I'm all for bring Nazis to justice (what ones remain), no matter how old and frail they may be now. Period. Their frailty now does not excuse their past crimes.
There's some reasonable doubt about one of the documents--the hinge of this entire case. And that is troubling, because even five years is a death sentence for a frail 91-year-old. The case has hounded this man for 30 years--when there were more witnesses alive, and there should have been a stronger case, but the man was exonerated by the Israelis for being 'Ivan the Terrible' of Treblinka. Instead, he has been tried as a low-level Nazi guard at Sobibor, as an accessory to murder. About 250,000 people were killed at Sobibor. He was tried for his role in the deaths of 27,900 and today he was sentenced.
My gut reaction is yes, he was a camp guard. While he may have been a prisoner of war, sent to the camps to maintain order, I cannot simply dismiss him as a victim of the Nazis as his defence would like us to believe. There comes a point where you must refuse to do something, at the risk of your own life, because it is right. It is most likely that he was, indeed, an accessory to the murder of thousands. If that is the case, the sentence is appropriate, given the man's health. Otherwise I would have expected more. In all likelihood he will be given credit for time served, or at the very least, it will be tied up in appeals. I know his family would like to see him exonerated, but I think there is enough evidence that that is not going to happen.
There is the question as to whether one of the documents is real or forged. A recently declassified document from the FBI states that they believed it to most likely be fabricated. But no one seems definitive on whether it is real or forged. The American Justice Department believed it to be true. Certain the Germans do. So this will go down in history as no open-and-shut case, but rather a murky one.
I certainly think his citizenship should have been revoked and he be deported, as he was. He concealed his work at Sobibor on his application. Earlier, he had stated on a displaced persons application that he was a truck driver at Sobibor, claiming later that another person suggested it who had an atlas and there had been a lot of Soviets at Sobibor (he was Ukrainian, and was conscripted into the Soviet army). It does look like he was trying to conceal his real work at Sobibor, for obvious reasons.
John Demjanjuk found guilty of helping kill Jews in Nazi death camp: Verdict closes latest chapter in more than 30 years of legal wrangling
John Demjanjuk guilty of Nazi death camp murders
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