John Demjanjuk once was the focus of the world’s attention for the bloodcurdling enormity of the crimes for which he stood accused. Today, he is attracting notice for being the lowest-ranking person to go on trial for Nazi war crimes.
The latest chapter in the retired Ohio autoworker’s decades-long legal saga brings him to a court in Munich in a case opening today that breaks new ground in Germany’s pursuit of alleged Holocaust perpetrators.
If successful, it could significantly lower the bar for who is considered important enough to go to jail for being part of the Nazi terror apparatus.
In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel accused of being one of the monsters of the 20th Century: the notoriously brutal guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka extermination camp. He was convicted, sentenced to death, then freed when an Israeli court overturned the ruling because it said the evidence showed he was a victim of mistaken identity.
The 89-year-old now stands accused of serving as a low-ranking guard at the Sobibor death camp, charged with being accessory to the murders of 27,900 people during the time he is alleged to have been there.
Demjanjuk maintains he was a victim of the Nazis: first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.
German prosecutors paint a different picture. After Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was in German captivity, they say he volunteered to serve with the fanatical German SS and was posted to Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The trial comes after 30 years of legal efforts against him on three continents. It is the first time prosecutors have sought the conviction of someone as low-ranking as Demjanjuk allegedly was without proof of a specific offense. If he should be convicted, other low-ranking alleged Nazis could face prosecution.
“This definitely marks a change in the decades-old policies of the German judiciary; a positive change,” said Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Immediately after the war, top Nazis like Hermann Goering were convicted at war-crimes trials run by the Allied powers.
Investigations of the lower ranks eventually fell to German courts.
Many of those trials ended with short sentences, or acquittal, of suspects in greater positions of responsibility than Demjanjuk allegedly had. Demjanjuk is accused as having served as a Wachmann or guard, the lowest rank of the so-called Hilfswillige or Hiwi volunteers who were subordinate to German SS men.
For example, Karl Streibel, commandant of the SS Trawniki training camp, where Demjanjuk is alleged to have trained, was tried in Hamburg, but acquitted in 1976 after the judges ruled it had not been proved that he knew what the guards being trained would be used for.
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