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Demjanjuk Convicted for Role in Nazi Death Camp

by
By
JACK EWING and ALAN COWELL
May 13, 2011


John Demjanjuk sentenced.
A German court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison for his role as a Nazi death camp guard.

MUNICH --In what may be one of the last major Nazi war crimes trials, a German court sentenced John Demjanjuk, a former autoworker in Ohio, to five years in prison after he was found guilty of taking part in the murder of 28,000 people while working as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943.

Mr. Demjanjuk was nevertheless freed from pretrial detention on Thursday while he appeals, which could take a year. After the verdict Mr. Demjanjuk, 91, was pushed out of the courtroom in a wheelchair and paused briefly before cameras, saying nothing but removing the dark glasses he had worn throughout the proceedings.

Relatives of Sobibor victims, who were recognized as co-complainants for the trial, said they were satisfied with the verdict even though Mr. Demjanjuk would at least temporarily be free. The two years he has spent in jail will be credited to his sentence.

"Whether it's three, four or five years doesn't really matter," said David van Huiden, who said he lost his mother, father and sister after Nazis seized them in Amsterdam and sent them to Sobibor. Mr. van Huiden said he survived because his parents sent him to walk the family dog before the Germans came, and he hid with non-Jewish friends.

Mr. van Huiden said that the trial demonstrated the role played by people like Mr. Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian who, according to testimony, initially fought on the Soviet side, but agreed to work for the German SS after being captured in 1941.

"He took part, he volunteered," Mr. van Huiden said. "You don't kill so many people without the help of guards."

Mr. Demjanjuk spent most of the proceedings, which lasted much of the day, lying on his back in a bed set up not far from where Judge Ralph Alt read the sentence in a sweltering courtroom. With his face hidden behind a blue baseball cap and dark glasses, Mr. Demjanjuk remained nearly motionless, occasionally lifting a knee or an arm but showing no reaction to the proceedings.

The verdict comes after decades of legal proceedings in three countries involving Mr. Demjanjuk. After losing his United States citizenship in 1985 for lying about his past, Mr. Demjanjuk was deported to Israel and accused of being a particularly brutal guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka camp.

But an Israeli high court overturned the conviction and death sentence in 1993, ruling that Mr. Demjanjuk was not Ivan even though it appeared he had been a guard at Sobibor, which was in Poland.

Mr. Demjanjuk returned to the United States, but after more years of legal proceedings he was deported to Germany in 2009 to face trial.

The long legal battle made Mr. Demjanjuk one of the most well-known war crimes suspects, even though he was said to have ranked low in the camp hierarchy. Victims said that did not matter. "He is a very small fish," said Rudie S. Cortissos, whose mother was killed in Sobibor. "But whether you are a whale or a sardine, someone who went wrong this way should be punished."

Mr. Demjanjuk's defense lawyers argued that an SS identity card and other documents were falsified by the Soviets. But Judge Alt said there was a clear trail of documents and testimony that demonstrated Mr. Demjanjuk's path from Soviet prisoner of war to Sobibor guard.

John Demjanjuk ID card

A duty card issued to the man known as John Demjanjuk notes that in 1943 he arrived at the Sobibor concentration camp, where he worked as a guard.

After Sobibor was shut down in late 1943, Mr. Demjanjuk served in a Ukrainian unit that fought on the Germans' side and was captured by American forces at the end of the war, according to testimony. After several years in a displaced persons camp in Germany, Mr. Demjanjuk settled in Ohio and worked in an auto factory, according to the court findings.

In an e-mail, Mr. Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said that "there remains not a scintilla of evidence he ever hurt a single person anywhere."

"While some may take satisfaction from this event," he wrote, "this verdict is no more definitive today than the wrongful Israeli conviction and death sentence was previously."

But Judge Alt said that it was impossible for anyone to have worked at Sobibor and not be part of the Nazi death machinery. Every one of the guards "knew he was part of an organization with no other purpose but mass murder," the judge said.

In painful detail, the judge recited dates when transport trains arrived in Sobibor, the number of people aboard and names of individual prisoners who were family members of co-complainants. Mr. Cortissos's mother arrived on May 21, 1943, with 2,300 other prisoners, mostly Dutch Jews who were sent immediately to gas chambers. Another train carried mostly children, who were also gassed immediately.

The court rejected arguments that Mr. Demjanjuk would have had no choice but to work in the camps. Judge Alt said that many of the Ukrainians recruited to work for the SS successfully escaped after learning the nature of the work, and Mr. Demjanjuk had a duty to do the same.

"An escape with a chance of survival was possible," Judge Alt said.

The judge said that Mr. Demjanjuk could easily have earned the maximum sentence of 15 years. But he said he took into account Mr. Demjanjuk's age and the fact that he had no influence over the number of prisoners sent to the camp.

Mr. Cortissos, who survived the war by hiding in Amsterdam, where he still lives, said that he appreciated the chance to describe his experiences during the trial.

"I had an opportunity to say what I wanted to say for 50 years," Mr. Cortissos, 73, said outside the courtroom. "I'm satisfied." He added, "It doesn't mean I can forget; it doesn't mean I can forgive."

Jack Ewing reported from Munich, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin,
and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.
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Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company.
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