FINALLY! JOHN DEMJANJUK CONVICTED!

A word of advice: if you had ever killed anyone in cold blood, you always have to worry about people coming to get you, but if you are responsible for the deaths of almost 28,000 people, settling down to be a common autoworker in Ohio is not going to save you. It is just now being reported that after 26 years of wranglings and exonerations, former Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk was found guilty of being an accessory to mass murder in Munich, Germany, where the Nazis got their start. Now he only gets five years, but then again he’s 91 years old, so it is pretty much a life sentence at this point. And even while he claims that he not a Nazi, he still enjoys the support of those who either are or sympathize with them. His most ardent supporter in the mainstream is Pat Buchanan, who a few years back provided us with the warning that the “un-American persecution” of John Demjanjuk “is the same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago.” Do we even need to spell out the anti-Semitic reference Pat jjust made there? Nah, this guy is getting his comuppance at last, and he should consider himself lucky. These days just killing 3,000 people is liable to get you shot in the face and dumped in the sea!

MSNBC

MUNICH — A German court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison on Thursday for his role in the killing of 27,900 Jews at the Nazi death camp Sobibor.

Lawyers for Ukraine-born Demjanjuk said they would appeal the verdict.

The Munich court found the 91-year-old guilty of being an accessory to mass murder as a guard at Sobibor camp in Poland during the Second World War.

Demjanjuk, who emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s, became a naturalized citizen in 1958 and worked as an engine mechanic in Ohio, had been exonerated in a separate Holocaust trial two decades ago in Israel. In that trial he was initially sentenced to death for being the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” camp guard at Treblinka in Poland, but the ruling was overturned by Israel’s supreme court after new evidence exonerated him.

Demjanjuk, who was once top of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most wanted Nazi war criminals, said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941 then taken prisoner of war by the Germans.

Demjanjuk attended the 18-month court proceedings in Munich — birthplace of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement — in a wheelchair and sometimes lying down, with his family trying to argue that he was too frail to stand trial.

Son protests

His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an email ahead of the verdict that his father was a victim of the Nazis and of post-war Germany.

“Fact is, the Germans are preparing a verdict based upon U.S. government fraud which, if necessary, will not survive German or U.S. judicial review,” Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an email.

“While those who refuse to accept that reality may take satisfaction from this event, nothing the Munich court can do will atone for the suffering Germany has perpetrated upon him to this day,” the email said.

Prosecutors had faced several hurdles in proving Demjanjuk’s guilt, with no surviving witnesses to his crimes and heavy reliance on wartime documents, namely a Nazi ID card that defense attorneys said was a fake made by the Soviets.

Guards at Nazi death camps like Sobibor were essential to the mass killing of Jews because extermination was the focus of such camps, prosecutors said. Some 250,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor, according to the Wiesenthal Center.

Defense attorney Ulrich Busch told the Munich court on Wednesday that even if Demjanjuk did become a prison guard, he did so only because as a prisoner of war he would have either been shot by the Nazis or died of starvation.

Faked evidence?
 
Demjanjuk is accused of having served as a “Wachmann,” a guard, the lowest rank of the “Hilfswillige” volunteers who were subordinate to German SS men.

The SS identity card that allegedly shows a picture of a young Demjanjuk, and indicates he trained at the SS Trawniki camp and was posted to Sobibor, was integral to the prosecution’s case.

Though court experts have said the card appears genuine, the defense maintains it is a fake produced by the Soviet KGB.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations also has said the card is genuine, but documents unearthed by the AP and brought to light in a story last month indicate that the FBI had doubts similar to those aired by Demjanjuk’s defense about the evidence — though the material was never turned over to them.

In a 1985 report, the FBI’s Cleveland, Ohio, field office concluded that: “Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB.”

The revelation has led to new court action in the U.S., with a District Court judge in Cleveland on Tuesday agreeing to appoint a public defender to represent Demjanjuk there, raising the prospect of renewing the decades-old case.