Jews were reduced to ashes within a half-hour of their arrival at the Sobibór extermination camp

Philip Bialowitz is one of the few survivors of the Sobibór extermination camp, who is still living.  He was one of the prisoners who escaped from the camp, “running through machine gun fire and minefields,” according to this article in a Florida newspaper on March 7, 2013.

This quote is from the news article:

“…We were reduced to ashes within a half-hour of our arrival,” Bialowitz said about his fellow prisoners at Sobibór, a Nazi prison camp. [...]

It was not a labor camp — it was an extermination camp. Jews from across Europe were brought in by train and almost immediately gassed and then burned in mass cremations. The Jewish Virtual Library estimates 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibór in 18 months.”

The photo below shows the location at Sobibór where a brick building with gas chambers once stood. A large block of stone represents the gas chambers in two buildings at Sobibór, which were torn down long ago. Survivors of Sobibór do not agree on the number or size of the gas chambers. The victims were killed with carbon monoxide from the exhaust of engines taken from captured Soviet tanks, which were stored in in the camp. There is also disagreement among Holocaustians on whether these were diesel engines or gasoline engines.

Monuments at Sobibór where the gas chambers were once located Photo Credit: Alan Collins

This quote is from the news article:

Now a small memorial sits in a dense forest at Sobibór. Bialowitz visits every year.

“I stand on the ashes of 250,000 Jews, in the middle of a forest, hidden from the conscience of the world.”

The photo below shows another view of the red stone sculpture, which represents a woman, looking up at the sky, holding a small child in her arms. In the background can be seen the huge mound of ashes that is located in the former camp. These are the ashes of the 250,000 Jews who were gassed and burned at Sobibór.

Sobibor Monument with ashes in the background Photo Credit: Alan Collins

Ashes of the Jews who were gassed and burned at Sobibor Photo Credit: Alan Collins

The photo above shows a huge mound of ashes and bone fragments surrounded by a stone wall. In front of the wall is a glass display case which contains a small amount of ashes and bone. There is also a display of ashes and bone fragments in the Museum at Sobibór.

Hopefully, Philip Bialowitz does not stand on this mound of ashes once a year when he goes back to visit the former camp.

Contrary to Biolowitz’s claim that the Jews were turned into ashes within a half hour of arrival, most Holocaust historians say that the bodies of the Jews who were gassed at Sobibór were first buried and then exhumed and burned.  This same procedure was followed at the Belzec, Treblinka and Chelmno extermination camps where the bodies were first buried and then exhumed and burned.

In an attempt to destroy all the evidence, the ashes of the victims at Chelmno were hauled away secretly during the night by the SS men and taken to another town where they were dumped into a river.

The ashes at Treblinka and Belzec were buried to destroy the evidence. Only at Sobibór were the ashes of the victims left behind as incriminating evidence.

There is a similar mound of ashes at the Memorial Site of the Majdanek camp, where the ashes of 18,000 Jews, who were shot on  November 3, 1943, have been placed under a dome, which is shown in the photo below.

Ashes of 18,000 Jews who were shot at Majdanek in 1943 Photo Credit: Simon Robertson

The Sobibór camp was quite small; it was only 400 meters wide and 600 meters long. The entire camp was enclosed by a barbed wire fence that was three meters high. On three sides of the camp was a mine field, intended to keep anyone from approaching the camp. The watch towers were manned by Ukrainian SS guards who had been conscripted from captured soldiers in the Soviet Army to assist the 30 German SS men who were the administrators of the camp.

The Jews arrived on trains which stopped at the ramp across from the Sobibór station, or in trucks from nearby Polish villages. Most of the Jews were transported in cattle cars, but the 34,000 Dutch Jews who were sent to Sobibór arrived in passenger trains, according to Toivi Blatt, one of the prisoners who was chosen to be one of the helpers at Sobibór.

At the entrance to the camp, the victims were instructed to deposit their hand baggage and purses before proceeding along the path, called the “Himmelfahrtstrasse” (Street to heaven), which led to the spot where the hair was cut from the heads of the women, and then on to the gas chambers disguised as showers. According to Toivi Blatt, all documents, photos and personal items were removed from the confiscated baggage and anything that could not be recycled to send to Germany was burned in open fires that lit up the night sky.

