By Alexandra Halsey-Storch
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

MUNICH, Germany–Convicted Nazi war criminal, John Demjanjuk, died on Saturday in a German nursing home. He was 91 years old and suffered from terminal bone marrow disease and other illnesses.

In 1977, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel from the United States, where he had been employed in Ohio as a mechanic with Ford Motor Corporation. In Israel, he was accused of and put on trial for being “Ivan the Terrible,” an “infamous Ukrainian guard” at Treblinka Extermination Camp. According to the Telegraph, “even in Treblinka, where beatings, gassing and torture were part of the daily routine, ‘Ivan the Terrible’ stood out for his perverse sadism’” and was allegedly responsible for putting 800,000 prisoners to their death.

After a lengthy trial, Demjanjuk was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity; he was thereafter sentenced to death in April 1988. However, the sentence was overturned five years later on appeal. The court determined that “new evidence threw sufficient doubt on whether Demjanjuk was, in fact, Ivan the Terrible.” In 1993, Israel ordered Demjanjuk back to the United States.

The United States reinstated Demjanjuk’s citizenship in 1998, but it was again revoked in 2002 after “mounting evidence,” suggested that Demjanjuk had served as a guard in Sobibor death camp where more than 27,000 people died during World War II. This evidence, the U.S. government claimed, had been omitted from Demjanjuk’s immigration papers and concealed from United States officials when Demjanjuk immigrated to the country in 1952. Thus, in 2009, he was again extradited, this time to Germany, where he faced yet another war crimes trial.

In May 2011, after eighteen months of trial, the Munich court convicted Demjanjuk on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder between March and September of 1943—one count for each person who died during his time at the camp.

The court said that although there is no doubt that Demjanjuk had been a prisoner of war, there was also “clear evidence” that Demjanjuk had volunteered to serve with the notorious German army and participated in the “Nazi killing machine that slaughtered 6 million Jews and undesirables.”

Interestingly, there was, according to the Huffington Post, no evidence that Demjanjuk had committed any specific crime. Instead, the prosecution based its case theory on the idea that “if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing.” According to the Huffington Post, it was the first time that such a legal argument had been made in Germany. Furthermore, according to Thomas Walther, a lead investigator who prompted Demjanjuk’s prosecution, this verdict could open the door to the prosecution of other “low-ranking Nazi helpers.”

A key piece of evidence to the prosecution’s case was an SS identity card, which “allegedly shows a picture of a young Demjanjuk and indicates he trained at the SS Trawniki camp and was posted to Sobibor.” Court experts claimed the card is genuine while the defense insisted that it was “a fake produced by the Soviet KGB.”

Though sentenced to five years imprisonment, the presiding judge had ordered that Demjanjuk be freed during the appeal process, noting that he was not “a flight risk because of his advanced age, poor health and the fact that [he was] deported from the U.S. two years ago, [and] is stateless.” Demjanjuk was not, however, to leave Germany.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk always denied his presence at any death camp and participation in the Nazi’s atrocities. Instead, he claimed that after having been drafted into the Soviet Red Army, he fell into the hands of German combatants in May 1942 and was thereafter “recruited to work as a guard in exchange for escaping the camps himself.”

After is May 2011 conviction, Demjanjuk told the German judges presiding over his trial, “I am again and again an innocent victim of the Germans. Germany is responsible for the fact that I have lost for good my whole reason to live, my family, my happiness, any future and hope.”

Demjanjuk’s son, John Jr., has accused German prosecutors of ignoring the facts. “My dad,” he said in an email to the Associated Press at the time of the 2011 verdict, “is a survivor of the genocide famine in Ukraine, of the war fighting the Nazis, of the Nazi POW camps…and now of Germany’s attempt to finish the job left unfinished by Hitler’s real henchmen.”

Demjanjuk is survived by his wife Vera, his son John Jr., and two daughters Irene and Lydia.

For mor information, please visit:

MSNBC World News–Nazi War Criminal John Demjanjuk Dies at 91–17 March 2012

The Telegraph–John Demjanjuk–17 March 2012