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German court sentences 91-year-old Ukrainian to five years for his part in killing 28,060 Jews at Sobibór concentration camp A 91-year-old Ukrainian man has been sentenced to five years in prison for his part in the killing of 28,060 Jews at a Nazi extermination camp in 1943. John Demjanjuk was convicted of being an accessory to mass murder for his actions as a guard at the Sobibór concentration camp in occupied Poland, where he herded Jews to their death in the camp’s gas chambers. Demjanjuk sat in a wheelchair before the judges as they announced their verdict, but showed no reaction. It was not immediately clear how much credit he would get for time already served. Defence attorneys had said during the 18-month trial they would appeal a conviction. Demjanjuk was a Red Army soldier allegedly captured as a prisoner of war by the Wehrmacht in 1942 and trained as an SS guard before being sent to work at a death camp near Sobibór, a village close to the border between Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. He has been described by one Nazi expert as “the littlest of the little fishes” and is the lowest ranking person ever to be put on trial for war crimes in Germany. The prosecution has presented no evidence that Demjanjuk committed a specific crime, but claims his presence at Sobibór is enough to charge him with being an accessory to murder. It is the first time this legal argument has been tried in German courts. The case against Demjanjuk was that he was one of the guards who forced Jewish prisoners into rooms, knowing that engine fumes were to be pumped in. Demjanjuk is then alleged to have dragged out the corpses and thrown them into a mass grave, where they were later burned in an attempt to leave no trace. Demjanjuk said he was a victim, not a perpetrator, of Nazi crimes. His lawyer, Ulrich Busch, told the court on Wednesday that high-ranking Germans, such as the commander of the Trawniki SS camp where Demjanjuk allegedly trained, had been acquitted by German courts. “Should foreigners pay for the crimes of the Germans … in order to acquit Germany of its responsibility alone for the Holocaust?” Busch said. Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr, accused German prosecutors of ignoring the facts. “My dad 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,” he said in an email to the Associated Press on Wednesday. “While some who refuse to accept the history of that period may take satisfaction from this event, nothing the Munich court can say will erase the true suffering he has endured to this day.” A Dutch Nazi war crimes expert, Professor Christiaan Rüter, has said Demjanjuk was not a key Nazi lieutenant but “the littlest of the little fishes”. The long, often interrupted proceedings attracted international attention after some legal experts suggested it could be the last trial of a Nazi war criminal in Germany. However, Cornelius Nestler, a lawyer for families of Sobibór victims who joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, said on Wednesday that “if there is a verdict for accessory to murder because one was a guard in a camp where many people were killed, it could be a beginning of new last wave of many [such] proceedings”. The trial was listed for 35 days when it began at the end of November 2009, but Demjanjuk’s poor health, plus countless legal arguments, have strung it out for 18 months. Hearings were sometimes cut short when Demjanjuk complained about his numerous health problems, which include early onset leukaemia and gout. The court was only able to sit for two 90-minute sessions a day after a doctor said the accused could cope with no more. Demjanjuk was carried into the court precinct each day on a stretcher and lay inside the courtroom on a bed with his eyes shut, or hidden behind sunglasses, as his alleged crimes were read out in horrific detail, translated loudly into his ear in Ukrainian. The trial was derailed by the death of a key witness in November last year. Samuel Kunz, 89, had been a Nazi guard at Sobibór and could also have stood trial for mass murder. Kunz’s death meant that no living witness could testify to having seen Demjanjuk at the concentration camp. The prosecution instead relied on written records and an SS identity card alleged to have belonged to Demjanjuk, who fled to the United States in 1952 and spent decades working in an Ohio car factory. In February, his lawyers asked the judge to stop the trial after a declassified FBI file emerged which suggested the ID card might have been forged by the KGB. The case continued after prosecutors argued that subsequent examinations had proved its authenticity. Demjanjuk, who changed his first name from Ivan when starting his new life in the US, spent more than seven years in prison in Israel, five of them on death row, after being found guilty of being a notorious concentration camp guard at Treblinka known as Ivan the Terrible. He was set free when his lawyers proved it was a case of mistaken identity. Demjanjuk spent 10 months in a US jail while awaiting extradition to Germany. He has been on remand in the hospital wing of Stadelheim, the jail where Hitler once served time, since 12 May 2009. Last November, on the first anniversary of the trial’s opening, Busch read out a statement in which Demjanjuk said he was just “a simple prisoner of war” who was being unfairly singled out and persecuted by German authorities who had let far more serious Nazi war criminals slip through the net. Busch had suggested at the start of the trial that Demjanjuk was a victim rather than a murderer. “Ultimately, my client is not different from Thomas Blatt, who did what he could to stay alive,” he said. Eighty-four-year-old Blatt, one of two plaintiffs who survived the camp, managed to stay alive by working as a shoeshine boy to the camp commandant before escaping in October 1943. Another survivor, Jules Schelvis, whose whole family was murdered at Sobibór, has said he is less interested in seeing Demjanjuk sentenced to die in jail than seeing justice done. “Justice must be done and be seen to be done, the sentence is almost irrelevant,” he said as the trial opened. Outside the courtroom on Wednesday, David van Huden, a 79-year-old Dutchman whose mother, father and sister were murdered within hours of arriving at Sobibór in 1943, said he saw the trial as a chance “to defend our rights as Holocaust survivors and the rights of our parents”. Helen Hyde, headteacher at Watford grammar school for girls, whose aunt, uncle and cousin were killed at the camp, said: “The horrors of Sobibór must never be forgotten.” Germany Europe Holocaust Second world war War crimes Helen Pidd guardian.co.uk