On the opening day of the trial of suspected Nazi war criminal Ivan Demjanjuk in Munich, his attorney said it was unfair for his client to be charged for following orders when his superiors were never charged. Demjanjuk, 89, a former autoworker who lived in near Cleveland, Ohio, and was extradited in May to Germany, appeared before the court in a wheelchair, covered by a blanket. He barely uttered a sound during the proceedings and appeared to have his eyes closed even as his lead attorney, Ulrich Busch, said that the judges and prosecutors should be removed from the case for being prejudiced against his client. The request was denied. Busch said the court had acted unjustly by refusing in the past to bring to trial those who had given orders to murder and preferring instead to try his client on suspicion of following orders.
Without suggesting that Demjanjuk was a murderous ‘Trawniki’ guard at Sobibor, as the prosecution charges, Busch said that the Trawnikis – many of them Soviet POWs who were trained by the SS – were just as much victims as Jews forced to work for the Nazis in concentration camps.
Demjanjuk has denied the charges and claimed he had been a Soviet prisoner of war in a German camp. If convicted, Demjanjuk could face a jail term of up to 15 years. In 2002, the US Justice Department charged Demjanjuk with being a guard at Sobibor and revoked his citizenship for lying about his Nazi past in order to gain citizenship.
In the early 1980s, Demjanjuk had been accused of being the notorious guard ‘Ivan the Terrible’ at the Treblinka death camp. He was deported to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death in 1988, but the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1993 after finding reasonable doubt that he was in fact not the guard in question. Monday's proceedings began an hour after the scheduled start time in order to accommodate the 250 accredited journalists and observers, among them a number of Holocaust survivors.
