Demjanjuk trial

From 2009 to 2011, one of the last major Nazi trials was held in Munich to widespread media coverage. Up in court was John Demjanjuk, who was 89 years old at the time of the trial opening. As a former SS 'Hilfswilliger' (auxiliary volunteer), he was charged with aiding and abetting murder in at least 27,900 cases, committed in the Sobibór Extermination Camp in 1943.

Ukrainian by birth, Ivan Mykolajovyč Demjanjuk was of modest origins. After four years at school, he worked as a tractor driver on a collective farm before being drafted into the Red Army in 1940. He was captured by the Germans in 1942. In the Chełm POW camp, he was recruited as an 'foreign auxiliary volunteer.' He went through the SS training camp 'Trawniki' south of Lublin and was deployed as a guard in Sobibór from March 1943 as one of around 130 Ukrainian 'auxiliary volunteers.' From October 1943 onward, he served at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp.

After the end of the war, Demjanjuk stayed in various camps for displaced persons, including Feldafing. In 1952, he succeeded in emigrating to the USA with his wife and child, where he was granted citizenship in 1958. As John Demjanjuk, he settled near Cleveland, Ohio, where he was employed by Ford. After the disclosure of his participation in the Holocaust, his American citizenship was revoked in 1981. In 1986, he was extradited to Israel, which brought charges against him for alleged acts of violence in Treblinka Extermination Camp. A special court sentenced him to death in Jerusalem in 1988. This judgment had to be overturned in 1993 after new evidence showed that Demjanjuk had been misidentified. He returned to the United States and was renaturalized in 1998. However, his proven activity as a guard at the Sobibór Extermination Camp led to his citizenship being revoked again in 2004. An attempt to deport him to Ukraine failed.

Following preliminary investigations by the Ludwigsburg-based Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, Demjanjuk was finally deported to Germany in 2009 and brought to trial in Munich. It was remarkable that an indictment was brought at all, as Demjanjuk could no longer be proven to have committed a specific act. However, the public prosecutor's office considered his presence as a guard in the extermination camp alone to be sufficient grounds for a conviction for having been an accessory to murder, thus breaking with decades of legal practice. It was therefore all the more noteworthy that the competent Munich Regional Court II adhered to this interpretation too. After a trial lasting 93 days, the court sentenced the defendant, who refused to testify, to five years in prison on May 12, 2011 for aiding and abetting the murder of at least 28,060 people. Demjanjuk appealed the verdict but never had to serve his sentence as he died in a care home in Bad Feilnbach on March 17, 2012, before the decision of the appeals court.

However, the Munich tribunal made history with its new legal opinion. As a result, new investigations were launched against the former personnel of the extermination camp and further charges were brought. And it was of great symbolic significance for the survivors, bereaved, and descendants of the victims. In 2016, the Federal Court of Justice as court of cassation confirmed the new legal interpretation in the case of an SS Sergeant from the Auschwitz Concentration and Extermination Camp who had been convicted by Lüneburg Regional Court.