Ending
a trial that had dragged on for almost 18 months, a court
in the south German city of Munich on Thursday convicted
91-year-old John Demjanjuk of being an accessory to the murder
of 28,060 Jews at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied
Poland and sentenced him to five years in prison. The presiding
judge, Ralph Alt, said the court found that Demjanjuk served
as a Nazi guard at the camp in 1943 and, as such, played
a crucial role in the "Nazi machinery."
The court sentenced Demjanjuk to five years in prison, and then set him free,
saying he would not have to stay in jail pending his appeal
— a decision that provoked a furious response from the families
of Holocaust victims. Judge Alt defended the decision by
noting that Demjanjuk had already spent two years in detention
awaiting trial and, being both old and stateless, is not
considered a flight risk.
(Was the evidence used against Demjanjuk faked?)
Throughout the trial, Ukrainian-born
Demjanjuk, wearing his trademark baseball cap and sun-glasses,
remained silent about the charges leveled against him. When
the verdict was read out on Thursday, he looked on impassively
from his wheelchair. "He was part of the machinery of extermination," the judge told the packed courtroom, adding that the court was convinced Demjanjuk
served as a guard at Sobibor from March 27, 1943 to mid-September
1943. As he delivered the verdict, Judge Alt described how
thousands of Jews arrived at the camp on trains from the
Netherlands, were forced to undress, and then were herded
into the gas chambers — where they desperately tried to open
the doors from the inside before they met their deaths.
Some of the victims' relatives, who
had traveled to Munich for the verdict, broke down in tears
as the judge read out the long list of those who were killed
at Sobibor. "For me, it is justice. This chapter is finally over — he received a sentence," Jan Goedel, whose parents and grandparents died at the camp, told reporters.
(See more on Demjanjuk's trial.)
Thursday's verdict was the culmination
of a long and tortuous legal battle. In 1988, Demjanjuk was
sentenced to death by a court in Israel after he was identified
as the brutal guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" from the Treblinka concentration camp. But the verdict was overturned in 1993
by Israel's Supreme Court, which found Demjanjuk was the
victim of mistaken identity. The trial in Munich began in
November 2009, after Demjanjuk was extradited to Germany
from the U.S., where he had settled in Ohio in 1952.
Germans have been watching the trial
closely, as the nation continues to struggle to come to terms
with its Nazi history. German authorities have recently stepped
up efforts to bring suspected Nazi war criminals to justice
after facing criticism in the past that some suspects had
evaded prosecution. In January, German tabloid Bild reported
on documents from Germany's foreign intelligence service
which revealed that the country's spy agency knew where Adolf
Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust, was hiding in
1952, eight years before he was captured in Buenos Aires
by Israeli agents. Back then, Eichmann was the most significant
Nazi war criminal still at large. The revelations were heralded
as a "sensation" by historians and commentators, who said they added further weight to the accusation
that West Germany lacked the political will to put former
Nazis on trial in the post-war years.
(See photos of Adolf Hitler's rise to power.)
But these days German authorities
are eager to show that they are serious about bringing Nazi
criminals to justice. And Demjanjuk's case may have made
that task a little easier. Although the prosecutors weren't
able to prove that Demjanjuk committed a specific crime,
his presence at Sobibor was enough to convict him of being
an accessory to murder. Some historians say the verdict could
pave the way for future war-crimes trials. According to Jürgen
Zarusky, an expert in Nazi history at the Institute for Contemporary
History in Munich, the quest to bring surviving Nazis to
justice doesn't end with Demjanjuk — there are several other
Nazi war-crimes cases pending. "This verdict could make it easier for future prosecutions of Nazi war crimes
suspects in death camps," says Zarusky, "because [it] has shown that having been a guard in an extermination camp is sufficient
proof for a court that the person concerned was complicit
in murder."
Following the court ruling on Thursday,
Demjanjuk's attorney, Ulrich Busch, immediately filed an
appeal and told TIME he hoped the retired autoworker would
one day be able to join his family back in the U.S. "John Demjanjuk is free, but he has no passport and no citizenship and he will
have to stay in Germany for the time being," Busch said. "He's a very old and sick man and he should be with his family."
But Jewish groups and the families
of Holocaust victims are far from happy. "Demjanjuk's release is totally inappropriate given the fact he was convicted
of being an accessory to the murder of tens of thousands
of Jews," says Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and director
of the center's Israel office. "It's an insult to Demjanjuk's victims."
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