The Sobibór camp was on the eastern edge of German-occupied Poland, five kilometers west of the Bug river. The Bug river was as far as trains from western Europe could go without changing the wheels to fit the train tracks in the Soviet Union, which were a different gauge. On the other side of the Bug river from Sobibór was Ukraine, which had belonged to the Soviet Union until it was taken by the Germans shortly after their invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

The unsuspecting Jews who arrived at Sobibór were told that they would be sent to work camps in Ukraine after they had taken a shower, but instead, the Jews were immediately killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

Sobibór was one of the three Aktion Reinhard camps which were set up following the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 when “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe” was planned.

The Nazis claimed that the Aktion Reinhard camps were transit camps for the “evacuation of the Jews to the East,” a euphemism for the genocide of the Jews. Unlike the death camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek, the three Aktion Reinhard camps did not have ovens to cremate the bodies. The Jews were not registered upon arrival at the Aktion Reinhard camps and no death records were kept.

The head of Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard) was SS-Brigadeführer Odilio Globocnik, who had previously been the Gauleiter of Vienna, Austria. Unfortunately, Globocnik and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler both committed suicide after being captured by the British, so we will never know their version of what happened.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946, documents were introduced which showed an exchange of letters in 1943 between Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the head of all the concentration camps, and Richard Glücks, the Inspector of the Concentration Camps, in which Glücks suggested that Sobibór be converted into a concentration camp. In a letter dated 5 July 1943, Himmler rejected this idea. This indicates that Sobibór was not a concentration camp, but rather a camp that was not part of the Nazi concentration camp system.

The three Aktion Reinhard camps were all in remote locations, but “each site was on a railroad line linking it with hundreds of towns and villages whose Jewish communities were now trapped and starving” in the spring of 1942, according to Martin Gilbert’s book entitled The Holocaust. Sobibór was linked by rail with many large Jewish communities, including Lublin, Wlodawa and Chelm. Jews were also brought from the Theresienstadt ghetto, located in what is now the Czech Republic, and from the Netherlands, to be gassed at Sobibór.

Deportations to Sobibór began in mid April 1942 with transports from the town of Zamosc in Poland, according to Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert. The Jews from the Lublin ghetto were also sent to Sobibór to be gassed, although there were several gas chambers at Majdanek just outside the city of Lublin.

During the first phase of the extermination of the Jews at Sobibór, which lasted until July 1942, an estimated 100,000 Jews were gassed to death. Their bodies were buried in mass graves, then dug up later and burned on pyres. During the next phase, the bodies were burned immediately, according to Toivi Blatt, one of the few survivors of Sobibór. At the age of 15, Blatt had been selected to work in sorting the clothing in the camp. Philip Bialowitz was also selected to work in sorting the possessions of the Jews who arrived at the camp.

This quote is from the news article about Philip Bialowitz:

Bialowitz was a teenager when he arrived with what remained of his family at the camp on the outskirts of the village of Sobibór in Poland. Prisoners who had a trade deemed useful by the guards were spared, to be used as slaves in the camp. Bialowitz’s brother was a pharmacist, and he told the guards Bialowitz was his assistant. The brothers were saved; the rest of the family was not.

Bialowitz said goodbye to his sisters and niece.

“My niece was crying as she hugged me,” Bialowitz said. “She knew she was going to die. At 7 years old, she knew.”

Upon arriving at the camp, prisoners were stripped of their clothes and all their belongings. Bialowitz was forced to search through their belongings, giving anything of value to the guards and burning all documents.

He said he tried to commit to memory the faces from thousands of families’ photographs before torching them.

Under constant threat of death, he had to cut the hair of women stripped naked on their last stop before the gas chambers. He was forbidden to utter a word of comfort to them.

During World War II, and for years afterward, the Sobibór camp was virtually unknown. William Shirer did not even mention it in his monumental 1147-page book entitled The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It was not until the release of a 1987 TV movie, Escape from Sobibor, based on a book with the same name, that the public knew of this remote spot where 250,000 Jews lost their lives. The movie tells the story of the revolt during which around 300 prisoners escaped; no more than 50 of them survived to the end of the war. Philip Bialowitz was one of the prisoners who escaped and survived.

