91-year-old
sentenced to 5 years but let out due to age; Demjanjuk convicted
for killing 27,900 as guard at death camp Sobibor.
BERLIN – A court in Munich on Thursday convicted John Demjanjuk,
91, of assisting in the murder of at least 27,900 Jews as
a Nazi guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland,
but then immediately released him pending an appeal against
his conviction and five-year sentence.
Legal proceedings against Demjanjuk, a former Ohio autoworker who was born in
Ukraine, have unfolded in Israel, the United States and Germany
over a three-decade period, culminating in Thursday’s verdict
and sentence. The appeal procedure may now take another year.
Pending an appeal from Demjanjuk’s attorney, Ulrich Busch, and the court’s statement
that there was no compelling reason to keep him in jail until
the sentence could be legally imposed, Judge Ralph Alt declared,
“The defendant is released.”
Demjanjuk is not deemed at risk of fleeing Germany because of his age and the
fact that he is stateless, Alt said.
The five-year sentence cannot be implemented
until the appeal process is exhausted.
In a signal that Demjanjuk may not
serve the entire term, or even any of it, even if his appeal
fails, Alt said that an incarceration period of five years
is “not commensurate” with such an elderly defendant.
Demjanjuk has been in German jail
for two years.
“It doesn’t seem likely that Demjanjuk
will actually serve any more time in the end. The appeal
will take at least a year and at that time his health may
not allow putting him in prison,” Alt told journalists after
the court ruling.
Demjanjuk cannot return to the United
States because the US government stripped him of his citizenship
in 2002.
Demjanjuk showed no reaction in court
– not when Alt delivered the verdict and sentence, and not
when the judge said he would be released.
Alt said non-German guards played
an important role at extermination camps like Sobibor, where
at least 250,000 Jews are thought to have been killed despite
only 20 German SS officers being there.
“He knew from the beginning exactly
what was going on in the camp,” Alt said.
Jewish organizations, a leading Jewish
attorney in Germany, Holocaust survivors and their family
members initially welcomed the guilty verdict, but news about
Demjanjuk’s release triggered sharp criticism.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center, told The Jerusalem Post, “We were very pleased with
verdict until he was released. It is totally inappropriate
and an insult to the victims. It is totally unacceptable
to release someone who was convicted for the murder of at
least 30,000 people.”
Zuroff said that the Ukrainian community
in Munich was set to “host him.”
According to Zuroff, widely considered
to be the world’s leading hunter of Nazis, the Demjanjuk
case is the second case within 24 hours in which “the German
legal system failed to respond appropriately to cases related
to Holocaust crimes.”
The other case was that of Klaas Carel
Faber, who is living in Bavaria and was convicted in a court
in the Netherlands. On Wednesday, Germany refused to extradite
him. Faber is the No. 3 most wanted Nazi on the Simon Wiesenthal
Center list, and the Dutch court had convicted him as a Nazi
collaborator in the Netherlands who helped murder 22 people.
Zuroff and the Wiesenthal Center had
encouraged the German authorities to prosecute Demjanjuk.
He said on Thursday that the Israeli prosecutors, the Office
of Special Prosecution in the United States and the German
prosecutors “deserve the credit” for the conviction.
Nathan Gelbart, a member of the Berlin
Jewish community and a prominent attorney, told the Post
that the Demjanjuk trial and verdict constituted an “important
sign that some people here care for those people who survived
the concentration camps and their heirs. One reason to punish
is for the satisfaction of the victims and justice.”
Gelbart noted that “only a handful
of Nazi criminals have been put on trial in this country.”
He said “The Ministry of Justice did not make overwhelming
efforts to follow or pursue extradition” in cases involving
Nazis, citing Germany’s refusal to push the Syrian regime
to release Austrian Nazi Alois Brunner, who fled to Syria
after the war, and who had helped Adolf Eichmann carry out
the destruction of European Jewry.
Germany “knew where he was. And they
did not pursue him in Syria,” Gelbart said.
Ronald Lauder, president of the World
Jewish Congress, issued a statement, saying “There must never
be impunity or closure for those who were involved in mass
murder and genocide, irrespective of their age.”
He continued that “John Demjanjuk
was one of many perpetrators, and there are still a few old
men out there who have the blood of innocent Shoah victims
on their hands. The World Jewish Congress will continue to
press for them to be tried before the courts of law.”
Stephan J. Kramer, secretarygeneral
of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said the verdict
was “not revenge but the execution of justice, even 65 years
later.”
Vera Dejong, whose family were Sobibor
victims, said she was “very much relieved that I don’t have
to have all the stress every time I have to come and sit
here and hear all the horrible things that happened during
the war and to my family.”
Demjanjuk has claimed he was drafted
into the Soviet army in 1941, and then taken as a prisoner
of war by the Germans.
His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said
in an e-mail before the verdict that his father was a victim
of the Nazis and of post-war Germany.
“While those who refuse to accept
that reality may take satisfaction from this event, nothing
the Munich court can do will atone for the suffering Germany
has perpetrated upon him to this day,” he said.
Prosecutors had faced several hurdles
in proving Demjanjuk’s guilt, with no surviving witnesses
to his crimes and heavy reliance on wartime documents, notably
a Nazi ID card that defense attorneys said was a fake made
by the Soviets.
Guards at Nazi death camps such as
Sobibor were essential to the mass killing of Jews because
extermination was the focus of such facilities, prosecutors
said.
Defense attorney Busch told the court
that even if Demjanjuk did become a prison guard, he did
so only because as a prisoner of war he would otherwise have
either been shot by the Nazis or died of starvation.
jpost.com
|