John Demjanjuk was convicted of being a low-ranking guard at the Sobibor death camp, but his 35-year fight on three continents to clear his name — a legal battle that had not yet ended when he died Saturday at age 91 — made him one of the most infamous faces of Nazi prosecutions.
The conviction of the retired Ohio autoworker in a Munich court in May on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, which was still being appealed, broke new legal ground in Germany as the first time someone was convicted solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.
It has opened the floodgates to hundreds of new investigations in Germany, though his death serves as a reminder that time is running out for prosecutors.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk steadfastly maintained that he had been mistaken for someone else, and that he was first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.
And he is probably best known as someone he was not: the notoriously brutal guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka extermination camp. That was the first accusation against him, which led to his extradition from the U.S. to Israel in the 1980s. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death — only to have the Israeli Supreme Court unanimously overturn the verdict and return him to the U.S. after it received evidence that another Ukrainian, not Demjanjuk, had been that Nazi guard.
“He has become at least one of the faces” of the Holocaust, Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. “His case illustrates the principle that whenever even a very low-ranking Nazi criminal can be found and convicted, the importance is not in the sentence, not in the amount of time such a person may have to sit in jail ... the important thing is to bring the crime to the attention of the general public.”
But attorney Yoram Sheftel, who defended Demjanjuk in the Israeli trial, criticized the German conviction of Demjanjuk as a Sobibor “Wachmann” — the lowest rank of the prisoners who agreed to serve the Nazis and were subordinate to German SS men — while higher-ranking Germans had been acquitted.
“I can only call it a prostitution of the Holocaust,” Sheftel told Army Radio. “[Demjanjuk] was found innocent. To convict him was a ludicrous and criminal act. The German court ruled that he was not at Treblinka; the trial was just a show.”
Lawrence Douglas, a law professor at Amherst College in the U.S. who has written about the Demjanjuk case and other war crimes trials, said:
“His passing brings us closer to the day when the Holocaust moves from lived memory of survivors and perpetrators into history. ”
“Demjanjuk’s defense attorney tried to suggest there was something fundamentally unfair holding a relatively minor figure when more superior officers escaped being brought to justice,” Douglas said. “That one of the last trials [of alleged Nazi war criminals] involved such a minor figure in no way detracts from the justice of the case.”
After his conviction in May, Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in prison, but was appealing the case to Germany’s High Court. He was released pending the appeal, and died a free man in his own room in a nursing home in the southern Bavarian town of Bad Feilnbach.
His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in a telephone interview from Ohio that his father apparently died of natural causes. Demjanjuk had terminal bone marrow disease, chronic kidney disease and other ailments, and local authorities said the cause of death was still being determined.
“My father fell asleep with the Lord as a victim and survivor of Soviet and German brutality since childhood,” Demjanjuk Jr. said. “He loved life, family and humanity. History will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian prisoners of war for the deeds of Nazi Germans.”
Demjanjuk spent most of his 18-month trial in Munich lying in a special bed brought into the courtroom, and listened to the proceedings through a Ukrainian interpreter.
Though he made no lengthy statements to the court on his own, in one read aloud by his attorney, he told the panel of judges he had been a victim of the Nazis himself — first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.
“I am again and again an innocent victim of the Germans,” he said in the statement.
He said after the war he was unable to return to his homeland, and that taking him away from his family in the U.S. to stand trial in Germany was a “continuation of the injustice” done to him.
“Germany is responsible for the fact that I have lost for good my whole reason to live, my family, my happiness, any future and hope,” he said.
Despite his conviction, his family never gave up its battle to have his U.S. citizenship reinstated so that he could live out his final days near them in the Cleveland, Ohio area. One of his family’s primary arguments was that the defense had never seen a 1985 FBI document, uncovered in early 2011 by the Associated Press, calling into question the authenticity of a Nazi ID card used against him.
But representatives of victims, Jewish groups and others welcomed his trial as a legitimate quest for justice.
“A death is always tragic. But in this case it is important to say that it was right to put him on trial and sentence him,” said Dieter Graumann, the president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews. “Justice does not know a statute of limitations, and age does not protect from punishment. This was never about revenge, but about justice.”
When they overturned his conviction in Israel, the Supreme Court judges said they still believed Demjanjuk had served the Nazis, probably at the Trawniki SS training camp and Sobibor. But they declined to order a new trial, saying there was a risk of violating the law prohibiting trying someone twice on the same evidence.
“The view of the general Israeli public was that he was Ivan the Terrible, and the court said no — that is very important, it shows the strength of the justice system,” Bauer said. “But he was most certainly in Sobibor; there’s no doubt about that.”
After he was released in Israel, Demjanjuk returned to his suburban Cleveland home in 1993, and his U.S. citizenship, which had been revoked in 1981, was reinstated in 1998.
Demjanjuk remained under investigation in the U.S., where a judge revoked his citizenship again in 2002 based on Justice Department evidence suggesting he concealed his service at Sobibor. Appeals failed, and the nation’s chief immigration judge ruled in 2005 that Demjanjuk could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine.
