Community | May 12, 2011 | 104 comments

91 year old convicted of aiding murder of 27,900 Jews in Holocaust

source: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/john-demjanjuk-convicted-of-aiding-murder-of-27-900-jews...

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maasanova
A 91 year old "Nazi," retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk was convicted of thousands of counts of acting as an accessory to murder at a Nazi death camp and sentenced on Thursday to five years in prison.

There was no evidence Demjanjuk committed a specific crime. The prosecution was based on the THEORY that if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing - the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts.

Note: In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court acquitted him of all war crimes charges and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit, had committed fraud upon the court by withholding exculpatory evidence in the case.
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104 comments // 91 year old convicted of aiding murder of 27,900 Jews in Holocaust

  • Radical_Centrist
    • +2
      Radical_Centrist  

    • I for one feel sorry for John Demjanjuk. This man has gone through more than 20 years of BS. First he was accused of being Ivan the terrible. They even paraded Holocaust survivors into court claiming they remembered his face. He was convicted, but to the credit of the Israeli Supreme court the conviction was overturned because they saw through the lies. This man did what he had to in order to survive and was a Model US Citizen for more than 40 years. Personally I think the Nazi Hunters SHOULD focus their attention on the Vatican and the Swiss Bankers INCLUDING Jewish ones like the Rothschild's and Warburg's.

    • 1 year ago
  • littlwarrior
  • SoCalFramer
    • +1
      SoCalFramer  

    • There had to be a lot of circumstantial evidence to convict this guy. Trials are held more then once for several reasons. His age has nothing to do with this trial. I believe the Nazi's were nice to the elderly Jews. If this guy is guilty he should hang.

    • 1 year ago
  • Radical_Centrist
  • crystalman
    • +1
      crystalman  

    • Demjanjuk was convicted of assisting in the murder of 28,000 people...and then was given a suspended sentence pending an appeal, and sent back home. Also,his sentence will not be served as the years spent in custody will be taken into consideration. Germany is still playing the same old game of letting off its henchmen lightly. About 400,000 people actively participated in the murders of the Final Solution and only 8000 have been convicted, and only a few of them got the death sentence. Some of the worst mass murderers are buried in Landsberg with marked graves and crosses....Blobel who managed the massacre of 37,000 Jews at Babi Yar in 2 days (amongst many others), Otto Moll, who specialised in throwing children alive into burning pits in front of their mothers at Birkenau, and a few others in the same prison cemetery. I visited it last year. A sobering place. The locals in Landsberg...famous also for being where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in the prison......protested when the Bavarian government decided to remove the nameplates on the graves to prevent neo-Nazi pilgrimages. They love these scumbags..they are seen as heroes and good Germans.

      Germany has not confronted its heart of darkness.

      Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose.

    • 1 year ago
  • maasanova
    • +1
      maasanova  
    • crystalman:

      Well if it makes you feel any better crystalman Russia has not confronted its heart of darkness as the Russians have never gone after any of their horrible mass murderers either.

    • 1 year ago
  • mrbeckett81
    • +1
      mrbeckett81  

    • Is it just me, or does this (along with the death of Osama Bin Laden) seem a little anti-climactic? Too much time has passed for it to really be relevant for most of us.

    • 1 year ago
  • congoboy
  • hombre76
    • +1
      hombre76  

    • wow aquited by the people you are acused of killing and you still get convicted ...thats some BS. If all it takes is being at the camps then we have a lot more old farts to hunt down cause their are thousands of enlisted and even low ranked officers who we released because they where concidered to be just soldiers. Plus as I understand most of this "evidance" was given through the USSR during the cold war when one of their stated missions was discredting the US by "revealing" evidence of nazis being sheltered in the US. I mean shit germany even pressed children as young as 12 to man the baricades in Berlin when the russians took it. Im sure if we dug we could find evidance of children working at the camps too...should we charge them as well? what about the residence of the towns near the camps who supplied the germans with food and labor and all manner of assistance should we just assume since they were there that they too took part in the killings? Am I the only one who sees how flimsy a fucking argument this is to convict a man on?

