Ex-prosecutor: Demjanjuk story is inconsistent

Associated Press

MUNICH

A former U.S. attorney who prosecuted John Demjanjuk in the United States testified Wednesday that he felt the retired Ohio autoworker who is accused of being a Nazi guard lied about where he was during World War II.

Demjanjuk, who was deported from the U.S. to Germany in May 2009, is on trial for 28,060 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he was a guard at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp — charges he denies.

He claims he spent most of the rest of the war in Nazi camps for prisoners of war before joining the so-called Vlasov Army of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others. That army was formed to fight with the Germans against the advancing Soviets in the final months of the war.

But Norman Moscowitz, a former attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations, told the Munich state court that during Demjanjuk’s 1981 denaturalization hearing, several inconsistencies in his testimony “contributed to my sense he was not telling the truth.”

He said, for example, that Demjanjuk said he was held in a camp in Chelm, Poland, at a time when it had already been closed down; and that he said he had joined the Vlasov army at a time it hadn’t yet been formed.

Demjanjuk’s defense has questioned the value of Moscowitz’s testimony, however, noting that a federal appeals panel in the U.S. chastised him and others involved in the American proceedings for withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense in the 1980s.

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