Five years for retired car worker, 91, in Nazi death camp case

John Demjanjuk was found guilty of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder, one for each person who died while he was ruled to have been a guard at the Sobibor camp in Poland.

Presiding Judge Ralph Alt said he was a piece of the Nazis’ “machinery of destruction”.

The judge said: “The court is convinced that the defendant... served as a guard at Sobibor from March 27, 1943, to mid-September 1943,” closing a trial that has lasted nearly 18 months.

Demjanjuk sat in a wheelchair in front of the judges in Munich as they announced their verdict, but showed no reaction. Charges of accessory to murder carry a maximum term of 15 years in Germany.

Judge Alt ordered Demjanjuk released pending an appeal, and it could take six months or more for an appeal verdict to come.

There was no evidence that Demjanjuk committed a specific crime. The prosecution was based on the theory that if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing – the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts.

Integral to the prosecution’s case was an SS identity card that allegedly shows a picture of a young Demjanjuk, and indicates he trained at the SS Trawniki camp and was posted to Sobibor.

Though court experts said the card appears genuine, the defence maintains it is a fake produced by the Soviet KGB.

The US Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations also has said the card is genuine, but documents unearthed by the Associated Press news agency indicate that the FBI at one time had doubts similar to those aired by Demjanjuk’s defence about the evidence – though the material was never turned over to them.

Rudolf Salomon Cortissos, whose mother was gassed at Sobibor with thousands of other Dutch Jews, cried softly in a back row of the courtroom, wiping his tears with a white handkerchief.

“It’s very emotional – it doesn’t happen every day,” he said, adding that he was happy with the verdict and sentence. “For me it is satisfying,” he said.

It was not immediately clear how much credit Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who has been stripped of his US citizenship and has been in custody in Germany since his deportation two years ago, would get for time served.

Prosecutors had asked for a six-year term, taking into account the defendant’s age, and time he already served in Israel in the 1980s.

The defence has pledged to appeal the verdict.