Episode 918
John Demjanjuk
Thu, 2019-Nov-07 01:28 UTC
Length - 6:43
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With 179,451 views on Wednesday, 6 November 2019 our article of the day is John Demjanjuk.
John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demianiuk; Ukrainian: Іван Миколайович Дем'янюк; 3 April 1920 – 17 March 2012) was a retired Ukrainian-American auto worker in the United States. During World War II, he was a soldier in the Soviet Red Army, a POW held by the Germans, and later a guard at a Nazi extermination camp.
John (Ivan) Demjanjuk was convicted in 2011 in Germany as an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews while acting as a guard at the Sobibór extermination camp in occupied Poland. Since his conviction had not been completed through the appeal judgment at the time of his death, Demjanjuk remained not guilty under German law. According to the Munich state court, Demjanjuk does not have a criminal record. Although remaining technically unconvicted under German law due to dying before his appeal was heard, the finding of guilt in a 91 day trial on 16 counts as an accessory to the murders had resulted in his being sentenced to five years in prison. Demjanjuk was born in Ukraine, and during World War II was drafted into the Soviet Red Army. He was captured by Germans after action in Eastern Crimea and became a prisoner of war. German treatment of Soviet POWs was typically harsh, and Demjanjuk "volunteered" for transfer to Trawniki concentration camp where special training was given for service as guards at extermination camps. He was a guard at Sobibor from March to September 1943 where, according to the findings at his final trial, he was found to have aided in the systematic murder of 28,060 persons. After the war, in 1952, he emigrated from West Germany to the United States. Demjanuk was granted US citizenship in 1958, whereupon he formally anglicized his name from "Ivan" to "John". In 1986, he was deported to Israel to stand trial for war crimes, after being identified by eleven Holocaust survivors, many from Israel, as "Ivan the Terrible", a guard at the Treblinka extermination camp in Nazi occupied Poland. Demjanjuk was accused of committing murder and acts of extraordinarily savage violence against camp prisoners during 1942–1943. He was convicted of having committed crimes against humanity and sentenced to death in 1988. The verdict was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993, based on new evidence that cast reasonable doubt over the identity of "Ivan the Terrible". Demjanjuk was nearly a decade younger than "Ivan the Terrible", who was believed to have been born around 1911. After the trial, in September 1993, Demjanjuk returned to his home in Ohio. In 1998, his citizenship was restored after a United States federal appeals court ruled that prosecutors had suppressed exculpatory evidence concerning his identity. In 2001, with new evidence, Demjanjuk was charged again, this time on the grounds that he had served as a guard named Ivan Demjanjuk at the Sobibor and Majdanek camps in Nazi occupied Poland and at the Flossenbürg camp in Germany. Separate documents supporting his presence had been found in archives from each of these camps. With his US citizenship again revoked in 2002, Demjanjuk again became a stateless person and remained so until his death in 2012. His deportation was again ordered in 2005, but even after exhausting his appeals in 2008, he remained in the United States because no country was then willing to accept him. Finally, on 11 May 2009, Demjanjuk was taken from his Cleveland home to the airport by ambulance to stand trial in Germany, where he arrived the next morning. On 13 July 2009, he was formally charged with over 27,900 counts of acting as an accessory to murder, one for each person who died at Sobibor during the time he was alleged to have served as a guard. His trial began 30 November, in Munich. On 12 May 2011, Demjanjuk was convicted pending appeal by an ordinary German criminal court as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor and sentenced to five years in prison. The interim conviction was later annulled, because Demjanjuk died before his appeal could be heard. After the conviction, he was released pending trial and final verdict by the German Appellate Court. He lived at a German nursing home in Bad Feilnbach, where he died on 17 March 2012. Despite decades of legal wrangling and controversy, Demjanjuk died a free man and legally innocent as his appeal had not been heard and decided. According to historian Professor Lawrence Douglas, who wrote a detailed history of the Demjanjuk case, conviction in the German court was the culmination of determined prosecutorial efforts in three countries over thirty years. He concluded that, in spite of the serious missteps along the way, the German verdict brought the case "to a worthy and just conclusion."
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:28 UTC on Thursday, 7 November 2019.
For the full current version of the article, see John Demjanjuk on Wikipedia.
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