Pat Dollard

Tweet

Watch them call him a “right wing extremist.”

The Jerusalem Post:

Anton Winkler, a spokesman for the Munich Prosecutor, confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Monday that John Demjanjuk has been formally charged with being an accessory to murder of 27,900 Jews in the Sobibor Nazi extermination camp during World War Two.

The zigzagging legal process surrounding Demjanjuk’s prosecution appeared to be entering its final phase. Winkler said the “indictment had been submitted” to the Munich state court, and that the court must decide whether the indictment is permissible.

In May, the United States extradited Demjanjuk to Munich. Prosecutors in Munich had issued an arrest warrant for him because he lived in Bavaria following the end of World War 11.

Demjanjuk’s criminal defense attorney, Günther Maull, told the Post that based on “statistical” experience with criminal cases, he did not anticipate a trial before the end of September.

Efraim Zuroff, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, told the Post, “It is an important milestone in bringing Demjanjuk to justice.”

Zuroff, who is responsible for tracking down Nazi war criminals, said that the prosecution sends “a message that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators.” In a reference to the 89-year-old retired auto worker from Cleveland, Ohio, Zuroff said “elderly age” should not be an “obstacle to prosecution.”

He stressed that “society owes the 27,900 victims, every one of them, an honest effort to find out who turned them into victims and to hold those accountable” for the crimes.

When asked if Demjanjuk is guilty, Zuroff said, “I have no doubt he is guilty. I have been following the case for 30 years.”

Asked about Zuroff’s statement about his client, Maull said, “Mr. Zuroff can have an opinion. I can have an opinion.” Pressed further on whether Demjanjuk participated in the mass murder of Jews, Maull said, “I have nothing to say.”

Israel tried and convicted Demjanjuk in 1988 over the charge that he was the brutal ‘Ivan the Terrible’ guard at the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland. But Soviet archives produced exculpatory material revealing that he was not. The Israeli Supreme overruled the conviction, and Demjanjuk regained his US citizenship, of which he had been stripped.

Zuroff termed Demjanjuk “another Ivan the Terrible”, and said that it is forgotten that he was convicted in Israel of working in the “service of a Nazi organization,” and “participated in the Final Solution.”

The Nazis and their accomplices gassed 2,000 Jews each day at the Sobibor camp.