Posted on 12/03/2009 12:47:45 PM PST by lizol
Demjanjuk: I am also a victim of the Nazis
By Assaf Uni
MUNICH - At 11:10 A.M. local time yesterday, John (Ivan) Demjanjuk, accused of involvement in the murder of 27,900 Jews at the death camp Sobibor, was rolled in his wheelchair into Munich District Court. The first trial in Germany of an East European Nazi collaborator had begun.
The courtroom had been filled for an hour before the session started, with reporters from around the world, attorneys and more than 20 relatives of the Dutch Jews who were killed at Sobibor during the time the indictment says Demjanjuk served there.
Thomas Blatt sat comfortably watching the proceedings. As a boy of 15 at Sobibor, Blatt invited about a dozen SS officers, one after the other, to come with him to the Jewish prisoners' hut, with the promise that they would receive fine coats. Once inside, the other prisoners killed them with axes and hammers. That was the famed Sobibor Uprising, and Blatt was one of the few survivors. At 83, he is one of the last living survivors of the death camp.
"I don't remember Demjanjuk's face," he said a few minutes before Demjanjuk was brought into the courtroom. "But so much time has passed that I don't remember the faces of my parents or brother, either. But I remember that they were murdered in the gas chambers." In January, Blatt is to testify for the prosecution.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
“I don’t remember Demjanjuk’s face.”
That testimony there should be enough to drop this ridiculously unfair case.
” Demjanjuk’s attorney, Ulrich Busch, said Germany had no authority to judge alleged guards like Demjanjuk after having acquitted the commandant of the camp.”
Very good point, and info that I’ve been trying to find for some time. Show trial!
This whole trial is basically for the Germans to say, “You see, not only Germans participated in the Holocaust.”
Germany never went after Mengele or Eichmann like this.
Double jeopardy ?
This show trial is in revenge for Demjanjuk making them look like idiots by proving he wasn’t “Ivan the Terrible,” a particularly brutal guard.
The evidence I’ve seen indicates he was an exterior guard, with little contact with inmates, and apparently for a relatively short period of time.
He also apparently lived a completely blameless life for 50+ years after the war. Shouldn’t this be taken into account when deciding comparative guilt or innocence?
It also ought to be considered that Soviet and other Communist guards and torturers who killed even more people than the SS remain in good standing in their countries. No prosecutions at all.
EXACTLY! They are trying to make some sort of example out of Demjanjuk. The Germans have a lot nerve trying him. They invaded his country and conscripted him into their ranks.
Or would it have happened sooner? What was he hiding?
“If Demjanjuk took part in the killing of Jews in Sobibor,”
So far, I’ve heard no evidence to support that. I have heard that he was a “perimeter” guard, but have seen no evidence to support that either. I’ve probably read more about this case than most, because I live in the next town east of Seven Hills. Cleveland news has covered the story extensively for many, many years. A bandmate of mine worked next to him on the assembly line. Right now, without seeing real evidence yet, I have the impression that he was just trying to stay alive. We’ll have to wait and see, I guess. After the results of the Israeli trials, I’m not finding him guilty yet.
That itself is a miserable argument to make.
If he had been a rocket scientist instead of a sheet metal worker, he would have had the U.S. government lying for him and providing him fabricated immigration papers to help him get into this country.
“That testimony there should be enough to drop this ridiculously unfair case.”
In the original mistaken identity Ivan The Terrible case fiasco, Gustave Boraks identified Demjanjuk, but then had trouble remembering the name of his own child. Boraks, who had come to Israel from Florida, was asked if he could remember how he had made the journey. He told the stunned audience that he had come “by train”! In spite of the obviously flawed memory, the judge let the testimony stand! When the Soviets sent documents showing Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, the OSI simply dumped them. A US appeal court ruled in 1993 that the OSI had displayed a “reckless disregard” for the truth, and that its misconduct amounted to “a fraud on the court”. In the end an embarrassed Israeli court acquitted Demjanjuk and sent him back to the US after 7 years in prison.
If there were so many problems 30 years ago with accurate memories and evidence in the case how can one expect the current case to be any more fair?
"Them" being the Israelis? (Who else?)
