Ex-Nazi official in ’87: I don’t recall Demjanjuk

June 17, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

MUNICH

A former administrator in a Nazi SS training camp told investigators that a camp ID card being used as evidence against John Demjanjuk appeared genuine, but that he did not remember Demjanjuk himself from the facility, according to evidence presented Wednesday.

Helmut Leonhardt, a former Cologne police officer who was sent to work in Trawniki training camp’s personnel office in 1942, told Israeli investigators in 1987 that he recognized the SS officers’ signatures on the Trawniki ID card that prosecutors say belonged to Demjanjuk and allegedly shows he has served time in the Sobibor death camp.

Demjanjuk denies having been in either camp, saying he is the victim of mistaken identity.

The 90-year-old retired Ohio autoworker faces a possible 15 years in prison if convicted in the Munich state court of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder — the number of people believed to have been killed in Sobibor during the time when Demjanjuk was reportedly there.

In the interrogation in Cologne in 1987, conducted by German authorities for Israeli investigators who were present, Leonhardt said the ID cards were not made by his office. But, he said, the one that prosecutors maintain belonged to Demjanjuk looked like others he had seen.

Leonhardt, who the court said is now dead, acknowledged testifying in a 1968 trial that he knew nothing of the ID cards. But he said he had been shown only a photocopy of the inside of the card then, and that in 1987 he had been shown photographs of the whole document.

Still, he said, he could not testify whether Demjanjuk was ever at the camp.