Five years for death camp guard who killed 28,000

Published on Thursday 12 May 2011 16:07

A 91-YEAR-OLD man has been sentenced to five years in jail for his part in the murders of 28,060 Jews in a Nazi death camp in the Second World War.

John Demjanjuk, who suffers from bone marrow disease and a heart ailment, will almost certainly die in prison if time served while awaiting trial is not taken into consideration. He will be released pending a possible appeal but will not be allowed to leave Germany.

The Ukrainian was yesterday found guilty of complicity to murder in 15 counts - 15 being the number of trains that carried Dutch Jews to the extermination camp where he served as a guard between April and September 1943.

More than a dozen family members of the people he killed were in court to see him sentenced. He sat in a wheelchair in dark glasses before the judge and said nothing as his fate was learned. The trial in Munich, which lasted 18 months, is almost certainly the last great Nazi war crimes trial in history and is a watershed moment in Germany's bid to deal with its dark past.

The guilty verdict came at the end of a process in which no witnesses remained alive to place Nazi collaborator Demjanjuk in the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland.

Prosecutors built the bulk of their case against him with the aid of a single SS identity card - a card which the defence said was a forgery made by the KGB of the old Soviet Union.

His lawyers said the aim was to "smear" Demjanjuk, but German records showed that he had been a death camp guard and also served at a concentration camp in Germany.

• John Demjanjuk background: He lived a lie, but now must face up to the awful truth

His claims of spending the war as a prisoner of the Nazis after being captured in 1942 were proved false.

Demjanjuk was a young Sov-iet army soldier when he was captured. Facing almost certain death in a PoW camp, he took a Nazi offer of staying alive by agreeing to work on a "special project".

That project was the Holocaust of Europe's Jews. At Sobibor some 250,000 of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis met their fate. Nazi Germany recruited some 3,500 Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians like Demjanjuk to force them into the gas chambers.

Sobibor was one of four clandestine killing centres set up at the start of the Holocaust. Here there was no work for Jews; they arrived exhausted and hungry on trains, were told they were to be showered and put to work.

Guards like Demjanjuk then drove the naked and terrified people along a fenced off walkway the SS called the "Road to Heaven" and pushed them into gas chambers that filled with diesel exhaust fumes from a U-boat engine. Most were dead and burned within two hours of arriving.

Demjanjuk, born Ivan Demjanjuk, escaped to America after the war. But in the 1970s he was accused of being "Ivan the Terrible" - a particularly sadistic guard at another Nazi killing factory, Treblinka, also in Poland.Israel extradited him to stand trial for his crimes there, found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

However, during a five-year appeal process it scoured the world for evidence and found that he was not in Treblinka but in Sobibor. He was released and it was left to Germany to extradite him from America to stand trial in Munich.

Part of his trial, most of which he slept through, involved the families of his victims talking about their loss. He never displayed emotion as they wept on the witness stand.

Helen Hyde, headmistress of the Watford Grammar School for Girls whose aunt, uncle and cousin perished in Sobibor, said: "It was unimportant if he got a day, a year or a hundred years. What is important is that this verdict tells the world the Holocaust happened and millions died in it.

"It is a small measure of justice for my family."