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 eyewitness weren’t ‘disregarded’, many had already died. That’s why Israel’s Supreme court cited evidence spoilage (legal term not derogatory) as the main reason for overturning the one conviction.
Luckily, it seems the new evidence is documentary, plus now we know that he did go by the name on the ID when he applied for his US visa, so that defense is out the window and actually is another piece against him.
That’s what we’ll find out. At least this time it is mostly based on documentary evidence and not eye-witnesses.
Heck, they might even have a competent charge to bring against him by 2015...
The problem is, the “mystery” witness will now have to testify in Germany to establish the “Marchenko” name being used, no one knows who that witness is, whether they are alive or not, or even if they would be willing to testify in a German proceeding.
If this new documentary evidence at any time passed through Soviet handling it is very suspect.
For one thing, he was adamantly opposed to the notion that an American charged with a crime in a foreign country should be extradited anywhere except the country where the alleged crime took place. The Ukrainian and/or German governments apparently had no interest in prosecuting him, so it seemed pretty bizarre to have him extradited somewhere else just because another government did. This is something worth thinking about for anyone who is familiar with the cockamamie ideas surrounding the International Criminal Court, war crimes tribunals for U.S. government officials, etc.
As I remember it, Buchanan's second point was that it was disgraceful for the U.S. government to deport Demjanjuk -- on the grounds that he had falsified his immigration documents to hide his past in the Ukraine -- in the first place. Buchanan correctly noted that the U.S. government basically deported him for being a retired auto worker instead of a rocket scientist . . . since this same U.S. government had gone to great lengths in the past to do the exact same thing for various German scientists in the post-WW2 era to whitewash their Nazi ties so they could immigrate to the United States.
I can't say I disagree with Buchanan on either point here.
So there are some illegal aliens Buchanan likes- nazis.
High volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel, WOT
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Spain is also requesting extradition. Suring his service at the Flossenburg camp, only half the inmates Jewish, several hundred Spanish citizens were executed. Along with the Germans involved in the plot on Hitler's life, and 13 allied agents.
That would be Pat “you can’t kill Jews with gas, survivors are mentally ill” Buchanan. Moral voice of the 1992 GOP.
There's a gread deal of documentary evidence. Ironically the Soviet archives that cast serious doubt that he was Ivan the Terrible provided a great deal of information regarding his service.
No, theres copius documentation of his service as a camp guard. The Soviet archives and captured German records which cast doubt on his being Ivan the Terrible, confirmed and added to the evicence of his service as a camp guard.
NEWS FROM THE FUTURE:
(AP) November 13, 2050.
A colony of Nazis hiding in Paraguay has been tracked down by Nazi hunters.
Actually his two main arguements were that Holocaust survivors were mentally ill, presumably only Jewish survivors, and that diesel fumes can't kill people, an absurd claim that got his column published in the Spotlight.
He's not an American citizen, he lied to get into the country, and on his citizenship application. The courts have held that consistantly. In no case other than ex-Nazis have I heard Pat opposed to enforcement of the immigration laws.
They all knew - they all allowed it. Monsters. They're all monsters.
Your link would be a bit more convincing if the first line at the top of the page wasn’t this one:
“As the physical evidence for mass exterminations at Nazi camps is missing (see a review of Auschwitz and Treblinka), much credence is placed on “holocaust survivors” eyewitness accounts.”
Try again. I have no words to express my disgust with those that deny the holocaust or those that post from such garbage sources.
Pat Buchanan was hardly a “moral voice” for the GOP. He fared quite poorly in the GOP primaries that year, although he did get some notoriety after winning in NH. The major point is that he has been effectively drummed out of the Republican party, and his participation in subsequent presidential campaigns has been as a third party candidate.
Forgeries can be detected. Unfortunately there was non-Soviet documentation as well, and the document which cast doubt on his identity as Ivan the Terrible was among the “forgeries”. Can’t have it both ways.
Funny, I thought the exact same thing..
..well, that, and I thought I would hire the guy with the cartoon character credit card because he apparently is a creative personality.
I think SJackson was mocking Buchananites who constantly put him on a pedestal similar to how Obamaites put the Obamessiah put him on a pedestal.
(1) Ivan Demjanjuk and Ivan "The Terrible" Marchenko were both Ukrainian nationals who served in the SS as camp guards. The documentary evidence on this is established.
(2) Ivan Demjanjuk and Ivan Marchenko were both trained as camp guards at the SS training facility in Trawniki in 1942.
(3) Ivan Demjanjuk's mother's maiden name was Marchenko.
(4) Marchenko was assigned to Treblinka and Demjanjuk to nearby Sobibor.
(5) Demjanjuk lied to US immigration about serving the SS at Sobibor.
(6) It was initially thought that Marchenko was merely a pseudonym that Demjanjuk used, because of his mother's name. (7) There is documentation in the German archives showing that an Ivan Demjanjuk gave the same birthplace, birthdate and other information for identification purposes to the SS as an Ivan Demjanjuk gave to US immigration. Ivan Demjanjuk also admitted in open court that he was at Trawniki and that he had undergone surgery to remove the distinctive official tattoos he had received at the end of his training.
He's as guilty as sin and he has avoided true justice for 64 years.
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