U.S. pensioner accused of being Nazi guard who oversaw 29,000 murders

[ReichGirl]

In 1988, Ukranian-born Demjanjuk was found guilty in Israel of being 'Ivan the Terrible', a guard who herded women and children into the gas chambers of the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.

However, five years later he walked free from an appeal court after his conviction was overturned.

Prosecutors accepted that recently released KGB archives cast reasonable doubt that Ivan was in fact someone else.

But that case of mistaken identity led Nazi hunters to examine his background more closely. Now they are certain that he was in fact a guard at the equally infamous the extermination camp of Sobibor.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1160877/Germany-Nazi-death-camp-guard-Ivan-terrible-trial-murder-29-000-people.html

[The Lawspeaker]

Well- if it really is him then he should be put on trial. But I don't think that the U.S.A should extradite it's citizens to a country where he cannot expect to get a fair trial.
But I think that (if there is a guaranty that he would get a fair trial) there should still be a fitting punishment for those sadistic murderers: the noose.

[ReichGirl]

Well- if it really is him then he should be put on trial. But I don't think that the U.S.A should extradite it's citizens to a country where he cannot expect to get a fair trial.
But I think that (if there is a guaranty that he would get a fair trial) there should still be a fitting punishment for those sadistic murderers: the noose.

oh please :rolleyes: this is just how the choesen keep the pitty machine rolling...have yo not noticed how nazis are being waved around lately? since the jews attacked Gaza its been REMEMBER THE HOLOCAU$T we are victims feel sorry for us, the wave nazis in our face every time they commit crimes

[The Lawspeaker]

oh please :rolleyes: this is just how the choesen keep the pitty machine rolling...have yo not noticed how nazis are being waved around lately? since the jews attacked Gaza its been REMEMBER THE HOLOCAU$T we are victims feel sorry for us, the wave nazis in our face every time they commit crimes
I don't care whether he killed Jews or not. He killed or is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent human beings.
And now that you mention Israel: I frankly don't care what they do with those terrorists and Muslim thugs (even young kids are in Hamas) . No- we should do exactly the same thing here.
Dear Reichgirl, I may not like Israel but we have something in common with them: we are surrounded by the barbarians- by Muslims. And believe it or not- both groups are imported : the Muslims here during the 1960's until now while they breed like rats- the Muslims there... you would be surprised to hear that a lot of those Palestinians are Egyptians, Syrians and Jordanians- including their old Fuhrer Arafat who was himself Egyptian.

I think that Israel should stop playing the victim card though because I too am sick and tired of that attitude.

[Æmeric]

Even if he was a guard at Sobibor, how does that make him responsible for the deaths of 29,000 persons? He wasn't the camp commandant, he wasn't in charge of policy... did he actually execute anyone? What is the basis for the charge, other then the Nazi-hunters have ran out of actual Nazis to prosecute. This persecution of Demjanjuk has been going on for over 30-years. The Israelis were embarassed when it turned out Demjanjuk wasn't a guard at the camp they alleged he was in the 40s, since 1988 they have tried to frame him for something to justify their treatment of him.

The Jews should be more focus on prosecuting crimes (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/04/israel1) that have happened in territory, & committed by persons, under Israeli control.

[Æmeric]

BERLIN – German prosecutors said Wednesday they have charged retired Ohio auto worker John Demjanjuk with more than 29,000 counts of accessory to murder for his time as a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp, and will seek his extradition from the U.S.

Demjanjuk (dem-YAHN'-yuk) is accused of participating in the murders while he was a guard at the Nazi camp in occupied Poland between March and September 1943.

"In this capacity, he participated in the accessory to murder of at least 29,000 people of the Jewish faith," Munich prosecutors said in a statement.

The 88-year-old Demjanjuk, who lives in a Cleveland suburb, denies involvement.

Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an e-mailed statement to the AP in Cleveland that his father is suffering from a blood disorder and acute kidney failure, and is not fit for international travel.

"Whatever the Germans decide to do, we will continue to fight for justice in this sad case as there has never been any credible evidence of his personal involvement in even one murder, let alone thousands," Demjanjuk Jr. said. "He has never hurt anyone — before, during or after the war. He is a good person as his family, grandchildren, friends and neighbors have always maintained."

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at Israel's Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he was "very pleased that the German authorities have taken this step."

"We hope that the process can be expedited to ensure that this Holocaust perpetrator will finally be appropriately punished," Zuroff told the AP in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. "We're on our way to a victory for justice today."

A native of Ukraine, Demjanjuk emigrated to the U.S. in 1952 and gained citizenship in 1958.

In denying involvement in war crimes, he has said he served in the Soviet army and became a prisoner of war when he was captured by Germany in 1942.

Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986, when the U.S. Justice Department believed he was the sadistic Nazi guard known as Ivan the Terrible from the Treblinka death camp.

He spent seven years in custody before the Israeli high court freed him after receiving evidence that another Ukrainian was that Nazi guard.

Demjanjuk's U.S. citizenship was restored in 1998, but the U.S. Justice Department renewed its case, saying he was another Nazi guard and could be deported for falsifying information on his entry and citizenship applications in the 1950s.

A December 2005 U.S. court ruling determined that he could be deported to his native Ukraine or to Germany or Poland, but Demjanjuk spent several years challenging that ruling.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court chose not to consider Demjanjuk's appeal against deportation, clearing the way for the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which oversees cases against former Nazis, to seek his removal from the United States.

But it was unclear which country would take him — his native Ukraine, Poland or Germany.

Now, the Munich prosecutor's office, which is handling the case because Demjanjuk spent time at a refugee camp in the area after the war, said it was working on the extradition request with the German government.

Justice Ministry spokeswoman Eva Schmierer said it was still not clear whether the U.S. would deport Demjanjuk, or whether it would be necessary to formally seek his extradition.

Munich prosecutors credited help from the U.S. Office of Special investigations in clarifying the validity of Nazi-era identity papers in enabling them to file charges against Demjanjuk.

They said Demjanjuk will be formally charged in front of a judge once he is extradited to Germany.

Source (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090311/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_demjanjuk)

[ReichGirl]

any former member of the nazi party is at risk of being tried by the criminal chosen, its how they keep the pity party going even if they know full well the accused is not guilty they will put him on trial as a way to keep the $$ coming in and the victim hood alive :coffee:

[Lenny]

herded women and children into the gas chambers of the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland:rolleyes:

http://www.codoh.com/video/treblinka.mpg

[SwordoftheVistula]

He killed or is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent human beings.

He was a teenager at the time, on the bottom rung of the ladder. He wasn't even German, he was a citizen of the Soviet Union at that time when Germany occupied the Ukraine. What would have happened if he refused to be a guard at the camp? He would have been thrown in there with them! The same 29k or w/e people would have been killed, perhaps 20,001 including young Ivan.

[ReichGirl]

Given that the first charges against this guy collapsed I would think there would be more caution a second time around, but this Schrimm is flogging the German authorities to proceed even though they feel the case, resting as it does on a single eyewitness, is weak.

[ReichGirl]

Demjanjuk's story shows that he was serving in the Russian army when captured by Nazis and forced to be a guard at the camp.

Is it unthinkable that, if he had refused, the Nazis would have shot him? His act of obeying his masters was obviously not deliberate.
http://blog.cleveland.com/letters/2009/03/endless_pursuit_of_john_demjan.html

[Baron Samedi]

Who cares?

Poetic justice, I say.

[Maelstrom]

Demjanjuk's story shows that he was serving in the Russian army when captured by Nazis and forced to be a guard at the camp.

Is it unthinkable that, if he had refused, the Nazis would have shot him? His act of obeying his masters was obviously not deliberate.
http://blog.cleveland.com/letters/2009/03/endless_pursuit_of_john_demjan.html

Legal Positivism vs 'Human' Rights in a nutshell.

[Æmeric]

John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker living in Cleveland, faces deportation to Germany Wednesday to answer to war crimes charges that as a guard at a World War II Nazi extermination camp he had a hand in the deaths of nearly 30,000 Jews and gypsies.

In this country of long memories and an ongoing determination to face up to the legacy of its Nazi past, even 60 years on, cases such as Demjanjuk's rarely raise questions here about whether too much time has elapsed to prosecute old crimes.

"If Mr. Demjanjuk is too ill to stand trial, that is one thing, and for others to decide," says Peter Graumann, the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. "Apart from that, I think it's very important to try him as a signal and a sign of justice being done at last – that there is no time limit to justice."

The fate of Mr. Demjanjuk edged closer to a German trial Monday when US Immigration Judge Wayne Iskra reversed his own ruling from three days before that had stayed Demjanjuk's deportation on grounds of poor health.

Due to his illnesses, Demjanjuk's family maintains a forced trip to Germany and subsequent trial would amount to inhumane torture, something the Justice Department denies.

Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, moved to the US in 1952 and gained citizenship in 1958. He has maintained his innocence, and his family vowed to appeal his deportation on health and humanitarian grounds Tuesday.

German authorities say they have extensive evidence – the most damning being a Schutzstaffel (SS) identification card – that implicates him and proves he was a guard at the Sobibor death camp in southern Poland who personally walked thousands of people to their demise in gas chambers.

The Ludwigsburg Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in southern Germany built the case against Demjanjuk. A spokesman for its director, Kurt Schrimm, declined to comment on today's developments, saying the case had been handed over to prosecutors in Munich, where Demjanjuk would stand trial upon arriving in Germany.