    • 1 year ago
  • congoboy
    • +1
      congoboy  
    • Image
    • hombre76:

      wow youre a lot more sensitive than your avatar and the man you revere. maybe you should choose a new one...The real Guevara was a reckless bourgeois adrenaline-junkie seeking a place in history as a liberator of the oppressed. But this fanatic’s vehicle of “liberation” was Stalinism, named for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, murderer of well over 20 million of his own people. As one of Castro’s top lieutenants, Che helped steer Cuba’s revolutionary regime in a radically repressive direction. Soon after overthrowing Batista, Guevara choreographed the executions of hundreds of Batista officials without any fair trials. He thought nothing of summarily executing even fellow guerrillas suspected of disloyalty and shot one himself with no due process.

      Che was a purist political fanatic who saw everything in stark black and white. Therefore he vociferously opposed freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, protest, or any other rights not completely consistent with his North Korean-style communism. How many rock music-loving teens sporting Guevara t-shirts today know their hero supported Cuba’s 1960s’ repression of the genre? How many homosexual fans know he had gays jailed?

      Did the Obama volunteers in that Texas campaign headquarters with Che’s poster on the wall know that Guevara fervently opposed any free elections? How “progressive” is that?

      How socially just was it that Che was enraged when the Russians blinked during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and withdrew their nuclear missiles from the island, thus averting a nuclear war? Guevara was such a zealous ideologue that he relished the specter of millions of Cuban lives sacrificed on the altar of communism, declaring Cuba “a people ready to sacrifice itself to nuclear arms, that its ashes might serve as a basis for new societies.” Some humanitarian. http://www.therealcuba.com/MurderedbyChe.htm

    • 1 year ago
  • crystalman
  • hombre76
  • hombre76
    • 0
      hombre76  
    • congoboy:

      And once again you attack an avitar because you have nothing of substance to say on the topic at hand ..... also one can admire a person with out being a deciple to their every moment in life, whitch is what you assume I do with che. as ussual this only makes an ass of you and your opinion.

    • 1 year ago
  • hombre76
  • congoboy
    • 0
      congoboy  
    • hombre76:

      my opinion of him shouldnt matter to you, nor to him since he's been dead quite a while now. i just wondered if you knew the full extent of his destructive exploits and the negative impact it could have on the way people view you and how it could form a non representative opinion of what you represent

    • 1 year ago
  • congoboy
  • ninetyseven
  • Buddha2112
    • +3
      Buddha2112  

    • Why is everyone ok with this? What is wrong with you? Just because he was once at a camp, he becomes evil... at 91 years old???

      Why is an old man being put in prison for 5 years? He will probably die soon, just let him live out his life. There is NO evidence, and he was already acquitted of war crimes. Why was he even on trial again?

      Sounds like someone felt guilty and went on a ghost hunt to make themselves feel better.

      The fact that this kinda bullshit holds up internationally should make you all worry about what they can do to you or any one of us. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE, and this man was convicted on thousands accounts of accessory to murder. Am I the only one that sees the issue? Just tell the masses that 'he was a nazi' or... in today's world 'he was a Islamist' and bam, all rights out the window, and people cheer. Double standards much?

    • 1 year ago
  • congoboy
    • 0
      congoboy  
    • Buddha2112:

      if he is guilty of the crimes against humanity then he deserves his fate. a lot of germans, even if not directly involved with genocide were well aware of what was happening in their country at the time. one who keeps silent is just as guilty as the perpetrator.

    • 1 year ago
  • galwayman
  • crystalman
  • galwayman
  • congoboy
  • freecrack
  • Saladin
  • ninetyseven
  • freecrack
  • GENERALNATTY
    • +2
      GENERALNATTY  

    • Born on April 3, 1920, in Kiev, Ukraine, Demjanjuk said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941 and was taken prisoner of war by the Germans a year later.

      * Prosecutors said that as a prisoner of war he worked as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland, where an estimated 250,000 Jews were killed.

      * He emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s and became a naturalized citizen in 1958, working as an engine mechanic in Ohio.

      Demjanjuk on trial:

      * He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel, where he was sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors said he was the notorious guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka camp where 870,000 people died.