The pursuit of Demjanjuk reflected the U.S. government’s determination to bring war criminals to justice, said U.S. attorney Steven Dettelbach, the top federal prosecutor in northern Ohio.
“There is no judicial or natural outcome that can erase the acts of Nazi persecution,” he said in a statement on Demjanjuk’s death. “Over the past three decades, the Justice Department has sought to identify and remove those individuals who denied so many the lives they themselves enjoyed, and give voice to those who were silenced.”
Prosecutors in Germany filed charges in 2009 saying that Demjanjuk’s link to Sobibor and Trawniki was clear, with evidence showing that after he was captured by the Germans he volunteered to serve with the fanatical SS and trained as a camp guard.
Though there are no known witnesses who remember Demjanjuk from Sobibor, prosecutors referred to an SS identity card that they said features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk and that says he worked at the death camp. That and other evidence indicating Demjanjuk had served under the SS convinced the panel of judges in Munich, and led to his conviction.
Demjanjuk, who was removed by U.S. immigration agents from his home in suburban Cleveland and deported in May 2009, questioned the evidence in the German case, saying the identity card was possibly a Soviet postwar forgery.
He reiterated his contention that after he was captured in Crimea in 1942, he was held prisoner until joining the Vlasov Army — a force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets in the final months of the war.
But Presiding Judge Ralph Alt said the evidence showed Demjanjuk played a part in the Nazis’ “machinery of destruction.”
“The court is convinced that the defendant ... served as a guard at Sobibor” from March 27 until mid-September 1943, Alt said in his ruling.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Wiesenthal Center, said even though all suspects were now elderly, there was still time to pursue others with the precedent set by the Demjanjuk conviction.
“It’s a question of how the German legal system will deal with these cases,” he said in a telephone interview from Riga, Latvia. “If these cases will be expedited and put on the fast track, there is time.”
Demjanjuk was born April 3, 1920, in the village of Dubovi Makharintsi in central Ukraine, two years before the country became part of the Soviet Union. He grew up during a time when millions of people were killed as the country was wracked by famines and Stalin’s purges to eliminate any possible opposition.
As a young man Demjanjuk worked as a tractor driver for the area’s collective farm. After being called up for the Soviet Red Army, he was wounded in action, but sent back to the front after he had recovered, only to be captured during the battle of Kerch Peninsula in May 1942.
After the war, Demjanjuk was sent to a displaced persons’ camp and worked briefly as a driver for the U.S. Army. In 1950, he sought U.S. citizenship, claiming to have been a farmer in Sobibor, Poland, during the war.
Demjanjuk later said he lied about his wartime activities to avoid being sent back to Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union. Just to have admitted being in the Vlasov Army would also have been enough to have him barred from emigration to the U.S. or many other countries.
He came to the U.S. on Feb. 9, 1952, and eventually settled in Seven Hills, a middle-class suburb of Cleveland. He worked as a mechanic at the Ford motor company’s engine plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, and with his wife, Vera, had three children — John Jr., Irene and Lydia.
‘The world will be a better place without him’
Dejanjuk’s historic death drew other reactions in Israel and around the world.
Serge Klarsfeld, France’s best-known Nazi hunter, said on Saturday that “a world without Demjanjuk will be better than the world with him.”
Zeev Factor, vice chairman of the Center for the Organizations of Holocaust Survivors and a survivor of Auschwitz himself, said: “I have no sense of relief. A rotten tree merely fell. There are dozens of Demjanjuks all over the world who are roaming freely and living a good life. I am convinced that Israel and other countries are not doing enough to find them.”
The Chairman of the Lobby for Holocaust Survivors in the Knesset, MK Zeev Bielski (Kadima), said on Saturday, “Today one of the greatest enemies of Israel died. He was linked to the death of tens of thousands of Jews. Justice was not done to Demjanjuk and he was able to escape from punishment under the legal system. The people of Israel will never forget nor forgive.”
Dr. Yitzhak Arad, who fought during the Holocaust in the underground resistance against the Nazis, was a witness in the prosecution of Demjanjuk during his trial in Israel and is a former chairman of Yad Vashem, and said on Saturday, “I am convinced that [Demjanjuk] was Ivan the Terrible, who was a guard at Sobibor and Treblinka. All Treblinka survivors identified him and I have no doubt about who he is. Justice was done, to some extent, because he did not die a free man, but only after he was found to be a war criminal. Unfortunately, he did not sit in jail. I appreciate the suit [against Demjanjuk] and the German judicial system, which sought his extradition from the United States, brought him to trial and found him guilty. It is important that he did not die as an innocent man.”
Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev also commented on Demjanjuk’s death on Saturday, saying, “This case illustrates the inability of the penal system and the law to bring to justice those who committed crimes against humanity, even if they were not prominent Nazis. However, the long-running chase after Demjanjuk attests to the importance of a lack of the statute of limitations regarding the prosecution of Nazis and their collaborators.“
