The last Nazi war trial

[IndianaGreen]

Source: The Independent (UK)

The last Nazi war trial

Frail 89-year-old Ukrainian accused over deaths of 29,000 Jews arrives in Germany

By Tony Paterson in Berlin

Wednesday, 13 May 2009


John Demjanjuk is taken to Stadelheim prison
in Munich yesterday after his deportation from
America

Germany's bid to bring the world's most wanted Nazi war crimes suspect to justice began inauspiciously yesterday: a Red Cross ambulance took John Demjanjuk on a stretcher and with tubes protruding from his nose to Munich's Stadelheim prison where he was meant to await trial, but nobody would open the prison door.

Visibly embarrassed, a plain-clothed policeman escorting the 89-year-old Ukrainian retired car worker from Munich airport, rang the bell at the prison's towering steel south gate and waited impatiently for a response from the entry phone. Nothing happened.

Mr Demjanjuk, clad in a black leather jacket and baseball cap, lay in the back of the ambulance and said nothing. After his deportation and subsequent transatlantic flight from his adopted home in Cleveland, Ohio, he stayed motionless with his mouth half open and his hands folded on his lap.

Then, after what seemed like an eternity, the entry phone spluttered into life. Mr Demjanjuk was driven round the block and taken into the prison, where, incidentally, Adolf Hitler was briefly held in 1922, through another entrance. His reception committee, it seems, had chosen the wrong gate.

Thus ended what could be Mr Demjanjuk's last attempt to escape trial for his alleged complicity in the murder of some 29,000 Jewish inmates at the Sobibor Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland during the latter stages of the Second World War.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-last-nazi-war-trial-1684044.html

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Related Der Spiegel articles on German evidence against Dejamjuk:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3872070#3872380

[Dr.Phool]

1. My mother worked with him at Ford back in the '70s.

[IndianaGreen]

3. Did your mom say anything about him as a person?

Curious.

[Dr.Phool]

4. Nothing much. Just another guy on the assembly line.

Friendly, but quiet.

She said that you'd never have known he was a war criminal. This was back when he was accused of being "Ivan the Terrible", at another death camp.

Funny, but part of his defense back then was that he was serving at Sobibor instead of Treblinka at the time.

[IndianaGreen]

5. Thanks for the info.

I thought he migh have kept a low profile.

[Stellabella]

2. Yeah, he lied about being so 'frail' he couldn't make the trip.

Then they caught him on camera walking around and getting into and out of a car on his own.

What a jerk.

[Kolesar]

6. And now he is acting a "tubes in the nose" routine for sympathy

He will spend his remaining years in a cell and I hope people quit talking about him.

[roseBudd]

8. tubes in the nose is quite common at that age, especially among smokers...

it's just oxygen

[LeftHander]

7. OMG he has a boner....lol...dirty nazi....nt

[badgervan]

12. Didn't Hitler Say....

... that the Nazis would "rise" again?

[dipsydoodle]

9. Fortunately there is no statute of limitations on war crimes

Are you reading this Smirk ?

[brendan120678]

10. Just a quick question...

How does Germany even have jurisdiction in this case? Sobibor was in occupied Poland (and it is still in Poland) and Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian citizen. So why Germany?

[happyslug]

11. For two reasons

First, Israel, the Ukraine and Poland have all decided that he was just a "Watchman" i.e. Guard at the perimeter of the Camp, not someone who did anything to kill the prisoners (or make their lives worse, which is what Ivan the Terrible did) AND if they can NOT get the people who had some sort of Command, why go after a person who was almost as much as a victim as the Jews (yes he survived and almost all of the Jewish "police" within the camps were killed, but what he did was not much different then the Jewish Police within the Ghettos and the Camps did and no one is calling such Jewish Victims "Nazis" just because they took a job no one else wanted).

Second, the Germans gave a general Amnesty to all GERMANS involved in the Camps in 1969, and now 40 years later as most of those people are dead the Germans want to show they are willing to go after ANYONE involved with the camps (Given that almost all of the Germans involved are subject to the Amnesty of 1969 OR dead).

AS to jurisdiction generally, Demenjuk was under the Command of the German SS while he was a guard, as a "member" of the SS, he is subject to the same laws as the SS, which includes German jurisdiction over ALL German Based organizations and their members.