Demjanjuk's Nazi ID card. Photo: DPA

'He was a part of the team at the Sobibor'

Published: 15 May 09 17:33 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20090515-19309.html

The likely trial of Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk may be one of the last times anyone is prosecuted for crimes committed during World War II.

Demjanjuk's extradition to Germany this week has sparked a new debate about whether the country has done enough to come to terms with and make restitution for its past. The Local spoke with Prof. Helgard Kramer, a specialist in cultural sociology and historical anthropology at Berlin’s Free University.

Hasn’t Germany come to terms with its past?

The confrontation with the country’s past picked up steam with the trial of [SS architect of the Holocaust Adolf] Eichmann in Jerusalem and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in 1963. Every generation has then had a new and different debate about it, like when Schindler’s List came out or [Daniel] Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Or even with the Wehrmacht exhibition about the crimes of the normal army. Right after the war there was silence but that changed in the 1960s and we’ve made good progress. In the 1980s, for example, a lot of memorials began cropping up.

Is this the right way to work through it?

It’s a past for which you can never get closure. And that isn’t even something to work toward. It’s a very difficult thing. It is one thing to learn about the Holocaust but it’s entirely different when it becomes personal. It’s hard to rectify your feelings for your grandparents and what you’ve learned about National Socialism and what some of them may have done. You always idealise your own family. The people who migrate here have a different view of the past but their children – the second and third generations – end up taking on the guilt as well.

What about Demjanjuk’s defence that he was forced to become a guard for the Nazis? It sounds almost plausible.

It’s been confirmed that he was a part of the team at the Sobibor [death camp]. In order for someone to be tried for murder in Germany you have to connect them to at least one death. The Nazis were very diligent record keepers and they can prove who died there while he worked there. The eyewitnesses don’t remember him but they have said that the Travniki guards there were very anti-Semitic and often used an extra dollop of sadism. Also he never took any opportunity to get away from the camp like some of his colleagues, albeit at a certain risk. If he never talks you’ll never be able to prove he was one of the more sadistic ones but he was there and he didn’t try to get away.

Even if they find other potential war criminals, they’re all getting very old. Will they be able to stand trial?

At their age it’s hard to say if they’ll be able to stand trial. The health of these criminals has a long history. So many cases in the ‘60s and ‘70s failed because they were able to get friendly doctors to testify that they were unfit for trial. These doctors were sometimes former Nazi doctors but their testimony was hard to contest. They would coach the criminals on how to feign various illnesses.

What else should Germany be doing to deal with this chapter of its history?

We have to ensure that the memories and confrontation take other forms. The conflict has to remain alive. There are a number of good initiatives. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin turned out very well and the cobblestone project here in Berlin [that places brass cobblestones with victims’ names in front of their former houses] is also a good thing.

Andrew Bulkeley (news@thelocal.de)

What do you think? Leave your comment below.

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Your comments about this article:

16:44 May 15, 2009 by Bruderinnot
"It's been confirmed that he was a part of the team at the Sobibor [death camp]. "

This is utter nonsense. None of the Sobibor survivors remember him being there including one man who was assigned to the guard barracks. He knew all the guards and he has testified that Demjanjuk was not at Sobibor as Demjanjuk has claimed from day one.

The Israli Supreme Court heard these charges of Sobibor in the indictment and found him innocent since the only proof was a forced KGB confession (the man "died" after signing) and the forged ID card - supplied by the communist Armand Hammer
16:57 May 15, 2009 by William Thirteen
Prof. Kramer might also note that the Stolpersteine are not a Berlin only phenomena but a Europe wide project by artist Gunter Demnig

http://www.stolpersteine.com
21:57 May 15, 2009 by Joseph Baugher
"The Nazis were very diligent record keepers and they can prove who died there while he worked there."

The Nazis claimed that Sobibor was a "transit camp." The prisoners who arrived there were not registered and no record card was made for them, so there are no individual death records for this camp. Even the exact number of deaths at Sobibor is unknown and estimates by Holocaust historians do not agree.

Survivors could testify that their relatives arrived with them on a transport train at Sobibor and were never seen again, but there is no documentation of the deaths at Sobibor.

Demjanjuk is accused of being an accessory to murder; the murder weapon was a gas chamber. The survivors do not agree on the number or size of the gas chambers at Sobibor. Historians do not agree on whether the gas chambers used carbon monoxide from diesel engines or gasoline engines. So the prosecution will have a hard time proving that the murder weapon existed.
02:33 May 17, 2009 by Coalbanks
I wonder what any one of us would have in the same circumstances? Or would do if the situation arose today? He & his fellow-slavs were under an eventual death sentence from the NAZI regime as I expect he knew, to defy would have been to shot at the very least or tossed into the gas chamber with other slavs/jews/rom/etc. Easy for us to say what SHOULD have ben done, difficult if not impossible to say with any certainty what we WOULD have done. Let him live out his days in the land of the dictatorship that ruled him or send him to the Ukraine - his homeland after all.
17:04 May 17, 2009 by Joseph Baugher
"He was part of the team at Sobibor"

