John Demjanjuk of Seven Hills, Ohio, born Ivan Demjanjuk in Ukraine in 1920, arrived in Munich Tuesday morning to face accusations of crimes committed as a Nazi death-camp guard.
Mr. Demjanjuk was deported for the second time by the United States on Monday. The first time was 23 years ago, and he was bound for worldwide notoriety, accused of being the unfathomably cruel “Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka,” one of the Holocaust’s most infamous sadists. He was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel, before new evidence won him a reprieve and eventually a trip back to the United States and the return of his stripped citizenship.
But the wheels of justice began to grind again, and the whole process has repeated itself step by step. Monday night, a frailer Mr. Demjanjuk, now 89 and once again stateless, boarded a special medically equipped airplane bound for Germany, where he is accused of being an accessory in the murder of 29,000 Jews while working as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in eastern Poland.
Investigators say that the documentary evidence is strong and that they will be able to prove that Mr. Demjanjuk was a living cog in a killing factory, where some 250,000 people were put to death in just one and a half years of operation. His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., says that his father, an old man with bone-marrow and kidney diseases, is being hounded by the United States Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and German prosecutors in an inhumane fashion.
Mr. Demjanjuk’s guilt will be decided in a Munich courtroom, assuming he lives long enough and is deemed fit to stand trial. But throughout the recent months of courtroom battles over appeals and stays of deportation, the gulf between the enormity of the crimes Mr. Demjanjuk is accused of and the frail old man he is now has grown more apparent.
Ultimately Mr. Demjanjuk’s advanced age and poor health serve as reminders, regardless of the outcome in court, of how the living memory of the crimes committed during World War II is on the verge of disappearing. Mr. Demjanjuk’s case might well be the last major war crimes trial in Germany, marking the end of an era that began in Nuremberg in 1945.
Thomas Blatt, 82, who was a prisoner at Sobibor at the same time Mr. Demjanjuk has been accused of having worked there as a guard, said the trial itself was more important than meting out any punishment. “I don’t care if he is released; I do care about his testimony,” said Mr. Blatt, who now lives in California and has written two books about his experiences. “There’s many people right now who say the Holocaust never happened.”
Mr. Blatt said he did not remember Mr. Demjanjuk from Sobibor, but he pointed out that he also could not recall the faces of his parents who were killed at the death camp along with his younger brother. Mr. Blatt was one of the few prisoners to escape Sobibor, in an uprising there in October 1943.
Mr. Demjanjuk was a soldier in the Soviet Army, fighting against the Germans, until he was captured in the Crimea in 1942. Mr. Demjanjuk says he spent most of the remainder of the war as a prisoner. But according to prosecutors, he went to an SS training camp in Trawniki, Poland, where foreign nationals were trained to take part in the Holocaust.
After the war, Mr. Demjanjuk moved to the United States, where he became an autoworker and raised a family. But in 1977, several Holocaust survivors identified him as Ivan the Terrible.
Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death by an Israeli court in 1988.
But the conviction was overturned in 1993, and he was freed by Israel’s Supreme Court after evidence surfaced suggesting that another man was most likely Ivan the Terrible. An identity card from Trawniki indicates that Mr. Demjanjuk was sent to serve at Sobibor.
His family has maintained his innocence throughout the three-decade legal odyssey. “Now at the age of 89, when alleged witnesses are now dead, he’s faced with having to defend himself again, when with the pain and suffering he’s no longer capable,” his son said on Monday in a telephone interview. “You would have thought that after the mistake they made in nearly sending him to the gallows, they would have just let this go.”
The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Mr. Demjanjuk’s latest appeal last week, and a Berlin court declined an appeal on Monday.
“The only reason not to put someone like Demjanjuk on trial is if he is not capable to stand trial,” said Cornelius Nestler, a professor of criminal law at the University of Cologne, who is advising possible co-plaintiffs in the case. “I think in the same way that the grief of the people who left their parents, very often their whole family, in Sobibor will not be over until their death, the responsibility of the people who did it will not be over until they’re dead.”
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