In recent days, the German news media have focused on the idea that if Demjanjuk stood trial here, it likely would be the last such trial linked to the Nazi era. In all, some 6,500 Nazi war criminals have been brought to justice in Germany since the end of World War II, about 1,200 of whom were accused of murder.

The last former Nazi to stand trial in Germany was Josef Schwammberger, who was issued a life sentence in 1992 and died in prison in 2004. "The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of Nazi perpetrators," says Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem. "If we want to set a chronological limit on prosecution, then if [former Nazis] are smart enough or lucky enough to escape justice until that age, they get completely off."

"We believe that every single victim of the Nazis deserves to hold the people who turned them into victims accountable," Mr. Zuroff says.

As Demjanjuk awaits deportation, the US Justice Department's Office for Special Investigations has begun moves to expel a Pennsylvania man accused of hiding his Nazi past. Authorities say Anton Geiser, an 84-year-old who has lived in the US since 1954, was an SS guard at the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camps and lied about this on his entry documents. Right now, it is unclear where the US wants to deport Mr. Geiser to.

Demjanjuk has faced allegations about his Nazi past for three decades. In 1987, he was extradited to Israel, where he was accused of being the Nazi guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp, also in what is today Poland. After seven years in Israeli custody, a court there acquitted him.

His US citizenship was restored in 1998. But a year later the Justice Department opened a new case against him. In 2002, a federal judge ruled that Demjanjuk had been a guard instead at Sobibor rather than Treblinka. He has been awaiting deportation since 2005, and last year failed to get the Supreme Court to consider his appeal.

Demjanjuk maintains that he was never a member of the Nazi party and that during the war he had fought with the Soviet Army, becoming a prisoner of war in Germany when he was captured in 1942.

"However the Germans proceed, we will be fighting for justice in this sad case," his son, John Demjanjuk Jr., told Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung recently. "There is no credible evidence that he engaged in murder or even thousands of murders. He has never harmed anyone, before, during or after the war."

Source (http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0406/p06s09-woeu.html)

[Æmeric]

The retired auto worker, 89, who is accused of being a Nazi death camp guard called 'Ivan the Terrible,' was taken from his suburban Cleveland home today by federal agents. Then the court intervened.

John Demjanjuk, the 89-year-old Ohio man accused of being a former guard in a Nazi death camp, was removed from his home today and taken into federal custody before a federal appeals court delayed his deportation to Germany.

Demjanjuk was taken from his suburban Cleveland house in a wheelchair, according to video from the scene. Relatives and medical personnel surrounded him as he was placed in a white van by federal agents. Then he was driven through the Cleveland streets to a federal facility to await being placed on an airplane to Germany, where he would have faced charges in connection with the deaths of 29,000 people in a Nazi death camp in Poland during World War II.


Before he could be deported, though, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay in the deportation order, the latest step in the case that has roiled the Jewish community for decades.

His family has argued that he was too old and frail to be deported and has maintained that he was not a Nazi guard. But critics have rejected those claims.

"We are delighted to hear" that Demjanjuk will deported, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said before the stay was issued.


"Every day they [prison guards] helped murder innocent civilians and cut off their possibility of life," Hier said. "For 50 years in the U.S. he lived in virtual freedom. He showed no compassion, no human feelings. I wish he would have let his victims live to 89 years of age. We are absolutely elated that justice has finally caught up with him."

Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker, has repeatedly denied that he was a prison guard, despite accusations that he was known as "Ivan the terrible" in Treblinka during World War II. An Israeli court convicted him in 1988 of war crimes, but that conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

In 2002, his U.S. citizenship was revoked by a U.S. court on the grounds that he had lied to immigration officials. The Justice Department maintained that Demjanjuk had hid his service at Sobibor and other Nazi-run death and forced-labor camps. An immigration judge ruled in 2005 he could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine.

The family had sought a stay at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after previous appeals to stay had been rejected.

Source (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-john-demjanjuk15-2009apr15,0,1958118.story)

[Lenny]

An Israeli court convicted him in 1988 of war crimes

Are these the same Israeli courts that claim that Israeli soldiers cannot be prosecuted for any reason? The soldiers involved in massacres committed in the various Israel-Arab wars are not able to be prosecuted because "the statute of limitations has expired" (i.e., crimes committed over 20 years ago cannot be tried now).:rolleyes:

I don't really sympathize with Arabs, but it is an ugly double standard.


Israel also still harbors a number of genuine murderers from the chaotic time of May1945-1949 Central Europe. The book by John Sack outlining the Jews who "took revenge" on German civilians after May-8-45 lists but a few of the most prominent killers.