Demjanjuk was 'dedicated Hitler follower'

Suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk was a willing follower of Hitler, his war crimes trial heard today.

The 89-year-old retired car worker who was deported from the United States in May to stand trial in Germany denies being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews in the Sobibor death camp, claiming mistaken identity.

Demjanjuk was wheeled in to the Munich state court on a trolley today, slightly propped up lying on his back.

A blanket covered his legs and his leather jacket was zipped up to his neck. He wore a blue baseball cap and kept his eyes closed as the 10-page indictment was read by prosecutor Hans-Joachim Lutz.

Demjanjuk showed little reaction, but put his left hand to his brow as Mr Lutz detailed how Jews were stripped of their belongings and clothes, then led naked into the gas chambers of Sobibor.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk maintains that he was a Soviet soldier who was captured by the Germans, and spent most of the rest of the war in prison camps.

But Mr Lutz told the five-judge panel he would prove Demjanjuk volunteered to serve the Nazis once he had been captured, and was a willing participant in the Holocaust.

Mr Lutz told the court that Demjanjuk learned how to be a guard at the SS training camp at Trawniki and was then posted to the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in March 1943.

“As a guard, he took part in all the various parts of the extermination process after the deportation trains arrived,” Mr Lutz said.

He said Demjanjuk could have deserted, but chose to stay in the camp.

“He willingly participated in the killing of the Jews because he wanted them dead for his own racist ideological reasons,” he said.

Presiding Judge Ralph Alt asked Demjanjuk if he wanted to respond to the indictment but his lawyer, Ulrich Busch, said there would be no comment.

During a short break after the indictment was read, a doctor checked Demjanjuk, who seemed more animated than during the proceedings. He opened his eyes, talked with those around him and took a drink of water.

His defence has previously said the prosecution has no witnesses who remember Demjanjuk from Sobibor and that its other evidence is weak. They suggest Demjanjuk is a victim of mistaken identity – something that has happened before.

In the 1980s, Demjanjuk was extradited by the United States for trial in Israel on charges that he was the notoriously brutal guard at Treblinka who earned the name “Ivan the Terrible.”

Demjanjuk was convicted in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and spent seven years in prison until Israel’s Supreme Court in 1993 overturned the conviction. It ruled that another person, not Demjanjuk, was “Ivan the Terrible.”

As the trial resumed today Mr Busch asked for the process to be thrown out, arguing that it had been illegal to deport Demjanjuk from the US instead of extradite him, and that the Sobibor charges were addressed in the Israel trial so the current process constitutes double jeopardy – trying a person twice for the same crime.

Judge Alt said he would rule later on the application, but has previously rejected several similar attempts.