'Nazi guard' Demjanjuk charged for killing 28K Jews

Could justice prevail in this case?

German prosecutors have formally charged John Demjanjuk (right) with 27,900 counts of being an accessory to the murder of Jews during World War II.

Demjanjuk, who was deported from the U.S. in May, is accused of serving as a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the war.

The 89-year-old auto worker says he never hurt anyone, claiming he was a Red Army soldier captured by Germans in his native Ukraine and kept as a prisoner of war.

Here's what frustrates me about a case such as this one: if he's guilty of assisting in the murder of thousands of Jews, then no charges, no trial, no bad press, no poverty, no prison time could ever settle the score. No amount of pain inflicted on him could compare to what the Jews were subjected to during the Holocaust.

So other than to serve justice and set the record straight, his arrest and imprisonment (if convicted) couldn't possibly offer much comfort to the victims. Long-term torture, might, but that's out of the question within the present judicial system.

The charges were filed Monday, but no details about a trial were released.

Doctors say he's fit to stand trial, but Demjanjuk's family say he is too frail to stand trial because he suffers from kidney disease, cancer and arthritis. In May, he was admitted to hospital for three days after developing gout, the BBC reported.

Demjanjuk arrived in the U.S. in 1952 as a refugee, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked in the car industry, according to the report. In 1988 he was sentenced to death in Israel for crimes against humanity after Holocaust survivors identified him as the notorious "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at the Treblinka death camp, but Israel's highest court later overturned his sentence after former Soviet Union documents showed "Ivan the Terrible" was another man.

Demjanjuk returned to the U.S. but lost his U.S. citizenship in 2002 because he had not disclosed his work at Nazi camps when he first arrived as a refugee. Three years later a U.S. immigration judge ruled that he could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. (Three years...it took them three years to arrive to this ruling, and meanwhile he was living happily in the U.S.).

In March 2009, Munich prosecutors issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of being an accessory in the deaths of Jews based on documents proving his Nazi background, including an SS identity card that showed he had been a guard at Sobibor between March and September 1943, and on witness testimonies.

If Demjanjuk is innocent, he should be very scared because prosecutors evidently have enough evidence to convict him.

If he's guilty, he--and his family--should be celebrating that he got a 65-year get-out-of-jail-free card after murdering nearly 28,000 innocent people and that he got to live and prosper in the U.S. as a refugee, with U.S. citizenship handed to him on a silver platter in an act of generosity and compassion. No need for long faces...he got away with it all up until now, when he's about to die anyway.

Where's the justice in that?

Sobibor Extermination Camp (Photo: Holocaust Research Project)

Sources: AP, BBC, Al Jazeera
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