Demjanjuk cannot be tried on a charge of being part of a team or a charge of participating in a common plan to commit murder. The prosecution will have to prove that he personally aided in the murder of a known individual whose death has been proven. At the Nuremberg IMT and the American Military Tribunals at Dachau, the Nazis were charged with participating in a "common plan" to commit war crimes. So anyone who was a guard at a camp was automatically guilty, regardless of what he or she personally did.
18:53 May 17, 2009 by Bipa
I am most interested in seeing any new hard evidence that has been found since the trial in Israel. We already know that the documents passed on from the KGB were possibly forged and cannot be relied upon. I will be very disappointed if the prosecution trots out the same old tainted evidence from KGB archives which has made up the foundation of the case up to now.

The whole thing actually started when the Soviets passed on lists of alleged ex-Nazis to the US back in 1975. The underlying motive is questionable. Were the Soviets actually searching for perpetrators of war crimes, or were they trying to discredit certain nationalities which were giving them trouble?
But it was important to them to divide the Jews and Ukrainians in the West who had joined together to expose the Soviet Russian totalitarian regime. T…
- from Divide and Conquer: The KGB disinformation campaign against Ukrainians and Jews
But, the Soviets wanted to cause a rift between the Jewish and Ukrainian communities in North America, which we all know were collaborating in the mid…
- from INTERVIEW: Yoram Sheftel, Israeli defender of John DemjanjukAnd some very important documents, whether allegedly real or faked, are still missing from the files even after all these years.
If John Demjanjuk had actually been a guard at Sobibor, as some are now claiming, he would have received basic training at Trawniki, and his completed…
- from My Campaign for Justice for John Demjanjuk
22:45 May 17, 2009 by Joseph Baugher
Being a guard in a Nazi camp was a crime during the war crimes trials immediately after the war, but it is not a crime under German law now. The prosecution will have to prove that Demjanjuk was an accessory to murder at Sobibor. First they will have to prove that Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor, and then that someone was murdered during that time. Then they will have to prove that Demjanjuk participated in this murder. The prosecution will have to prove how a person was murdered at Sobibor and show proof of a murder weapon. The judge will not be able to give judicial notice of what allegedly happened, instead of requiring proof.
23:18 May 18, 2009 by chicken1900
I'm fed up with the word 'will have to prove.
08:30 May 19, 2009 by redlawrey
What will all of this actually achieve? Will putting him in prison for the rest of his days - probably not that many - make any difference? Will it give some 'closure' to some of the camp survivors, will it assuage Germany's feeling of collective guilt?

I can't see how now it makes the slightest bit of difference.
09:19 May 19, 2009 by dang65
He was part of the "team"

I hope they've interviewed all the surviving customers of the camp to get their feedback and performance reviews.
01:46 May 20, 2009 by Joseph Baugher
To chicken1099:

Under German law, the prosecution will have to prove "intent to commit a crime." To do this, the prosecution will have to prove that Demjanjuk volunteered to join the SS when he was a Soviet Army soldier in a German POW camp. If the defense can show that Demjanjuk was forced to join the SS to save his own life, Demjanjuk will be acquitted. Demjanjuk does not admit that he was in the SS, but he has a scar where his SS tattoo was removed. He may be guilty of lying about his past, but that is not what he is charged with in this case.
19:40 May 21, 2009 by Vargaz
Anyone who witnessed crimes against humanity and did nothing to stop them is just as guilty as those committing them, but its a bit late now. After 60 years, perhaps its time to move on from the past and accept the futility of never being able to change it.
20:52 May 21, 2009 by Theatregroup
[SS architect of the Holocaust Adolf] Eichmann
more like the Quantity Surveyor of the holocaust... the quality of TT debate on the Second World war just proves that not enough has been researched and published on it.
21:39 May 21, 2009 by kato
Being a guard in a Nazi camp was a crime during the war crimes trials immediately after the war, but it is not a crime under German law now.
Purely technically, the postwar Denazification laws are still in power, and will be as long as Art 139 remains in the constitution. Technically, Demjanjuk could hence be sentenced to 10 years work camp if proven that he was a member of the SS, or 5 years if they can only prove he was at Sobibor as anything but a prisoners. And by work camp i mean Gulag.

Some government elements actually tried to use these laws against Neonazis back in the 80s, but the judicial side sorta balked at it.
21:48 May 21, 2009 by Joe
Hhmm lot of first time posters on this thread...
21:56 May 21, 2009 by Kay
They are posting on The Local's site, where the story originated, and their comments are cross-posted here.

Confused? Join the club.
17:40 May 22, 2009 by Joseph Baugher
To Vargaz: "Anyone who witnessed crimes against humanity and did nothing to stop them is just as guilty as those committing them" Crimes against Humanity were not crimes until after the war when the Allies made up a new law after the fact. How was Demjanjuk supposed to know that he was committing a crime by not stopping what was happening at Sobibor. If he had tried to stop the alleged Crimes against Humanity, he would have been shot on the spot.
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