      * The Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction and death sentence in 1993 and freed him after newly released records from the former Soviet Union showed another man, Ivan Marchenko, was probably the Treblinka guard.

      * He returned to his home near Cleveland in 1993 and, in 1998, the United States restored his citizenship. But the U.S. Justice Department the following year refiled its case against him, arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps and had hidden the facts when he emigrated.

      * A federal judge rescinded his citizenship in 2002 and he was ordered to be deported in 2005. He fought deportation for years in a number of courts but Germany finally issued an arrest warrant charging him with complicity in the death of 28,060 Jews and requested his deportation.

      A new trial:

      * Germany's Constitutional Court turned down an appeal in 2009 from Demjanjuk, clearing the way for a new trial to start. Demjanjuk was deported from the United States in May 2009 and has been in jail near Munich ever since.

      * In July 2009, another appeal was turned down, rejecting Demjanjuk's argument that his deportation from the United States infringed his basic rights.

      * The Simon Wiesenthal Center has said Demjanjuk pushed men, women and children into gas chambers at Sobibor. Demjanjuk has denied any role in the Holocaust. His family had argued he was too frail to stand trial.

      * During the trial Demjanjuk threatened to go on hunger strike unless the court allowed him to present evidence from a KGB file from Russia and Ukraine that could exonerate him.

      * Prosecutors demanded a six-year jail term but could have sought a term of up to 15 years.

      * In closing arguments, Demjanjuk's defense team demanded that he be awarded damages for false imprisonment.

      * Demjanjuk's defense attorneys said ahead of the sentencing that they would appeal any guilty verdict.

    • 1 year ago
  • Straighttalker
  • good_stuff
    • +1
      good_stuff  

    • What a waste of resources. The point of laws is to protect people, so it is silly to prosecute someone that poses no threat to anyone. Not saying the law agrees with me, but that is my breakdown of what the founding fathers intended, and why I don't agree with this case being brought to court.

      War is a nasty thing, but being on the losing side is always the nastiest. Didn't we learn from WWII that you have to let the grudges fade otherwise they come back to haunt you (i.e. nazis easily took power of germany after WWI because germany was in a massive depression due to the loss of WWI and nobody gave them money to rebuild). After WW2 we rebuilt germany and japan to avoid this mistake again.

    • 1 year ago
  • Joeydee44
  • congoboy
  • Straighttalker
    • +4
      Straighttalker  

    • Evidence is not clear about this case. Does the preponderance of the facts show that he committed the crimes? Not sure! Evidence need to put him in the front and center of the crime: Participating; supporting, etc.

    • 1 year ago
  • KSirys
    • 0
      KSirys  
    • Straighttalker:

      There's no need for evidence... the jails in the US are for profit and the rich... it doesn't matter if you're guilty or innocent, if you can make them money and you're poor, you qualify for jail!

    • 1 year ago
  • GENERALNATTY
  • KSirys
    • +1
      KSirys  
    • GENERALNATTY:

      You know, i read the thing quickly and thought it was here in the US. Once i saw "Ohio man" i quickly read the rest.. there i go, making stupid comments without reading corrently, thank you for pointing it out to me.

    • 1 year ago
  • congoboy
  • KSirys
  • congoboy
  • NiceN
  • vixxxen618
    • +2
      vixxxen618  
    • NiceN:

      WHAT? So a 91-year-old priest that raped a child 75 years ago should just be "forgiven" because of his age? Or maybe we should just forget his heinous acts since they were so long ago. Or maybe because we should practice healing and turn the other cheek. Yeah... right. You probably wouldn't feel the same way if he had sent YOUR kid to be gassed or worked to death in a concentration camp.

      I am not going to speculate as to this man's innocence, I am only commenting on your proposed solution as to what we should do with very old people convicted of crimes like this.

    • 1 year ago
  • ThirdSection
    • +2
      ThirdSection  
    • NiceN:

      He was sentenced to 5 years, and released pending appeal, for shoving thousands of people into a gas chamber, after being allowed to live a full, productive life. That sounds pretty lenient, forgiving, and healing to me!