This quote is from the news article about Philip Bialowitz:

Bialowitz said it is of the utmost importance the story be retold over and over, so the world might finally learn the lessons it failed to learn from Adolf Hitler’s reign. Referring to the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the genocide in Darfur, Bialowitz said, “The world is profoundly broken.”

The father of five and grandfather of 15 said his faith was tested but is stronger than ever.

“There are good people and evil people,” he said. “God didn’t make the Holocaust happen.”

Bialowitz has testified at several war trials and the subsequent sentencing of some of the Gestapo gives him little satisfaction. He has not forgiven them.

“I do not condemn the Germans, only the perpetrators, and the punishment does not fit their crimes.”

On the day of his escape 70 years ago, a teenage Bialowitz made a promise to the leaders of the successful revolt — to tell the world about Sobibór.

You can read the official history of the Sobibór at this website.

You can read here about how some of the Jews were saved because they were sent to Siberia by Stalin.

The death of Gitta Sereny (author of a book about Franz Stangl, the Commandant of Treblinka)

I have just learned of the death of Gitta Sereny, at the age of 91, in June 2012. She is the famous author who wrote about evil people and their crimes, including Franz Stangl, who was involved in the euthanasia program in Germany before he became the Commandant of the Sobibor death camp for six months and then the Commandant of the Treblinka death camp.  Her book about Stangl, entitled Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder was published in 1974, and is still in print.

You can read one of her obituaries here.

Franz Stangl

Franz Stangl was imprisoned by the Allies after the war, but was released two years later without ever having been put on trial. Following his release, he went to Italy where he was helped by the Vatican to escape to Syria, where he lived with his family for three years. In 1951, he moved to Brazil where he lived openly, using his real name.

Stangl was a native of Austria, but for years the Austrian authorities declined to bring him to justice for the murder of thousands of Jews at Treblinka. Finally in 1961, a warrant for his arrest was issued, but it was not until six years later that he was captured in Brazil by the famous Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal; he had been working at a Volkswagen factory in Sao Paulo, still using his own name.

In 1969, Dr. Wolfgang Scheffler submitted an expert opinion, based on more recent research, that the total number of persons killed at Treblinka was 900,000.

Franz Stangl was finally put on trial in the Second Treblinka Trial by the court of Assizes at Düsseldorf on October 22, 1970, charged with the deaths of 900,000 people at Treblinka. Stangl confessed to the murders, but in his defense, he said, “My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty …”

After his six-month trial in the German court, Stangl was found guilty on December 22, 1970 and sentenced to life in prison in January 1971; he died in prison at Düsseldorf on June 28, 1971, shortly after he was interviewed by Gitta Sereny.

Franz Stangl got his start when he was appointed by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler in 1940 to be the superintendent of the T-4 Euthanasia Program at Schloss Hartheim. He was transferred to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland in March 1942 where he was the Commandant until September 1942 when he was transferred to the extermination camp at Treblinka.

A poster at Hartheim shows a photo of Franz Stangl

Stangl is pictured on the poster above, which is in the Museum at Hartheim. His photo is on the far right in the left-hand column.

The exhibit at Hartheim makes it clear that Euthanasia started in America before it was done in Germany. One room in the exhibit area at Hartheim has posters from America, as shown in the two photographs below.

Exhibit at Hartheim shows Euthanasia posters in America

Exhibit at Hartheim shows a poster in America

These posters from America promote the idea that heredity is to blame for the mentally and physically handicapped. In Hitler’s Germany, deformed and mentally retarded persons, who had been institutionalized by their families, were sent to Hartheim Castle or the five other euthanasia centers, where they were killed. The Nazis kept track of how much money the government had saved by putting these people to death. After the war, these documents were found by General Patton’s army. The total amount saved by killing over 70,000 handicapped people was 885,000,000 Reichsmark or over 3 billion dollars in today’s money.

Gitta Sereny talked about her interview with Franz Stangl in a YouTube video.

