Nazi war criminal released on age grounds

A Munich court sentenced Demjanjuk to five years in prison for being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Nazi death camp Sobibor in Poland, where 250 000 people were killed between 1942-1943.

It is the end of an eighteen-month trial and nearly three decades of legal wrangling.

Ukrainian born Demjanjuk was serving in the Red Army in 1942 when he was captured by the Germans. His defence claimed he was a prisoner of war and a victim. But prosecutors argued he was recruited by the Germans to be an SS camp guard.

Prosecutors had faced several hurdles in proving Demjanjuk’s guilt, with no surviving witnesses to his crimes and heavy reliance on wartime documents, namely a Nazi ID card. Defence attorneys said it was a fake made by the Soviets, although court experts said it appeared genuine.

Serge Klarsfeld, a French lawyer and Nazi hunter, has expressed frustration with the trial, saying it failed to provide new details about the case and could not prove Demjanjuk’s direct participation in the killings.

“The witnesses are all dead and there are no documents because he was only a small fish,” Klarsfeld told AFP. A guilty verdict “would open the door to accusations of unfair justice,” he said last week.

Defence attorney Ulrich Busch told the Munich court on Wednesday that even if Demjanjuk did become a prison guard, he did so only because as a prisoner of war he would have either been shot by the Nazis or died of starvation.

Demjanjuk has kept silent throughout the 18 months of proceedings, sitting in a wheelchair or lying on a stretcher over 93 hearings. His health was often a cause for concern during the trial, leading to frequent delays.

He had been in custody since being extradited from the US in 2009, where he had lived for decades after World War II.

This is a terrible decision, he was convicted of accessory to murder of nearly 30,000 people. He belongs in jail. Efraim Zuroff, Nazi-hunter

Previously he had already served nearly eight years in an Israeli prison, five of them on death row after being found guilty in the 1980s of serving as a guard in another death camp – Treblinka – where he went by the name “Ivan the Terrible”.

The Israeli supreme court later overturned the verdict and ordered his release on the grounds that he had likely been wrongly identified.

The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center, who once placed Demjanjuk at the top of their most wanted Nazi war criminal list, welcomed the guilty verdict but criticised the decision to release him.

The Jerusalem head of the Wiesenthal Centre, Efraim Zuroff said he was “very dissapointed”.

“This is a terrible decision, he was convicted of accessory to murder of nearly 30,000 people. He belongs in jail. That’s where he belongs.”

Zuroff added it was “the second time in two days that German law has failed on an issue of importance related to Holocaust crimes,” pointing at a Wednesday decision by Bavaria to reject a European arrest warrant for Dutch SS-officer Klaas Faber, who lives in the province.