Legal News

Alleged Nazi Guard Demjanjuk Shipped to Germany

By Ashby Jones

Demjanjuk. It’s a name that’s popped up episodically throughout our lives. First when we were young — when allegations arose that an Ohio autoworker, John Demjanjuk, was actually “Ivan the Terrible,” a Nazi guard who helped murder 29,000 Jews and others at the Sobibor death camp. We remember the saga that played out years later, when Demjanjuk was deported to Israel, where, in 1988, he was found guilty of war crimes, a conviction that was later reversed by the Israeli Supreme Court.

The latest: Demjanjuk was deported from the U.S. to Germany on Tuesday to face allegations of being an accessory to murder. He reportedly arrived safely in Germany on Tuesday morning. Click here for the AP story; here for the NYT story.

Demjanjuk, who was born in the Ukraine, says he was a Red Army soldier who spent World War II as a Nazi prisoner of war and never hurt anyone. However, Nazi-era documents obtained by U.S. justice authorities and shared with German prosecutors suggest otherwise. They include a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at the Sobibor death camp and saying he was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki. Both sites were in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The key to Demjanjuk’s fate may lie not with the evidence but rather with a German court’s decision about whether he is medically fit to stand trial. In any case, Demjanjuk, who has been without a country since the U.S. stripped him of his citizenship in 2002, is likely to spend the rest of his life in Germany.

Germany’s main Jewish leader urged authorities to act quickly.

“It is a race against time,” Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor, said in a statement. “For survivors of the Shoah, it is intolerable to watch how a suspected Nazi war criminal, who knew no mercy for his victims, seeks sympathy and compares his deportation to torture,” she said, using the Hebrew term for Holocaust.

Demjanjuk insists he is innocent and fought bitterly for decades against efforts to strip him of his U.S. citizenship and later deport him.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 12, 2009 (boomark / email).