Convicted Nazi camp guard Demjanjuk dies before appeal resolved

Associated Press

BERLIN

John Demjanjuk was convicted of being a low-ranking guard at Sobibor death camp, but his 35-year fight on three continents to clear his name — a legal battle that had not yet ended when he died Saturday at age 91 — made him one of the best-known faces of Nazi prosecutions.

The conviction of the retired Cleveland-area autoworker in a Munich court in May on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, which was still being appealed, broke new legal ground in Germany as the first time someone was convicted solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.

It has opened the floodgates to hundreds of new investigations in Germany, though his death serves as a reminder that time is running out for prosecutors.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk steadfastly maintained that he had been mistaken for someone else — first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.

And he is probably best known as someone he was not: the notoriously brutal guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka extermination camp. That was the first accusation against him, which led to his being extradited from the U.S. to Israel in the 1980s. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death — only to have the Israeli Supreme Court unanimously overturn the verdict and return him to the U.S. after it received evidence that another Ukrainian, not Demjanjuk, was that Nazi guard.

His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in a telephone interview from Ohio that his father apparently died of natural causes. “My father fell asleep with the Lord as a victim and survivor of Soviet and German brutality since childhood,” Demjanjuk Jr. said. “He loved life, family and humanity. History will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian POWs for the deeds of Nazi Germans.”

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