Israeli Holocaust institute welcomes Demjanjuk verdict

Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Institute welcomed on Thursday, the conviction and sentencing of former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk by a Munich court.

Reuters

91 year old Demjanjuk was given a five year prison sentence.

Presiding judge Ralph Alt told the court that he was convinced Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk served at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland "and that as a guard he took part in the murder of at least 28,000 people".

His lawyer said before the guilty verdict was announced, that his client planned to appeal.

Demjanjuk had been brought to the packed courtroom in a wheelchair, and during the morning session, he was offered a last chance to address the court, but he declined.

He had stayed silent throughout the 18 months of proceedings, sitting in a wheelchair or lying on a stretcher over 93 hearings.

His health was often a cause of concern during the trial, leading to frequent delays.

He was a Red Army soldier, until he was captured by German troops in 1942, and sent to a prisoner of war camp, before signing up to work as a death camp guard. Millions of other Soviet POWs died.

The prosecution argued that if he worked as a camp guard, he was, by definition guilty of helping to kill all the Jews sent there at the time.

The high profile trial, one of the last to involve an alleged Nazi war criminal has re-opened the issue of delayed justice.

And the fact that Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian-born POW, being tried in the country which started the war, and perpetrated the Holocaust, has also raised questions.

He is the first foreigner to be tried in Germany for Nazi war crimes.

Earlier in his life, he served nearly eight years in an Israeli prison, five of them on death row, after being found guilty in the 1980s of being the notoriously sadistic "Ivan the Terrible" guard at Treblinka, another death camp.

The Israeli supreme court later overturned the verdict and ordered his release on the grounds that he had probably been wrongly identified.

Before today's verdict on Demjanjuk, Serge Klarsfeld, a French lawyer and Nazi hunter expressed frustration with the trial, saying that all the witnesses were dead, and there were no documents.

He said he feared that a guilty verdict would open the door to accusations of unfair justice.

Demjanjuk was deported in 2009 from the United States, where he lived for decades after World War 11.