John Demjanjuk YM”S, a suspected Nazi death-camp guard, was charged by Munich prosecutors with aiding the murder of 27,900 people in the Sobibor concentration camp during World War II.
The indictment today follows the 89-year-old’s deportation to Germany from the U.S. in May and the loss of several bids to stop the extradition in the courts of both nations. A Munich tribunal in March issued an arrest warrant saying evidence suggests he assisted in the killings in 1943 as a guard at the camp, then in German-occupied Poland.
Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, has denied the allegations. The Munich Regional Court now has to decide whether Demjanjuk must stand trial, the city prosecutor’s office said in an e- mailed statement.
Munich prosecutors relied on a Sobibor work identity card issued for Demjanjuk that Bavarian police experts examined and found authentic. The card with the number 1393 was handed over to the Germans by the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations.
Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker, had lived outside Cleveland until his deportation to Germany.
In 1986, he was stripped of the U.S. citizenship he obtained in 1958 and extradited to Israel to face charges that he was the guard known as “Ivan the Terrible,” who tortured Jewish prisoners while herding them into gas chambers at the Treblinka concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.
His 1988 conviction and death sentence were overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court in 1993. Demjanjuk returned to the U.S. and regained his citizenship.
In 2002, a federal trial court in Cleveland again revoked Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship after a two-week trial. The court found that Demjanjuk participated in Sobibor in the process by which thousands of Jews were murdered in the camp’s gas chambers, according to the Justice Department. His subsequent appeals were rejected.
(Source: Bloomberg News)
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2 Responses
Your headline is overly sensational. He was charged as an “accessory”, meaning with helping someone else commit the crime. Ukrainian collaborators weren’t responsible for the holocaust, Germans were . And in all cases, Germans who actively were involved were doing so voluntarily and could have refused to do so (the worst that would happen is they would be assigned to a combat unit), which isn’t at all clear for Ukrainians – indeed one can argue that the case against “Ivan the Terrible” is that he was enthusiastic about a job he was coerced into.
It isn’t clear he could have quit (whereas it is clear that a German could have quit). It also isn’t clear he knew what he was volunteering for. In most cases, that’s enough for a non-German to avoid prosecution for war crimes (though not necessarily for other things, such as helping the enemy in wartime).
This is why very few individual concentration camp guards were prosecuted as war criminals. He is being prosecuted based on evidence that he was enthused about his job and showed it. His defense comes down to arguing that he isn’t the same person who went out of his way to be a “good” (from a German perspective) guard, but just followed orders from his German bosses.
It should be noted that the Israelis acquitted him.