Jan. 3




GERMANY/USA:

Case Against Ohio Man Could Be Germany's Last Nazi Crimes Trial


Prosecutors here have assembled a case against a retired autoworker
living in Ohio that could lead to Germany's last major Nazi war crimes
trial.

The Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, based for the
past half-century in this southwestern German town, recently recommended
the filing of murder charges against John Demjanjuk, 88, a Ukrainian by
birth who immigrated to the United States in 1952. Demjanjuk has long been
accused of working for the Nazis as a death camp guard, but his conviction
on similar charges in Israel was overturned in 1993 by that country's
Supreme Court.

It has been seven years since Germany last convicted a former Nazi of
committing atrocities under Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Although
prosecutors say they are pursuing other targets, the Demjanjuk case could
be Germany's final opportunity to bring a major Nazi figure to justice.

The few former Nazis still alive are in their late 80s or 90s, raising
doubts about their ability to stand trial. The trails of many fugitives
went cold decades ago. In other cases, there are no surviving
eyewitnesses.

"Our job is very difficult, and our success rate is not high," said Kurt
Schrimm, director of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg. "We don't know
exactly how long we'll be able to stay open. Our job will end when we
don't know what to do next."

Germany set up its Nazi investigation office in 1958 in response to
criticism that it had been too lax in pursuing Third Reich criminals after
the end of the war. Since then, the Central Office has investigated more
than 7,000 cases, though the number of active files has dwindled
substantially of late.

Schrimm said he spends 90 percent of his time these days working as a
"historian or a detective," with little practical hope of bringing anyone
to trial. He said that his staff, which includes seven investigators, is
pursuing a handful of cases but that only Demjanjuk is close to being
ready for prosecution.

"It's getting more and more difficult with each passing year," he said.

German prosecutors hope to win a rare conviction against a former Nazi in
an ongoing trial in Munich, where Josef Scheungraber, 90, stands accused
of murdering 14 Italian civilians in Tuscany in June 1944. His trial began
in September and is expected to continue for months.

In April, prosecutors in Dortmund indicted Heinrich Boere, 87, a confessed
SS commando accused of killing three Dutch civilians during the war. But
the case has been repeatedly delayed over questions of whether Boere is
fit to stand trial.

Critics have complained that Germany's efforts to bring Nazis to justice
have been hamstrung by a slow-moving bureaucracy and a reluctance among
some officials to try elderly citizens for crimes committed more than six
decades ago.

"The race against time has been lost," Charlotte Knobloch, president of
the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in a speech last month
commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Nazi investigation office in
Ludwigsburg. "An unknown number of grave crimes remain unpunished."

Knobloch praised the work of the Central Office but criticized the German
government for not giving it more authority. Under German law, the Central
Office can only investigate cases; it is up to state prosecutors to decide
whether to press charges.

The Central Office, for example, announced in November that it had
assembled enough evidence against Demjanjuk to warrant a trial. But
prosecutors in Munich, who have jurisdiction over the case, have moved
more cautiously and say they have not made a final decision.

"We will examine whether the evidence is sufficient during the coming
weeks and months," said Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld, a deputy spokesman
for the Munich prosecutors' office.

Demjanjuk lived briefly in Munich before he immigrated to the United
States. Germany's high court ruled in December that his past residency
in the city gives prosecutors there the authority to pursue a case against
him.

Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director
of its Jerusalem office, said there was plenty of justification for a
trial.

"There's no question that there's enough evidence against Demjanjuk, no
question at all," Zuroff said in a telephone interview. The decision on
whether to press charges, he said, was "primarily a political issue, to be
honest."

John H. Broadley, a lawyer in Washington who represents Demjanjuk,
declined to comment on the German investigation. He said Demjanjuk needs
blood transfusions twice a week and questioned his fitness to stand trial.
"He's in very poor health," Broadley said.

Demjanjuk lives outside Cleveland and for decades was an autoworker for
Ford. He became a U.S. citizen in 1958. The U.S. government has since
stripped him of his citizenship and is seeking to deport him, charging
that he covered up his Nazi past on immigration forms. But U.S. officials
lack jurisdiction to try him.

"He's stateless. We can put him on an airplane as soon as a country is
willing to take him," said Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of the Justice
Department's Office of Special Investigations, which oversees Nazi
war-crime cases.

So far, however, no country has been willing to accept Demjanjuk. Neither
Poland, where he allegedly served as a concentration camp guard, nor his
native Ukraine, which became an independent state only after the collapse
of the Soviet Union, has shown interest.

Demjanjuk is among five aging former Nazis whom the U.S. government is
seeking to deport. U.S. officials have criticized Germany for its
unwillingness so far to accept or prosecute the men, most of whom were
non-Germans who worked for the Third Reich.

"The two countries have not always seen eye-to-eye on this," Rosenbaum
said. "Clearly, time is our biggest enemy. We have to work as fast as we
responsibly can. It is still possible to achieve justice in some of these
cases."

U.S. officials and investigators from the Central Office in Ludwigsburg
said that Demjanjuk served as a guard at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in
German-occupied Poland, for six months in 1943. During that time, they
said, 29,000 people were killed at the camp.

Demjanjuk has denied wrongdoing, saying he was captured by the Germans in
1942 while serving in the Soviet army.

He has successfully contested past efforts to prosecute him. In 1986, the
United States extradited him to Israel, where he faced charges that he had
been a Nazi guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka
concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.

He was convicted in Israel and sentenced to death. But he was freed in
1993 on appeal after evidence emerged that investigators had confused him
with another Ukrainian guard at Treblinka.

In this case, the Nazi hunters in Ludwigsburg say, there is stronger
evidence against Demjanjuk, including his identity card from the Sobibor
camp. They also note that he admitted on his immigration application to
the United States a half-century ago that he had been in Sobibor. At the
time, details about the camp were not well known to U.S. officials.

Schrimm said there are no surviving eyewitnesses to testify against
Demjanjuk. But he said he was confident that prosecutors in Munich could
still win a conviction.

"We know that he was a guard at Sobibor, and we know that all guards at
Sobibor had to do the same work," he said. "All of them had to bring the
people from the trains and to the gas chambers and to remove the corpses
afterward."

(source: Washington Post)