Landmark Nazi trial begins in Germany

Nazi war crimes suspect John Demjanjuk will go on trial in Munich today in a case that breaks new ground in Germany’s pursuit of Holocaust perpetrators.

The retired Ohio car worker was once the focus of world attention for the bloodcurdling enormity of the crimes for which he stood accused of.

But today, he is attracting notice for being the lowest-ranking person to go on trial for Nazi war crimes.

If the prosecution is successful, it could significantly lower the bar for who is considered important enough to go to jail for being part of the Nazi terror apparatus.

In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel accused of being one of the notoriously brutal guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

He was convicted, sentenced to death, but freed when an Israeli court overturned the ruling because it said the evidence showed he was a victim of mistaken identity.

The 89-year-old now stands accused of serving as a low-ranking guard at the Sobibor death camp, charged with being accessory to the murders of 27,900 people.

Demjanjuk maintains he was a victim of the Nazis: first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.

But German prosecutors say after Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was in German captivity, he volunteered to serve with the SS and was posted to Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The trial comes after 30 years of legal efforts against him on three continents and is the first time prosecutors have sought the conviction of someone as low-ranking as Demjanjuk allegedly was without proof of a specific offence.

“This definitely marks a change in the decades-old policies of the German judiciary; a positive change,” said Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Immediately after the war, top Nazis like Hermann Goering were convicted at war-crimes trials run by the Allies and investigations of the lower ranks eventually fell to German courts.

Many of those trials ended with short sentences, or acquittal, of suspects in greater positions of responsibility than Demjanjuk allegedly had.

Demjanjuk is accused as having served as a “Wachmann” or guard, the lowest rank of the so-called “Hilfswillige” or “Hiwi” volunteers who were subordinate to German SS men.

There are no direct living witnesses in Demjanjuk’s case but prosecutors argue that if he was a guard at the death camp, that necessarily meant he was involved in the Nazi machinery of destruction.

“In the early 1950s there were certainly some mistakes made, and sometimes there may have been an agenda behind it,” said Kurt Schrimm, head of the special German prosecutors’ office responsible for investigating Nazi-era crimes.

“One must remember, however, that our office has embarked since its founding in 1958 into completely uncharted territory.

“It is unique that a people pursues their own crimes over decades, and we are always learning more.”

Demjanjuk’s family argues that there are now new pressures from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the US Justice Department and others, to put him on trial.

“I think they’re going to push forward to have the trial no matter what, to have the media event and make it seem like Germany is doing what it can to hunt down and prosecute so-called Nazi war criminals,” his son John said.

Mr Demjanjuk said his father suffered from a bone marrow disease and could only have months to live.

“If they wanted to try him, they should have done it 30 years ago,” he said.

But Mr Schrimm said it was not until 2008, when his department found lists of Jews transported to Sobibor during the time Demjanjuk was alleged to have been there, that there was enough evidence to pursue a case against him in Germany.

Demjanjuk maintains he was never at the camp and questions the authenticity of one of the prosecution’s main pieces of evidence: an SS identity card said to be a photo of a young Demjanjuk that says he worked at Sobibor.

Demjanjuk is being tried in Munich because he lived in the area briefly after the war. He emigrated to the US in 1952 and gained citizenship in 1958.

He was extradited to Israel in 1986 after the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations said it had evidence that he was Ivan the Terrible.

If convicted, Demjanjuk faces a possible 15-year sentence, although he could be given credit for some or all of the time he spent behind bars in Israel.