A historian is now the Munich district court declare the end of the Nazi mass murder of Jews. Background, the question was whether as a suspected Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk accused perpetrators or victims. "Nazi hunter" Efraim Zuroff, said in an interview with n-tv.de, Demjanjuk was "actively and personally involved in the murder of 29,000 people" had been.

After a three-week break is continued today as the trial of those suspected Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk. The plan is to be heard by the historian Dieter Pohl of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, Ludwig-Maximilians-University.

Pohl will report on the killing machine of the Nazis. His research interests include the history of the Nazi mass crimes and the occupation policy in Eastern Europe and Nazi trials.

Demjanjuk said to have helped as a security guard in the Nazi extermination camp at Sobibor in occupied Poland in 1943, killing tens of thousands of Jews in gas chambers. The now 89-year-old had participated as a soldier in the Red Army in World War II, a prisoner of war he should have chosen to cooperate with the Germans in the extermination camps in occupied Poland. Before the Regional Court of Munich II, he has to answer for complicity in murder in 27,900 cases. So far, Demjanjuk is silent on the allegations.

"The callous and ruthless attitude"

Demjanjuk's lawyer Ulrich Busch Demjanjuk had presented to the process beginning late November 2009 as a victim. The natives of Ukraine had to work as a prisoner of war at the behest of the Germans as guards. He had to run commands in order to save his own life, and be "victims, not perpetrators."

Historians and prosecutors reject this interpretation. "He and the other perpetrators and participants in the Sobibor extermination camp acted in callous and ruthless attitude," it says in the indictment. The prosecution alleges that Demjanjuk to have incorporated the concept of racial extermination by the Nazis.

On the list of most wanted war criminals, which publishes the Simon Wiesenthal Center annually, Demjanjuk is the first place. "We have three criteria on the basis, we evaluate the crimes of individuals to help us decide on which place they stand," said the head of the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, the Interview with n-tv.de. "The first is the extent of the crime, the number of cases involved, the number of victims. The second criterion is whether the person has personally committed murders, and the third their rank, their rank, their power."

Demjanjuk was classified in the first two criteria is very high, the third criterion is not. "But the overall view is that he was actively and personally involved in the murder of 29,000 people," said Zuroff. "The fact that he is protecting a low rank held him in any way from criminal prosecution."

n-tv.de