This quote about Franz Stangl and his work at Treblinka is from Wikipedia:

Stangl assumed command of Treblinka on September 1, 1942. “He proved to be a highly efficient and dedicated organizer of mass murder, even receiving an official commendation as the ‘best camp commander in Poland’. Always impeccably dressed (he attended the unloading of transports at Treblinka dressed in white riding clothes), soft-voiced, polite and friendly, Stangl was no sadist, but took pride and pleasure in his ‘work’, running the death camp like clockwork.”[5] Stangl wanted his camp to look attractive, so he ordered the paths paved and flowers planted along the sides of Seidel Street, near camp headquarters and SS living quarters. Despite being directly responsible for the camp’s operations, Stangl limited his contact with Jewish prisoners as much as possible. Stangl rarely interfered with unusually cruel acts (other than gassing) perpetrated by his subordinate officers at the camp. Stangl usually wore a white uniform and carried a whip, which caused prisoners to nickname him “The White Death”.[1] He claimed that his dedication had nothing to do with ideology or hatred of Jews.[5] He viewed the prisoners as objects of his work rather than as people, and he regarded his job the same as he would any job: [...]

In September 1942, Stangl supervised the building of new, larger gas chambers to augment the previously existing gas chambers. The new gas chambers became operational in early autumn 1942. It is believed that these death chambers were capable of killing 3,000 people in two hours, and 12,000 to 15,000 victims easily every day,[1] with a maximum capacity of 22,000 deaths in 24 hours.[13] According to Jankiel Wiernik [a survivor of Treblinka]: “When the new gas chambers were completed, the Hauptsturmführer [Stangl] came and remarked to the SS men who were with him: ‘Finally the Jewish city is ready’ (German: Endlich ist die Judenstadt fertig).”[11]  [...]

At the end of the war, Stangl concealed his identity and fled. He was detained by the American Army in 1945 and was briefly imprisoned pending investigation in Linz, Austria in 1947. Stangl was suspected of complicity in the T-4 euthanasia programme. But on May 30, 1948, Stangl escaped to Italy with his colleague from Sobibor, SS officer Gustav Wagner. The Roman Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal, a Nazi sympathizer forced in 1952 to resign by the Vatican, helped him to escape through a “ratline” and to reach Syria using a Red Cross passport.[14] Stangl was joined by his wife and family and lived in Syria for three years before they moved to Brazil in 1951. After years of other jobs, Stangl found work at the Volkswagen plant in São Bernardo do Campo with the help of friends, still using his own name.  [...]

The court Schwurgericht Düsseldorf found Stangl guilty on October 22, 1970, and sentenced him to maximum penalty, life imprisonment.[9] While in prison, Stangl was interviewed extensively by Gitta Sereny, for a study of him published as Into that Darkness….

I find it very strange that Franz Stangl was not put on trial by the Allies.  As the Commandant of both Sobibor and Treblinka, he could have been included among the defendants at the Nuremberg IMT where testimony about Treblinka was given by the survivors of the death camp.

The American Military Tribunal had no jurisdiction over Stangl since his crimes did not include Allied victims. The British had no jurisdiction over him since he had not served at Bergen-Belsen which was in their zone of occupation.

Stangl was able to live in Brazil, under his own name, and it was left up to the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal to track him down, so that he could finally be put on trial by the Germans. By that time, Germany had a law against Holocaust denial, so Stangl did not claim that Treblinka and Sobibor were transit camps, from where Jews were “transported to the East.”  If he had used that as his defense, Stangl would have been imprisoned for Holocaust denial.

Demjanjuk “died guilty” says Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff

According to an article in a German newspaper which you can read in full here, Efraim Zuroff said this about the death of John Demjanjuk: “Demjanjuk died guilty of his service in the Sobibor death camp….”

Demjanjuk was found guilty, by a German court, of serving as a guard at Sobibor, but at the time of his death, he was awaiting trial for the appeal of his conviction because Demjanjuk maintained until his dying day that he did not serve as a guard at Sobibor.

The article in the German newspaper begins with this quote:

Former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk died guilty of helping to mass murder innocent Jews, the Israel director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre said on Sunday.

In a statement issued a day after the police announced Demjanjuk’s death, the centre said it believed there was “never any doubt” that the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk helped implemented the Nazis’ “Final Solution.”

“Demjanjuk died guilty of his service in the Sobibor death camp and that is how he should be remembered,” the centre’s Israel director Efraim Zuroff said.

“Not as a person falsely accused, but as an individual who volunteered to serve in the SS, and who at the height of his physical powers spent months helping to mass murder innocent Jews deported to that death camp.”