    • 1 year ago
  • crystalman
  • congoboy
  • congoboy
  • michail77
    • +3
      michail77  

    • I'm just not sure about this case.

      He fought against the Germans and was captured as a POW. What happened after that is speculation and difficult to prove beyond any sort of reasonable doubt. Especially after all this time.

      It seems Germany has been making his life a misery since they first invaded his country.

    • 1 year ago
  • crystalman
    • -1
      crystalman  
    • michail77:

      He participated in the most monstrous crime against humanity in history. But consider this. He had a choice....either die in the gas chambers himself or die a slow horrible death through starvation and torture(and 2 million Russian POWs died this way in Auschwitz and other camps)......or serve as a guard for the SS in a death camp faciliating the deaths of thousands. what would you have done?

    • 1 year ago
  • michail77
    • +2
      michail77  
    • crystalman:

      I'd probably choose death over committing such acts. But is there even solid evidence that proves he committed such crimes? Without that he appears to be another victim of Nazi Germany that was lucky enough to survive.

      Those were times to live through I can't even imagine. When survival instincts kick in it's hard to say what one will do. There were also Jews who hid out on the other side.

      The Nazis elites that fled to places like Argentina are the ones who should have been brought to justice.

    • 1 year ago
  • freecrack
  • congoboy
  • crystalman
  • Nephwrack
  • congoboy
  • ArchDruid
  • maasanova
    • +1
      maasanova  
    • ArchDruid:

      Yeah, Yahoo News is reporting that they released him. It's just a shame because they made this guy's life hell even after he was already aquitted more than a decade ago.

    • 1 year ago
  • crystalman
  • crystalman
  • maasanova
  • kennymotown
  • maasanova
  • Mikey_Pogoloff
  • ArchDruid
  • crystalman
    • 0
      crystalman  
    • ArchDruid:

      The Israeli Supreme Court cleared him of being 'Ivan the Terrible', a particularly vicious and sadistic guard at Treblinka death camp.
      This verdict today regards the time he served as a guard at Sobibor death camp

    • 1 year ago
  • maasanova
  • vixxxen618
  • crystalman
  • vixxxen618
    • -1
      vixxxen618  
    • crystalman:

      You can always tell who the Christians are. They're the first to open their traps and point fingers at how horrible everyone ELSE is. You continually prove your inability to think objectively and your lack of creativity EVERY TIME YOU TALK.

    • 1 year ago
  • maasanova
  • curtisreed
    • 0
      curtisreed  
    • maasanova:

      yeah, and that poor OJ Simpson, ya know? acquitted and then they tried him again in civil court and found him guilty, damn ruined his life, ya KNOW?

      as for the lives of the people he killed...well who cares, right?

      RUINED this guy's life?! SERIOUSLY? he participated in GENOCIDE. He helped kill TENS of THOUSANDS of innocent people--kinda ruined their lives forever, and yet he's had DECADES of life they didn't get.

      And you actually are feeling bad for a genocidal killer. Good on ya, maasanova!

    • 1 year ago
  • curtisreed
  • maasanova
    • 0
      maasanova  
    • curtisreed:

      I care, that's why I'm asking you and crystalman for the names, so we can get down to the bottom of this! If he helped kill 27900 Jews or only one Jew, surely the courts had evidence of this such as names of the dead Jews or other camp prisoners he killed, right?

    • 1 year ago
  • crystalman
    • +1
      crystalman  
    • maasanova:

      you really don't want to know but I'll tell you. There were two camps at Auschwitz...Auschwitz 1, the main camp and Auschwitz 2 at Birkenau, 3 km away, where the gas chambers and crematoria operated. They kept a register at Auschwitz 1 because it was a labour camp but Birkenau was a death camp and registrations were not kept there. Similarly no registers were kept at the other death camps in Operation Reinhard...Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, and in part Majdanek.

    • 1 year ago
  • maasanova
  • crystalman
    • +1
      crystalman  
    • maasanova:

      you haven't understood because you don't want to. you will never cease to let go of your resistance to the Jewish narrative.

      People who were selected to work at the camp were registered but not those who went straight from the train to the gas chambers, which were the majority of the arrivals. Many worked at Birkenau on the Sonderkommando or at 'canada' the sorting area. Most were later dispensed with when they outlived their usefulness and also to eliminate any witnesses and later testimony, but some survived.

