Former
Ohio autoworker was stripped of US citizenship and convicted
of helping murder 28,000 Jews at Sobibor.
John Demjanjuk, whose trial in Israel on suspicion of being the notorious death
camp guard “Ivan the Terrible” gripped the nation during
the 1980s and 1990s, died in southern Germany on Saturday
at the age of 91.
The Bavarian police said Demjanjuk died in the early morning at the care home
near Rosenheim, south of Munich, where he had been living.
Demjanjuk was planning to appeal his
conviction in Munich last year for helping to murder 28,000
Jews at Sobibor, a German death camp where he was a guard.
He was sentenced to five years in
prison but freed, pending appeal, because of his age.
He denied the charges against him
but otherwise did not speak at his trial.
The court said in its verdict that
guards played a key role at camps such as Sobibor, where
at least 250,000 Jews are thought to have been killed despite
the presence of only 20 German SS officers.
Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian, was recruited
by the Germans in 1941 from among captured Soviet soldiers,
to guard concentration camps in Eastern Europe where the
Final Solution, the Nazi plan to annihilate European Jewry,
was being carried out.
After World War II he emigrated to
the US where he changed his name from Ivan to John and lived
in anonymity. During the late 1970s, authorities discovered
his wartime past and accused him of being Ivan the Terrible,
the nickname given to a sadistic guard at the Treblinka death
camp in occupied Poland. He was extradited to Israel in 1986
where he became the second person – and so far the last –
indicted in a local court for committing atrocities against
Jews during the Holocaust.
The lengthy and emotional trial drew
international attention, and in 1988 he was found guilty
and sentenced to death by hanging. But the defense argued
in its appeal that Demjanjuk was the victim of mistaken identity,
and in 1993 the Supreme Court overturned the ruling. In their
verdict the justices wrote they believed Demjanjuk had been
a guard at a concentration camp but that the evidence could
not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was Ivan the
Terrible.
“The importance of everything that
happened was in how it put on the table once more the things
that were done [to the Jews]. The main thing is that it is
not forgotten, that humanity learns a lesson from this,”
former Supreme Court justice Dalia Dorner, who was on the
court when it overturned Demjanjuk’s conviction, said on
Saturday.
Demjanjuk returned to the US but legal
procedures against him for his role during WWII continued
until his extradition to Germany in 2009, where he was tried
as an accomplice to mass murder.
He attended the 18 months of court
proceedings in Munich in a wheelchair and sometimes while
lying down.
Prosecutors – working on the case
for more than 60 year since the war’s end – faced several
hurdles in proving his guilt, with no surviving witnesses
to his crimes and heavy reliance on wartime documents, namely
a Nazi ID card indicating he had worked at Sobibor.
“This is the first time a war criminal
was convicted in Germany without proof of a specific crime,”
said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Israel. “This has paved the way for more to come.”
Zuroff, who spoke on Saturday over
the phone from Riga, Latvia, where he attended an anti-fascist
rally, said the legal precedent could lead to the trial of
up to 80 other former guards.
“If only 2 percent of the 4,000 people
who guarded the camps then are alive then we might convict
up to 80 people,” he said.
The Jewish official said his organization
was offering a reward of up to 25,000 euros for the indictment
and conviction of a Nazi war criminal.
Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr.,
said on Saturday that his father died as a “victim and survivor
of Soviet and German brutality since childhood,” AP reported.
“He loved life, his family and humanity,”
Demjanjuk Jr. said. “History will show Germany used him as
a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian POWs for the deeds
of Nazi Germans.”
Zuroff, who has spent years tracking
down perpetrators of atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust,
said he felt indifferent toward news of Demjanjuk’s death.
His only regret was that the former Nazi guard died in an
old age home and not behind bars.
jpost.com
|