A 91-YEAR-OLD man has been found guilty of assisting the methodical mass murder of 28,000 people in a Nazi death camp, but was released from prison yesterday pending appeal.
Munich regional court found that John Demjanjuk, a stateless man born in Ukraine, had served as a guard at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland in 1943, herding Jews to their death in gas chambers.
Demjanjuk admitted he was a Soviet prisoner of war in 1942 but denied being recruited by the Nazis and trained as a guard at the notorious “Trawniki” camp.
With no direct evidence linking him to Sobibor, yesterday’s conviction hinged on a guard ID card from the period which the court decided was enough to link the accused to the camp and what went on there.
“Every ‘Trawniki’ man knew that he was part of a well-oiled apparatus that had no other goal than systematically murdering as many people as possible,” said presiding judge Ralph Alt in his ruling. “They all knew about the daily abuse of people right up to the terrible murder. The accused was part of that extermination machinery.”
The judge dismissed the defence claim the ID card was a Soviet forgery, saying there were no indications it was fake, nor motivation to forge an ID.
Imposing a five-year sentence, short of the six years requested by the prosecution, the court said it had taken into account Demjanjuk’s advanced age and the fact the events lay 68 years in the past.
The court noted that Demjanjuk had served time on death row in Israel after he was mistakenly identified as “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. After the war, Demjanjuk emigrated to Cleveland where he adopted US citizenship and worked in the car industry. He was stripped of his US citizenship twice, and extradited to Germany in April 2009.
Billed as the last great Nazi war trial, the Demjanjuk hearing stretched over 18 months as the defendant, who declined to testify, followed events in court from a stretcher.
Proceedings were limited to two 90-minute sessions daily but were often delayed due to Demjanjuk’s complaints of ill-health.
Yesterday’s decision to free Demjanjuk on appeal was greeted with dismay by relatives of Sobibor dead and Nazi investigators.
“We don’t think that is appropriate given the severity of his crimes,” said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel. “This is, frankly, an insult to his victims.”
Defence lawyer Ulrich Busch said Demjanjuk, whom he dubbed “the littlest of the little fishes”, was being hounded by Germans guilty for not putting senior Nazis on trial in the past.
“Of course we will appeal the verdict,” said Mr Busch. “The court has not presented one piece of evidence that would prove the personal guilt of my client.”
In his ruling, Judge Alt insisted yesterday that the trial took place on strictly legal grounds, was “free from moral or political concerns” and was “not about coming to terms with German history”.