German court convicts Demjanjuk of Nazi war crimes

MUNICH, Germany, (Reuters) – A German court sentenced  John Demjanjuk to five years in prison today for his role  in the killing of 27,900 Jews at the Nazi death camp Sobibor.
His lawyers will appeal the verdict.
The Munich court found the 91-year-old guilty of being an  accessory to mass murder as a guard at Sobibor camp in Poland  during World War Two.
Demjanjuk had been exonerated in a separate Holocaust trial  two decades ago in Israel, where he was initially sentenced to  death for being the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” camp guard at  Treblinka in Poland. The ruling was overturned by Israel’s  supreme court after new evidence exonerated him.
Ukraine-born Demjanjuk, who was once top of the Simon  Wiesenthal Center’s list of most wanted Nazi war criminals, said  he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941 then taken prisoner  of war by the Germans.
Demjanjuk attended the 18-month court proceedings in Munich  — birthplace of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement — in a wheelchair  and sometimes lying down, with his family trying to argue that  he was too frail to stand trial.
His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an e-mail ahead of the  verdict that his father was a victim of the Nazis and of  post-war Germany.
“While those who refuse to accept that reality may take  satisfaction from this event, nothing the Munich court can do  will atone for the suffering Germany has perpetrated upon him to  this day,” he said.
Prosecutors had faced several hurdles in proving Demjanjuk’s  guilt, with no surviving witnesses to his crimes and heavy  reliance on wartime documents, namely a Nazi ID card that  defence attorneys said was a fake made by the Soviets.
Guards at Nazi death camps like Sobibor were essential to  the mass killing of Jews because extermination was the focus of  such camps, prosecutors said. Some 250,000 Jews were killed at  Sobibor, according to the Wiesenthal Center.