Witness tells how Nazi guards were recruited

March 18, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

MUNICH

Soviet prisoners of war used by the Nazis as death-camp guards weren’t told what they were agreeing to do when they signed up to serve the Germans, an expert testified Wednesday in the trial of John Demjanjuk.

Demjanjuk, 89, a Ukrainian-born retired Ohio auto-worker who was once a Soviet Red Army soldier, is accused of agreeing to serve as a guard for the SS and training at the Nazis’ Trawniki camp after his capture in 1942.

Though Demjanjuk denies having served in any Nazi camp, the defense also has argued that Soviet POWs who were recruited to serve the Germans did so only to escape death themselves.

In testimony Wednesday, Dieter Pohl, an expert at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, said that when the SS recruited Red Army prisoners, the men were simply told that they were needed for “German service” or as “auxiliaries of the SS.”