Prosecutors Confident as Demjanjuk Trial Opens, in Germany, of All Places

Toby Dershowitz
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

MUNICH

John Demjanjuk, shown in a 1991 photo in Israel's Supreme Court, is facing several years in jail if convicted in his upcoming trial in Germany. (Flash 90/JTA)

The long-awaited Nazi war crimes trial of John Demjanjuk opened here with his attorney claiming that his client is a scapegoat for German guilt over the Holocaust.

Demjanjuk, 89, is charged as an accessory to the murder of 29,700 Jews at the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1943. He appeared nearly expressionless Monday as he was wheeled into the Munich courtroom.

Demjanjuk's lead attorney, Ulrich Busch, said that Germany "wants to be acquitted through this trial, by finding people from other nations guilty."

The trial, which some are billing as the last major Nazi war-crimes case, marks another landmark for Germany's confrontation with its Nazi past.

For Demjanjuk, who was born in Ukraine and immigrated to the United States after the war, it is the second war-crimes trial.

In 1988, Israeli courts convicted Demjanjuk and sentenced him to death for murder and savagery at the Treblinka death camp. But the sentence was overturned in 1993, when the Israeli Supreme Court determined that there was insufficient evidence to prove that Demjanjuk was the so-called guard named "Ivan the Terrible." He was released.

This time, prosecutors say they have all the proof they need that Demjanjuk participated in the mass murder of Jews in the gas chambers of Sobibor in 1943.

"The totality of evidence is overwhelming," stated Barbara Stockinger, spokeswoman for the state prosecutor in Munich.

An SS identification card places Demjanjuk in the death camp, and his number shows up on many documents related to Sobibor.

The prosecution alleges that Demjanjuk, after being captured by the Germans in 1942, received training at the Trawniki SS facility in occupied Poland, which produced guards for several death camps. Demjanjuk insists that he merely served in the Soviet army, and was captured by Germany in 1942.

Much of the evidence against him was gathered by the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations to prove that Demjanjuk had lied about his role in the Holocaust to gain U.S. citizenship.

In October 2002, U.S. District Judge Paul Matia found that "he had contributed to the mass murder of Jews by asphyxiation with poison gas," and "had served voluntarily at the camps," said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the OSI, which had been investigating Demjanjuk since 1977.

Demjanjuk, an autoworker who lived in suburban Cleveland, eventually was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and, after exhausting his appeals, was deported to Germany in May. Germany has jurisdiction to try Demjanjuk because 1,900 of his alleged victims were German Jews and he had stayed in a Munich D.P. camp after the war.

If convicted, Demjanjuk faces several years in jail. The trial is expected to last until May.

Addressing the court on Monday, the attorney Busch insisted that it was unfair to try a man for allegedly following orders when those giving the orders were never charged.

Busch demanded that the judges and prosecution be removed on suspicions of prejudice against his client.

Busch also said that the so-called Trawnikis -- many of them Soviet POWs trained by the SS -- were just as much victims as Jews who were forced to work for the Nazis in the camps.

Many of the 30 co-plaintiffs against Demjanjuk are Dutch Jews whose parents were murdered in Sobibor. On Tuesday, several who lost parents and siblings at Sobibor became emotional during testimony.

David van Huiden of Amsterdam was 12 when he said goodbye to his parents and sister in July 1943, "sure we would meet again."

They believed they were going to a work camp, he said.

Van Huiden went into hiding. His family was gassed in Sobibor.

Busch and another defense attorney, Guenther Maull, asked several co-plaintiffs how they knew for sure that their relatives had been gassed in Sobibor. Virtually all of them had seen original lists of deportees or received notifications from the German Red Cross.

For some in Germany, the Demjanjuk trial is reminiscent of the first major postwar trials of Nazis by Germans, including the Auschwitz trials of 1963-65, when Germany put 22 citizens on trial for their roles as mid- and lower-level officials at Auschwitz.

The trials served to wake up the postwar generation to the horrors their parents had tried to forget.