John Demjanjuk, accused of helping to murder nearly 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp, has gone on trial in the German city of Munich.
Mr Demjanjuk, who is 89 and was deported from the US in May, entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. His eyes were closed but he seemed conscious. He denies being a camp guard at Sobibor, in Nazi-occupied Poland…
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel Office, said: “Demjanjuk put on a great act. He should have gone to Hollywood, not Sobibor.”
Defence lawyers say he will not speak at all during the trial, and will neither confirm nor deny that he was at Sobibor…
The trial is expected to last until May and, if found guilty, Mr Demjanjuk could be sentenced to 15 years in jail. The trial’s first session was delayed for over an hour, as large numbers of people tried to gain access…
There are no living witnesses in this case, but over 30 people listed as joint plaintiffs are expected to testify about what happened at Sobibor, described by investigators as hell on earth. Two are camp survivors, others lost relatives or their entire families among the 250,000 people murdered there.
This is the second time John Demjanjuk has appeared in court.
Two decades ago, he was sentenced to death in Israel, convicted of being Ivan the Terrible, a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp. But that ruling was overturned after new evidence showed that another Ukrainian was probably responsible.
- BBC News
One Comment
This guy was all over the papers when I was in high school. I wrote a short story about his Israeli conviction (subsequently overturned on appeal) in 1988. He’s a large part of the reason I wrote my first novel. Two thoughts:
1. John Demjanjuk, would you hurry up and die already.
2. The spectacle of Germans trying people they deliberately corralled into all the shittiest aspects of the Holocaust looks, well, pretty poor…