MUNICH, Germany (WJC)–The trial of Ukrainian-born Ivan Demjanjuk, 89, who is accused of helping to murder 27,900 Jews in the Sobibor Nazi death camp during World War II, began here Monday, marking the final chapter of 30 years of efforts to prosecute the retired autoworker.
Demjanjuk was deported from Ohio in May after his US citizenship was revoked. He could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted for his alleged activities as a guard at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland.
However, in deference to his fragile health, the trial at the Munich state court has been limited to two 90-minute sessions per day. In the 1980s Demjanjuk was extradited by the United States for trial in Israel on charges that he was the notoriously brutal guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka camp He was sentenced to death in 1988 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and spent seven years in prison until Israel’s Supreme Court in 1993 overturned the conviction. It ruled that another person, not Demjanjuk, was actually “Ivan the Terrible.”
Demjanjuk, a former Soviet Red Army soldier, is now accused of volunteering to serve as a guard under the Nazi SS after being taken prisoner by the Nazis in 1942. According to the prosecutors’ indictment, he served as a low-ranking guard at Sobibor which meant – even with no living witnesses who can implicate him in specific acts of brutality or murder – he had pushed thousands of Jewish men, women and children to their death in the gas chambers. Demjanjuk maintains he was never at Sobibor and questions the authenticity of the main piece of evidence – an SS identity card that prosecutors say features a photo of a young Demjanjuk.
The trial, which has attracted large media interest, is expected to last until May 2010. Over 30 people are listed as joint plaintiffs and expected to testify about what happened at Sobibor, where 250,000 people were murdered.
Thomas Blatt, whose younger brother and parents were killed at Sobibor, traveled from his American home to follow the trial. “It is important to hear the testimony of those times, for young people to truly know the meaning of the hell on earth that was Sobibor. The stink of carbon monoxide, the naked little children going to be gassed, the flames that licked out of the furnace chimney as all you knew and loved evaporated before your eyes. Demjanjuk is not an old man who deserves pity but who should come to terms with what he did,” he told the British newspaper ‘Daily Mirror’.
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Preceding provided by World Jewish Congress