Posted on 11/13/2008 7:54:02 AM PST by mnehring
German authorities said Monday they have enough evidence to charge John Demjanjuk with taking part in the deaths of 29,000 Jews in 1943.
German officials said they are "convinced that Demjanjuk . . . is by all means guilty of being an accessory to a vicious murder" of Jews at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where investigators say he worked.
Investigators said they delivered a report to prosecutors in Munich to determine if Demjanjuk could stand trial in Germany. It is unclear when a decision to seek extradition will be made.
The last time German officials filed war crimes charges was in 1992, when Josef Schwammberger, a senior prison official at labor camps, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2004.
"There were points in [Demjanjuk's] case that I never thought it would happen," said Efraim Zuroff, the world's leading Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Demjanjuk's attorney, John Broadley, said he has not seen the report. But he stressed Demjanjuk is ill and frail.
He and his family have denied the Nazi allegations, claiming he is a victim of mistaken identity.
In 1983, Israel charged Demjanjuk with being "Ivan the Terrible," the guard who ran the gas chambers and tortured Jews at the Treblinka death camp.
He was convicted and sentenced to death, but the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1993 based on new evidence that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union. Some have accused Ivan Marchenko as being the guard who operated the gas chamber.
The opening of Soviet archives enabled U.S. prosecutors to uncover evidence that helped them prove Demjanjuk worked at the Sobibor death camp.
A U.S. immigrations judge ordered Demjanjuk deported from the country in 2005 because he concealed his wartime past. But no nation would take him, allowing him to remain in his Seven Hills home.
Demjanjuk came to the United States in 1952 and worked for Ford Motor Co.
German authorities, for the first time, have transport records that list the names and ages of victims taken to the camp.
"This is a big opportunity for Demjanjuk to answer for his atrocities," Kurt Schrimm, the lead investigator for Nazi war crimes in Germany, told Der Spiegel, a German publication.
John Demjanjuk Jr. told the Associated Press: "Trying [his father] again is not about justice. It is about self-serving headlines for Schrimm and his office."
Of the Nazi camps, Sobibor was one of the worst. People were taken off trains, beaten, stripped and sent to their deaths. Of the 250,000 shipped there, 50 survived.
The first trial he was convicted on was based on eye-witness evidence, and overturned because of one mystery eye-witness that came up after the fact out of nowhere. The new evidence is period documentation. That is pretty damning and hard to fight..
I guess that’s where the problem is....he’s a very old man, who had never answered for his crimes when his life actually meant something to him. Now...executing him doesn’t gain anything as far as punishment goes he’s already got one foot on a banana peel and the other in a grave.
What do you mean by period documentation? It all still comes down to an eyewitness seeing him there and after 60 (or even 40) years, that’s going to be tough.
Germany does not have a death penalty.
As I recall, a ID card came to light showing that he was never at the Camp where “Ivan” engaged in those atrocities.
Read a book about this a few years ago. I believe Demjanuk was not the “Ivan the Terrible” he was accused of being, but there is ample evidence that he was a guard at another camp (Sobibor). So what’s he going to say, I wasn’t this infamous guard that was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, because I was really a guard at another camp where merely thousands were killed.
Israel does, that is where he was first convicted.
The period documentation clearly proves that Ivan the Terrible was a mass murderer, but it doesn't prove that this guy is Ivan the Terrible.
Israel concluded he wasn't. I just wonder what the new information is that says otherwise.
That’s what other articles on this say, there are transport lists that tie him with the charges. The Nazis where very OCD with documentation- it has been the convicting evidence in many cases.
I hope Pat doesn’t get tear stains all over his copy of Mein Kampf.
That is what I understood to have happened, “but” even the evidence of working at the “other” camp was shoddy at best, and with the KGB forging the original ID documents, it would be difficult to place credibility on some “new” “new” evidence.
If the KGB forged stuff, why wouldn’t the East Germans forge things as well?
Can’t they even decide which camp he was at?
..actually, Israel convicted him..but after ten years of fighting the conviction, they said there spoliation of evidence and then the mystery eye-witness came forward who claimed he remembers seeing some ID with the name Marchenko instead of Demjanjuk. What the supreme court didn’t hear at the time was that Demjanjuk’s mother’s name was Marchenko and he even used that name on his US entry visa.
The Israeli supreme court didn’t find him not guilty, they overturned the ruling and made a statement “The matter is closed-but not complete, the complete truth is not the prerogative of the human judge.” They left open the legal door to keep going and not clear Demjanjuk.
One of the Israeli prosecutors had this same thought after his original conviction and death sentence were overturned. As he put it, "OK, so he's Ivan the Not Quite So Terrible."
The so called evidence that caused his first conviction to be overturned was a mystery witness who claimed they saw the name Marchenko instead of Demjanjuk on a piece of ID. The Israeli Supreme Court didn’t hear when they reviewed the case that Demjanjuk had used the name Marchenko on his US entry visa way back in the 50s and Marchenko was his mother’s name, so there was even a connection to that name, but the connection doesn’t clear him.
Not sure what you mean, he was at both Sobibor and Treblinka.
Ridiculous. He’s, what? 90 years old.
Time to move on.
And that “mystery” witness was so convincing that no less then 5 eyewitnesses were disregarded, that is no small thing.
I can recall some of those witnesses testifying in the original trial, they were convinced..and apparently, they were dead wrong.
That is one of the perils of eyewitness testimony that is 60 years old, if the guy is guilty he should face Justice, but if innocent, what then?
These are very serious crimes for which the person responsible should die, but I would hope that the state (whichever state that happens to be) establishes concrete proof, beyond doubt, that this is the guy who did these things.
"Probably" isn't enough.
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