"Voicing pity in any degree for the 89-year-old former car plant worker takes you into perilous waters. There is no one at the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the Jewish human rights group which leads the hunt for Nazi war criminals, who has the slightest doubt that he is guilty of genocide against Jews. Twenty years ago, he was identified by Israel as "Ivan the Terrible", the sadist of Treblinka, and tried and sentenced to hang. Famously, that conviction was overturned."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ivan-the-terrible-or-just-plain-john-demjanjuk-1669301.html
What does this have to do with the current trial?
Yeah, just give him a pass...don't even consider personal accountability (like for 'welfare recipients' in US inner cities as voiced every day right here on FreeRepublic).
One fact that wasn’t pointed out by the media during Obama’s visit to Buchenwald, was that after the war, the Soviets used it as concentration camp.
Maybe this guy should be put on trial too. It does not sound like the prisoners were in immediate danger of being killed. You can't use the self-defense justification for murder unless you are in immediate danger. </sarc>
The commander of Sobibor was acquitted. The architects and designers of worse atrocities in other countries, at least in numbers of dead people, remain free and in many cases honored.
But a teenage perimeter guard who walked the line for some weeks at Sobibor must be pursued till he dies.
Why is this? What is it about Demjanjuk that sets him apart from thousands of others who are left in relative peace?
Is it his personal crimes? Apparently not. Nobody has come up with credible evidence of his individual criminality. His crimes consist of being one of the lowest-level members of an admittedly criminal organization.
So why spend decades pursuing him specifically? I think it's quite obvious: he made American and Israeli prosecutors and the NGOs that work with them look like idiots, and they're taking their organizational revenge.
If Demjanjuk took part in the killing of Jews
It's possible this is part of the answer. There are those who require an occasional human sacrifice to their belief that murdering Jews is immensely worse than murdering other people.
I'm not among them. Murdering an innocent Jew is no worse (or better) than murdering an innocent kulak, Armenian or "class enemy." But there seem to be those who believe otherwise.
Not particularly. The Israelis deserve high accolades for overturning their conviction when the evidence called for it.
Yeah, just give him a pass...don't even consider personal accountability
Here's the problem with that. He was a Ukrainian, himself a member of the untermensch in Nazi eyes. He was a member of the Red Army taken prisoner by the Nazis.
Are you familiar with the death rate among Red Army prisoners? Are you aware Stalin pronounced the death penalty on all prisoners when retaken? Which was very frequently carried out.
What were his options when allowed to escape from the death penalty of the POW camp if he served as a camp guard? Remain in the POW camp to die, or possibly be shot right away for refusing service.
In my opinion only those who have faced a choice of go along with evil or die, and who have resisted anyway, have a RIGHT to pronounce judgment on those who survive by compromising.
Have you, yourself, ever been in such a situation? I have not. I hope and pray that I would do what was right, despite the consequences. But I may be as weak as most people.
I greatly honor those who refuse to compromise their ethics when faced with such a choice. But it is just a fact that most humans do what they must to survive, whatever that may be.
Only those who have been faced with such a stark choice and resisted evil anyway have a moral right to condemn those who gave in.
Oddly enough, my experience has been that most of them are more forgiving than those who have never faced such a choice.
Yes, he was forced to participate, which will be taken into consideration in the trial. Only by all accounts he was very enthusiastic “beyond the call of duty” in what he did. If he really is Ivan the Terrible, he was a particularly sadistic POS.
And even if he’s found guilty I would be surprised if due to his age and health (his real state of health, not the theatrics he’s putting on, mind you) he will spend a day in prison. But at least it might provide some scant satisfaction to his victims. Let’s not forget about those.
You may be correct. But all I've seen evidence of is that he was a perimeter guard for some weeks or months.
To address your issues about whether it is proper to prosecute someone when others go unpunished.
It's a question of priorities all prosecutors must face. They can't pursue every potential case with all available resources. They must prioritize.
Let's try to put it in an American context. Let's assume law enforcement is perfectly well aware of who the leaders of MS-13, an illegal organization, are. They choose to not pursue these leaders, for whatever reasons. Instead they decide to go after a low-level short-time foot soldier against whom there is no credible evidence of individual crimes, only that he is a member of this illegal operation.
While blatantly ignoring the higher-ups in the organization and those members against whom there is actual evidence of personal involvement in individual murders and other serious crimes, they pursue this one guy for over 30 years.
Does this seem like a rational allocation of prosecutorial resources, or more like a determination to prove they can "get their man," regardless of his comparative guilt?
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