MUNICH
— In what may be one of the last major Nazi war crimes trials,
a German court sentenced John Demjanjuk, a former autoworker
in Ohio, to five years in prison after he was found guilty
of taking part in the murder of 28,000 people while working
as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied
Poland in 1943.
Mr. Demjanjuk was nevertheless freed from pretrial detention on Thursday while
he appeals, which could take a year. After the verdict Mr.
Demjanjuk, 91, was pushed out of the courtroom in a wheelchair
and paused briefly before cameras, saying nothing but removing
the dark glasses he had worn throughout the proceedings.
Relatives of Sobibor victims, who were recognized as co-complainants for the
trial, said they were satisfied with the verdict even though
Mr. Demjanjuk would at least temporarily be free. The two
years he has spent in jail will be credited to his sentence.
“Whether it’s three, four or five
years doesn’t really matter,” said David van Huiden, who
said he lost his mother, father and sister after Nazis seized
them in Amsterdam and sent them to Sobibor. Mr. van Huiden
said he survived because his parents sent him to walk the
family dog before the Germans came, and he hid with non-Jewish
friends.
Mr. van Huiden said that the trial
demonstrated the role played by people like Mr. Demjanjuk,
a Ukrainian who, according to testimony, initially fought
on the Soviet side, but agreed to work for the German SS
after being captured in 1941.
“He took part, he volunteered,” Mr.
van Huiden said. “You don’t kill so many people without the
help of guards.”
Mr. Demjanjuk spent most of the proceedings,
which lasted much of the day, lying on his back in a bed
set up not far from where Judge Ralph Alt read the sentence
in a sweltering courtroom. With his face hidden behind a
blue baseball cap and dark glasses, Mr. Demjanjuk remained
nearly motionless, occasionally lifting a knee or an arm
but showing no reaction to the proceedings.
The verdict comes after decades of
legal proceedings in three countries involving Mr. Demjanjuk.
After losing his United States citizenship in 1985 for lying
about his past, Mr. Demjanjuk was deported to Israel and
accused of being a particularly brutal guard known as Ivan
the Terrible at the Treblinka camp.
But an Israeli high court overturned
the conviction and death sentence in 1993, ruling that Mr.
Demjanjuk was not Ivan even though it appeared he had been
a guard at Sobibor, which was in Poland.
Mr. Demjanjuk returned to the United
States, but after more years of legal proceedings he was
deported to Germany in 2009 to face trial.
The long legal battle made Mr. Demjanjuk
one of the most well-known war crimes suspects, even though
he was said to have ranked low in the camp hierarchy. Victims
said that did not matter. “He is a very small fish,” said
Rudie S. Cortissos, whose mother was killed in Sobibor. “But
whether you are a whale or a sardine, someone who went wrong
this way should be punished.”
Mr. Demjanjuk’s defense lawyers argued
that an SS identity card and other documents were falsified
by the Soviets. But Judge Alt said there was a clear trail
of documents and testimony that demonstrated Mr. Demjanjuk’s
path from Soviet prisoner of war to Sobibor guard.
After Sobibor was shut down in late
1943, Mr. Demjanjuk served in a Ukrainian unit that fought
on the Germans’ side and was captured by American forces
at the end of the war, according to testimony. After several
years in a displaced persons camp in Germany, Mr. Demjanjuk
settled in Ohio and worked in an auto factory, according
to the court findings.
In an e-mail, Mr. Demjanjuk’s son,
John Demjanjuk Jr., said that “there remains not a scintilla
of evidence he ever hurt a single person anywhere.”
“While some may take satisfaction
from this event,” he wrote, “this verdict is no more definitive
today than the wrongful Israeli conviction and death sentence
was previously.”
But Judge Alt said that it was impossible
for anyone to have worked at Sobibor and not be part of the
Nazi death machinery. Every one of the guards “knew he was
part of an organization with no other purpose but mass murder,”
the judge said.
In painful detail, the judge recited
dates when transport trains arrived in Sobibor, the number
of people aboard and names of individual prisoners who were
family members of co-complainants. Mr. Cortissos’s mother
arrived on May 21, 1943, with 2,300 other prisoners, mostly
Dutch Jews who were sent immediately to gas chambers. Another
train carried mostly children, who were also gassed immediately.
The court rejected arguments that
Mr. Demjanjuk would have had no choice but to work in the
camps. Judge Alt said that many of the Ukrainians recruited
to work for the SS successfully escaped after learning the
nature of the work, and Mr. Demjanjuk had a duty to do the
same.
“An escape with a chance of survival
was possible,” Judge Alt said.
The judge said that Mr. Demjanjuk
could easily have earned the maximum sentence of 15 years.
But he said he took into account Mr. Demjanjuk’s age and
the fact that he had no influence over the number of prisoners
sent to the camp.
Mr. Cortissos, who survived the war
by hiding in Amsterdam, where he still lives, said that he
appreciated the chance to describe his experiences during
the trial.
“I had an opportunity to say what
I wanted to say for 50 years,” Mr. Cortissos, 73, said outside
the courtroom. “I’m satisfied.” He added, “It doesn’t mean
I can forget; it doesn’t mean I can forgive.”
Jack Ewing reported from Munich, and
Alan Cowell from Paris. Stefan Pauly contributed reporting
from Berlin, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.
nytimes.com
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