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Tag Archives: John Demjanjuk

FOLLOW UP: American Sobibor guard found guilty

This is a follow up to yesterday’s post, American Sobibor guard found guilty.

(Reuters) – A German court convicted John Demjanjuk on Thursday for his role in the killing of 28,000 Jews in the Sobibor Nazi death camp, then set the 91-year-old free because of his age.

Holocaust survivors at first welcomed the Munich court’s verdict that Demjanjuk, who was exonerated in another war crimes case in Israel two decades ago, was an accessory to mass murder as a guard at Sobibor camp in Poland during World War Two.

But they then expressed dismay at Judge Ralph Alt’s decision to free Demjanjuk despite handing down a five-year sentence.

“At the end he threw everyone in the courtroom a curveball and destroyed the hopes of the survivors of Sobibor,” Martin Mendelsohn, counsel for the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center and the lawyer of two co-plaintiffs in the case, told Reuters.

Demjanjuk showed no reaction while the judge read out his verdict. It said guards played a key role at extermination camps like Sobibor, where at least 250,000 Jews are thought to have been killed despite only 20 German SS officers being there.

“He knew from the beginning exactly what was going on in the camp,” Alt said.

But he said that since Demjanjuk had already been imprisoned on remand for two years, more time in jail seemed inappropriate at his age. “The defendant is to be let go,” he said. A court statement cited two other reasons: Demjanjuk had already spent eight years in prison in Israel and the crime was 68 years old.

Demjanjuk was initially sentenced to death two decades ago in Israel for being the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” camp guard at Treblinka in Poland. The guilty verdict was overturned on appeal by Israel’s supreme court in 1993 after new evidence emerged pointing to a case of mistaken identity.

The Ukraine-born Demjanjuk has been in a German jail since he was extradited from the United States two years ago and his lawyers had sought his release on age and health grounds.

He attended the 18-month court proceedings in Munich — the birthplace of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement — in a wheelchair, and sometimes lying down. He denied the charges but otherwise did not speak at his trial. Full story at Reuters.

American Sobibor guard found guilty

He’s an American, and was found guilty of war crimes at the Sobibor Concentration Camp. John Demjanjuk from Ohio has been a U.S. citizen since 1958, immigrated here in 1950, prior to that, had a very dark Nazi past. Kind of like George Soros. I can’t decide who’s worse. A Nazi guard indirectly responsible for 250,000 deaths, or a Nazi sympathizer with no remorse, even to this day who turned in his very own people, then stole their property. Both will have a very warm spot waiting for them in the after life.

via The Sun:

Evil John Demjanjuk, from Ohio, US, was convicted by a German court of acting as an accessory to murder at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland – where 250,000 Jews were killed.

Demjanjuk sat in a wheelchair before the judges as they announced their verdict, but showed no reaction as he was sentenced to five years in prison.

Sobibor was perhaps the worst of the worse. If you were sent there, you were sent there to die. It has a fascinating story from a historical point of view which you can read about here.

That camp was so bad, in the end, the Nazi’s destroyed it, buried it, and planted tree’s over it in the hopes that it would never be found.

In October 1943, the 300 Jews imprisoned at Sobibor staged an unprecedented uprising. Fifty of the 300 successfully escaped. To hide their defeat, the Nazis quickly dismantled or burned the camp structures, and the entire site was covered over with earth and newly planted trees. Later, the Polish government erected a small cement memorial to the 250,000 Jews exterminated at the camp, and posted plaques throughout the overlying forest marking where the various buildings were thought to have stood.

The local Poles knew where the camp had been, as did the 50 Sobibor survivors. After the war, a historical commission was organized to locate and document the various labor, concentration, and extermination camps.

But for some reason, with this camp, even though they knew where it was and there was a memorial placed there, no one tried to go back to uncover it,” says Dr. Avinoam Patt, Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Greenberg Center who accompanied Freund to Sobibor, “There were also halachic issues around disturbing the site, since it is a mass grave, and bodies were burned and cremated there.”