      In the meantime, try letting go of your petty considerations and opening your heart.

    • 1 year ago
  • maasanova
  • crystalman
  • freecrack
  • freecrack
  • freecrack
    • +1
      freecrack  
    • maasanova:

      it isnt as if that would matter anyway.
      thier are lists.lists wich im sure you would claim are invalid by some strained mental gymnastics, like zionist forgeries.

      nor do you accept the resources when offered, as you have still to respond to the results of the fogel murders.after claiming all that you required was a news source to validate the notion it was dont by palestinians, as opposed to the asian guy story.

      wich im sure those palis didnt do it either, just israel tortured them into being proud symbols to fellow terrorists in your mind.

      look forward to your obfuscation by expounding on the irrelevance of this due to the thread not being about that.despite your always present narrative being the same old race baiting.

    • 1 year ago
  • freecrack
    • +1
      freecrack  
    • maasanova:

      still claiming your not a sick holocaust denier?
      just curious how many instances you need to offer that various elements didnt happen before they in summation sow holocaust denial, as a whole.

    • 1 year ago
  • freecrack
    • +1
      freecrack  
    • maasanova:

      the names of the people killed are the names of registered citizens who went mia upon german occupation.
      the body counts are based largely on nazi documentation.
      in combination with one another, people who avail themselves of deductive reasoning, forensicly conclude where the missing ended up.
      if you need the list you can search the regional records yourself, or look at shoa websites wich list them.

      if a jew is killed in the forest and no one is around to hear it did it happen?
      u r sick

    • 1 year ago
  • freecrack
  • freecrack
    • +1
      freecrack  
    • maasanova:

      you seem to be just find with a wide variety of greater inconsistencies when the narrative demonizes jews.
      like the dancing israelis bit, wich im still waiting for you to explain by what amazing new technological advancement one can figure out the nationality of others soley by observing dancing techniques.
      but yeah, the holocaust stuff is just a bridge too far.

    • 1 year ago
  • crystalman
  • vixxxen618
  • maasanova
    • 0
      maasanova  
    • freecrack:

      That is a false analogy as well as a non-sequitur.

      Osama bin Laden was not "cleared" of anything to my knowledge, but I'd like to see what you offer as proof of bin Laden being "cleared.".

      I think that you, freecrack are mistaking being "cleared" with the fact that the FBI admitted that there is no hard evidence linking him to the 9/11 terror bombings as stated by Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI in June of 2006.

    • 1 year ago
  • freecrack
    • 0
      freecrack  
    • maasanova:

      well, bin laden is a murderer, and has never served any time for it.
      is that really tricky for you to figure out on your own?
      and then when one offers the nuanced arguments (that you apparently require) they are obfuscating via "wall of text".
      just add that to the ever growing hypocritical list of catch 22's you imagine anyone but you thinks is valid.

    • 1 year ago
  • littlwarrior
  • congoboy
  • congoboy
  • congoboy
  • congoboy
    • 0
      congoboy  
    • vixxxen618:

      i dont think the agreement that they were nazi german fascist murdering bastards is limited to christians only. a few of us jews can be thrown in the mix. not sure about 7th century islamo-fascist pigs though

    • 1 year ago
  • congoboy
  • vixxxen618
  • maasanova
    • 0
      maasanova  
    • congoboy:

      You mean "vermin" like Elie Wiesel, who was actually treated by Nazi doctors for a foot infection and who was somehow spared the "gas chambers" when allegedly if you couldn't work you were immediately sent to the gas chambers?

      You mean the same Elie Wiesel who decided to flee Auschwitz with the Nazis instead of staying at the camps to be rescued by the invading Soviet Army?

    • 1 year ago
  • congoboy
  • congoboy
  • vixxxen618
    • 0
      vixxxen618  
    • congoboy:

      Yes it does matter. Not so much that you are a Jew, but more so the fact that you believe in any religion at all. That matters to me, and it does have some affect on your opinion.

    • 1 year ago
  • congoboy
  • vixxxen618
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