American’s Holocaust trial begins

Prosecutors charge that Demjanjuk, 89, listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as its most wanted Nazi war criminal, worked as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943.

It was the second time Demjanjuk has been prosecuted. He was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 only to have his conviction overturned five years later as a case of mistaken identity.

Demjanjuk arrived in court in a wheelchair pushed by a police officer. His lawyers and family had argued that he was too sick to stand trial, suffering from a variety of ailments including bone marrow disease. But doctors have concluded that he is fit to stand trial, provided that hearings are restricted to two 90-minute sessions a day.

Yesterday’s second session ended after about 30 minutes. Doctors said Demjanjuk had complained of serious pain and was given a shot. The trial is to resume today. The proceedings began with defense lawyers challenging the credentials of the judge and prosecutors, accusing them of bias.

As survivors and defendants have aged and died, the prosecution of Nazi-era war criminals has become increasingly difficult. There are no witnesses to testify to Demjanjuk’s presence at the camp or the specific crimes he stands accused of committing there.

Demjanjuk was deported from the United States to Germany in May, and has been in custody since then. A native of the Ukraine, Demjanjuk was a soldier in the Soviet army, fighting the Germans, until he was captured by the Nazis in the Crimea in 1942. He says he spent most of the remainder of the war as a prisoner. But according to prosecutors, he went to the SS training camp in Trawniki, Poland, where foreign nationals were trained to work in the death camps.

The case against Demjanjuk involves some 15 transport trains known to have arrived in 1943 from the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, carrying 29,579 people. Prosecutors are charging Demjanjuk with 27,900 counts on the assumption that some must have died in transit or been spared for a time to work at the camp.

The prosecutors say they are confident they can convict Demjanjuk based on an SS identity card and the orders sending him to Sobibor from Trawniki. Because Sobibor was an extermination camp, devoted almost entirely to killing, they will argue that working as a guard there meant assisting in mass murder. But Demjanjuk’s lawyers question the authenticity of the documents.

“When a transport of Jews arrived, routine work was suspended and all camp personnel took part in the routine process of extermination,’’ according to the indictment.

Demjanjuk could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted, but would probably die in a German prison cell. It is unclear what would happen were he to be acquitted. Given that his United States citizenship has been revoked, he would probably remain in Germany. The proceedings, which could last until next May, have been described as the last major Nazi war crimes trial, but new cases keep surfacing as research continues into the systematic murder of European Jews during the Holocaust.

“These are the final efforts, where one says, the time really is running out but there is still the chance to bring a few more cases,’’ said Andreas Eichmüller, a researcher on Nazi prosecutions at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich.

In an e-mail statement late Sunday, his son, John Demjanjuk Jr., rejected the rush to judgment against his father, pointing out that in the 1980s, American and Israeli prosecutors “succeeded in convicting, and having sentenced to death, John Demjanjuk for being someone he wasn’t.’’

Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 as the infamously sadistic Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, only to see the conviction overturned in 1993. He was freed by Israel’s Supreme Court after evidence surfaced suggesting that another man was probably Ivan the Terrible.