Demjanjuk Trial Could Be Germany's Last Major Nazi War Crimes Tribunal

This is worth sharing with readers. From today's Los Angeles Times, "Why is Germany Putting John Demjanjuk on Trial?":

"The Nazi war crimes case is seen as a chance for Germany to right a moral wrong, before the 89-year-old Demjanjuk and other suspects die."

*****

Demjanjuk is accused of helping kill 27,900 Jews at Sobibor from March through September 1943, when he allegedly worked there as a guard.

What some observers described as an absurd piece of courtroom drama -- which was adjourned Wednesday for three weeks -- constitutes what could be the last major Nazi war crimes trial in Germany.

As Haas and five other witnesses whose relatives were killed in Sobibor testified, it was impossible to know whether Demjanjuk, who remained impassive and shut-eyed throughout, was even listening.

Doctors vouch for his mental and physical health, saying that though he is frail -- he suffers from a bone marrow illness and a heart murmur -- he is fit to stand trial. The defense argues that he is very sick, with less than a year to live.

Detractors have accused Ukraine-born Demjanjuk of putting on an act. They point to video of him getting in and out of a car with relative ease and to witnesses who saw him gardening at his home in Cleveland, before his deportation to Stadelheim Prison in Munich after a 30-year effort to bring him to justice.

"Listen, seeing him there in court he belonged to Hollywood, not Sobibor, so great was the act he put on," said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which lists Demjanjuk as its most-wanted war suspect.

Recall the photos from April, just before Demjanjuk was extradited:

"In this two-photo combination, John Demjanjuk is seen on April 6, 2009, getting into a car outside a medical building in Parma, Ohio, top. In lower photo he is taken on a wheelchair from his home in Seven Hills, Ohio, by immigration agents on April 14, 2009. Federal prosecutors submitted videos of Demjanjuk to an appeals court that show the alleged Nazi death camp guard walking and talking animatedly."

The Times' piece continues:

The complexity of trying one of the last suspected World War II criminals has been further underlined by the experience of Israel, which in the 1980s convicted Demjanjuk of crimes against humanity for allegedly being the guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp. Israel was forced to release him in 1993 after the Supreme Court overturned his death sentence because of reasonable doubt.

Germany might be forced into a similarly embarrassing back-down. None of the current witnesses can make a positive identification of Demjanjuk. Of the two survivors involved, neither remembers seeing him. The main evidence is some paperwork and an SS identity card, which states that he worked in Sobibor.

So why is Germany putting Demjanjuk on trial? The main reason is that the case is being seen as one of the last chances to right a moral wrong, before Demjanjuk and other suspects die.

Apart from the Nuremberg trials that followed the war, few Nazis have been tried in Germany, despite tens of thousands of investigations. Much of the pressure for Germany to host the trial, despite the fact that Demjanjuk is not a German citizen, was brought to bear by the United States.

The U.S. Office for Special Investigations has sought to persuade the native countries of some of the hundreds of elderly Nazi war crime suspects who sought refuge in the United States to put them on trial.

Those nations, most in Eastern Europe, have largely refused on grounds that the costs are high and the responsibility not theirs, but Germany has accepted it as a moral duty of the country that carried out the Holocaust.

Other suspects whose U.S. citizenship was revoked after court rulings that they had lied about their Nazi pasts will be watching the Demjanjuk proceedings carefully, knowing that its outcome could determine their fate.

Here's Demjanjuk in 1983, "Demjanjuk hearing his death sentence on April 25, 1988 in Jerusalem, Israel":