John Damjanjuk, the Ohio autoworker who was deported to Germany on charges of Nazi war crimes, was found guilty by a Munich judge this month of complicity in the mass murder of 28,000 people at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. In the 1980’s, Mr. Demjanjuk was stripped of his U.S. citizenship. He then faced trial in Israel for being “Ivan the Terrible,” a famously brutal Sobibor guard. Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death. In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction, finding insufficient evidence that his true identity was Ivan the Terrible.
Two years ago the United States deported Mr. Demjanjuk to Germany. After a trial, a German judge has found him guilty of participation in the murder of thousands.
Mr. Demjanjuk’s lawyers argued that there was no evidence that Mr. Demjanjuk physically harmed anyone or even knew about the killings. Judge Alt rejected this defense, pointing out that every guard at Sobibor “knew he was part of an organization with no other purpose but mass murder.” The judge likewise rejected the defense that Mr. Demjanjuk had “no choice” but to serve as a guard at the Sobibor death camp.
To learn more about the John Demjanjuk trial, check out The New York Times or The Huffington Post