk as its most-wanted war
suspect.
But many observers
have questioned whether the trial should be taking
place, saying that too much time has passed,
there are no witnesses to Demjanjuk's alleged
crimes and that he was forced to participate
in the Nazi killing machine or else face death
himself.
According
to the prosecutor's case, Demjanjuk was a Red
Army soldier who was taken prisoner by the Germans
in May 1942. He was allegedly trained as a guard
by the SS and was one of 150 Soviet prisoners
sent to Sobibor.
The prosecutor
argues that it is enough to prove that Demjanjuk
was a guard in Sobibor to determine that he was
an accomplice to murder because all camp personnel
were involved in the killings.
The defense
argues that Demjanjuk had no choice but to obey
orders.
"The
Germans who gave him orders had a whip in their
hands," his lawyer, Ulrich Busch, told the court this week, arguing that Demjanjuk was
as much a victim as the prisoners.
The complexity
of trying one of the last suspected World War
II criminals has been further underlined by the
experience of Israel, which in the 1980s convicted
Demjanjuk of crimes against humanity for allegedly
being the guard known as Ivan the Terrible at
the Treblinka death camp. Israel was forced to
release him in 1993 after the Supreme Court overturned
his death sentence because of reasonable doubt.
Germany might
be forced into a similarly embarrassing back-down.
None of the current witnesses can make a positive
identification of Demjanjuk. Of the two survivors
involved, neither remembers seeing him. The main
evidence is some paperwork and an SS identity
card, which states that he worked in Sobibor.
So why is
Germany putting Demjanjuk on trial? The main
reason is that the case is being seen as one
of the last chances to right a moral wrong, before
Demjanjuk and other suspects die.
Apart from
the Nuremberg trials that followed the war, few
Nazis have been tried in Germany, despite tens
of thousands of investigations. Much of the pressure
for Germany to host the trial, despite the fact
that Demjanjuk is not a German citizen, was brought
to bear by the United States.
The U.S. Office for Special Investigations has sought to persuade the native
countries of some of the hundreds of elderly
Nazi war crime suspects who sought refuge in
the United States to put them on trial.
Those nations, most in Eastern Europe, have largely refused on grounds that the
costs are high and the responsibility not theirs,
but Germany has accepted it as a moral duty of
the country that carried out the Holocaust.
Other suspects
whose U.S. citizenship was revoked after court
rulings that they had lied about their Nazi pasts
will be watching the Demjanjuk proceedings carefully,
knowing that its outcome could determine their
fate.
They include
Bronislaw Hajda, an 85-year-old Pole living near
Chicago who is accused of having been a guard
at the Trawniki SS camp. A U.S. court ruled in
1997 that he had taken part in the massacre of
hundreds of Jews in July 1944. Anton Geiser,
84, an ethnic German from the Balkans who is
suspected of working as an SS guard at Sachsenhausen
concentration camp, had his citizenship revoked
in April and could also face extradition.
But for the
22 plaintiffs in the Demjanjuk case, it is important
that the trial is taking place.
"They're
looking for truth and justice," said Cornelius Nestler, a lawyer representing several of them. "They want that everyone who was responsible for the murders, regardless of their
age, to be forced to live up to those responsibilities."
Thomas Blatt,
82, the main plaintiff, who escaped from the
camp during a prisoner-led revolt in 1943, said
he wanted to ensure that what happened at Sobibor
was acknowledged.
"The
Nazis razed it to the ground, trees were planted
to cover the human ashes and most of the documents
proving its existence were destroyed," Blatt said. "At least this trial will ensure that it goes on the record, because once the
survivors and their relatives are all dead, the
easier it will be for revisionists to say it
was a fabrication, that Sobibor, in fact even
the Holocaust, never happened."
As for Haas,
he recalled how at the war's end he waited in
vain for his parents to come for him. His father's
second cousin tracked him down, and his new family
immigrated to the United States in the 1950s.
A decade ago, Haas summoned the courage to find
out what had happened to his parents, brother
and sister, and discovered his connection to
Sobibor.
"Part
of me just didn't want to know the truth," he said. "It was just easier not to know. I still can't face the thought of seeing their
names on the [train] transport lists."
latimes.com
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