On May 12, a Munich court finally called John Demjanjuk to account for his crimes during the Holocaust. In finding the Ukrainian native guilty on all counts and sentencing him to five years in prison for helping to murder over 28,000 Jews while an SS Nazi guard at Sobibor death camp, the court recognized the role Demjanjuk played in the Nazi extermination machinery.

However, in releasing him pending appeal of the conviction, the court stunned members of the Jewish community.

“I am extremely upset about it,” said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem. “In a certain sense it is an insult to the memories of victims and certainly inappropriate. Germany made such an effort to bring him to Munich for trial. Then just to free him makes no sense whatsoever.”

The appeal, Demjanjuk’s German attorney has said, could take up to two years. In the meantime, Demjanjuk, 91 and stateless, cannot return to the U.S. German prison officials placed him in a nursing home. The two years he was held in a Munich prison will likely count as part of his five-year sentence.

Early this week, Munich prosecutors appealed his five-year sentence (prosecutors had asked for six years) and a judge’s decision to release Demjanjuk while his attorneys appeal.

“That’s the good news,” said Zuroff, Israel’s chief Nazi hunter. “Hopefully, they’ll win and he’ll be back in jail where he belongs.”

A spokesperson said prosecutors argued that Demjanjuk was a flight risk, the Associated Press reported. Even without a passport, Demjanjuk could travel within Europe’s so-called Schengen zone, 25 European countries that have no internal border controls for travel within the zone.

The German conviction is a criminal one. Demjanjuk’s two previous trials in U.S. District Court in Cleveland were based on civil immigration violations that stripped him of his citizenship because he lied about his wartime service on his naturalization documents. The punishment was deportation.

His criminal conviction in Israel was set aside in 1993 when the Israeli Supreme Court found evidence from the collapsed Soviet Union pointed to someone else being Treblinka gas chamber guard “Ivan the Terrible.”

“Notwithstanding last-minute questions that were raised about the authenticity of one of the key documents, I believe that the prosecution has more than made its case for Demjanjuk’s conviction and that the decision will be upheld on appeal,” said Michael Scharf, international law professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

“Thank God,” said survivor Gita Frankel when she heard the news on TV. “I was tortured at the hands of Ukrainian guards, dressed in black, who used to beat innocent Jews with sticks.” Demjanjuk’s conviction will not bring her family back, but “it makes me breathe a little easier.”

While commentators often cite the prosecution as the last major Nazi war-crimes trial, Zuroff called that “total rubbish, ridiculous. If anything, the Demjanjuk trial set precedent, which can be utilized to bring additional Nazi war criminals to justice.”

clevelandjewishnews.com