Nothing the justice system could have done could possibly atone for the crimes of convicted Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, retired Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner said Saturday, following the death of the 91-year-old war criminal in a German nursing home earlier that day.
Dorner, together with fellow former Jerusalem District Court Judge Zvi Tal and Supreme Court Justice Dov Levin, served on the Jerusalem District Court panel of judges which in 1988 convicted Demjanjuk of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced him to death.
The conviction was unanimously overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court in 1993 after documents surfaced suggesting that Demjanjuk may not have been the notoriously brutal Nazi guard Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka extermination camp. This accusation led to him being extradited from the U.S. to Israel in the 1980s. The evidence suggested that Demjanjuk was in fact a guard at another camp, Sobibor.
Dorner insisted on Saturday that she was convinced now, as she was in 1988, that the initial verdict had been just, and that Demjanjuk was indeed Ivan the Terrible.
“I’m glad that at least he wasn’t given the opportunity to live in peace and prosperity and enjoy his grapevines and fig trees,” Dorner said Saturday.
“In my opinion, justice was done when the German court convicted Demjanjuk for crimes committed at Sobibor, and closure was achieved when this man was determined to have taken part in the murder of Jews,” she said, referring to the five-year sentence handed down by the German court for involvement in the murder of soem 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp.
“He was convicted for a different crime, but there is no contradiction,” she stressed. “I have no doubt that he was Ivan the Terrible. I heard during the first trial a series of witnesses who identified him. They said he appears in their nightmares. I heard the SS man who said that he was the man and I heard his lies.”
“I am proud that a Jewish court acquitted him due to reasonable doubt,” she said. “His line of defense was that he was an innocent Ukranian man who fought in the Soviet army, and that he was subjected to a show trial here and that a terrible injustice had been done. Even the Supreme Court didn’t believe this line of defense.”
“In preparing his appeal, however, his attorney dug around in the archives and discovered a case in which a different man, who does not even resemble him, was executed in the Soviet Union as Ivan the Terrible,” she said. “That case raised doubts. The Supreme Court said then, it is done, but not over. Now it is over.”
“The importance of everything that happened was in how it put on the table once more the things that were done (to the Jews). The main thing is that it is not forgotten, that humanity learns a lesson from this,” she told Israeli television.
Attorney Yoram Sheftel, who represented Demjanjuk during his trial in Israel, said on Saturday that “Demjanjuk was a victim of a show trial.”
Sheftel insisted further that there were no grounds to prosecute Demjanjuk, in Israel, in the U.S. or in Germany.