Demjanjuk was sentenced by a Munich court in May to five years in prison after being found guilty of more than 27,000 counts of accessory to murder from the six-month period when he was a guard in Poland at the Sobibor camp in 1943.

A judge ordered him released pending an appeal, saying Demjanjuk was no longer a threat and was unlikely to abscond, being stateless, after the United States revoked his citizenship.

I googled Efraim Zuroff and found this information here:

Efraim Zuroff’s great-uncle was kidnapped in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 13, 1941, by a gang of Lithuanians “roaming the streets of the city looking for Jews with beards to arrest.”

“He was taken to Lukiskis Prison — to this day the main jail in the city — and was murdered shortly thereafter,” says Zuroff. So were his wife and two boys.

Born seven years later in Brooklyn, New York, Zuroff was named for his great-uncle and grew up questioning his American-born parents about the Holocaust.

So Zuroff’s great-uncle was killed by Lithuanians who hated Jews.  Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian who was captured by the Germans in World War II and was given the option to defect to the German side.  Zuroff should be concentrating on why everyone in Europe hated the Jews and wanted them out. He should be questioning why so many Soviet soldiers defected, after they were captured, and then fought for the Germans. Instead, Zuroff is consumed by hatred of the goyim and is voicing his hatred of a dead man who was persecuted for half his life.

It is important to note that Demjanjuk was not convicted of murdering anyone, nor of being an accessory to murder.  He was convicted of being a guard in a camp that may or may not have been a “death camp.”  It was assumed by the Germany court, without any proof being offered, that Sobibor was a “death camp” where an unknown number of Jews were allegedly killed.  Demjanjuk was found guilty by association because he was allegedly a  guard at Sobibor.

This news story written on Nov. 23, 2009, about the Demjanjuk trial tells about how the trial was based on testimony from the dead:

Munich prosecutors who built the case against former death camp guard Mr Demjanjuk, 89, put 23 witnesses on their list, some of them from Russia and Ukraine.

But all members of the list are dead. It means that Demjanjuk, charged with assisting in 27,900 murders during his time as an SS guard at the extermination camp of Sobibor in occupied Poland, will be judged on records such as his identity card and on the statements of the dead.

His lawyer Guenther Maull said the defence (sic) would contest the witness statements may have been made under pressure from Soviet KGB interrogators. “The men were questioned 30 years ago at least in part in the Soviet Union and possibly under pressure,” he said. “Whether their statements have any value as evidence is questionable.”

The unbelievable testimony of the Holocaust survivors: Are the Jews overplaying their hand?

Out of all the dramatic stories told by the Holocaust survivors, who are currently out on the lecture circuit and/or publishing their memoirs, which one takes the prize for the most unbelievable?  The first story that comes to mind is the one told by Irene Zisblatt, about how she was saved because the gas chamber was too full on the day that she was scheduled to be gassed.  She was rescued by a young Jewish Sonderkommando who tossed her over a 10-foot high fence into an open railroad car, so that she could be transported out of Auschwitz. That one tops the story of Anna Levin-Ware who was pulled out of the Auschwitz gas chamber because she was “Hungarian by marriage.”

My personal favorite Holocaust story is the one told by Esther Terner Raab, who was a survivor of Sobibor, one of the three Operation Reinhard camps. In a TV documentary, which I saw many years ago, Esther told about a party in the Sobibor camp that the SS men had before the famous “escape from Sobibor.”  At the party, Esther was told by the SS men that they were celebrating the fact that one million Jews had been killed at Sobibor. Unlike the other Nazi death camps, the SS barracks at Sobibor were located inside the camp. According to another Sobibor survivor, Toivi Blatt, the Jewish workers in the camp sometimes socialized with the SS guards.

Esther’s story was corroborated by another Sobibor survivor, Moshe Bahir, who testified in 1965 at the trial of several of the Sobibor perpetrators in Hagen, Germany. Moshe Bahir testified, under oath in a court of law, that he was a witness to a celebration by the Germans in February 1943 after one million Jews had been killed at Sobibor. So it wasn’t just young attractive girls who were invited to the SS celebration of one million Jewish deaths; there were also young men like Moshe Bahir who were invited.  The SS men were so happy that they had killed one million Jews, they wanted to share their jubilation with two of the Jews who were still alive and waiting for their turn to be killed.

Sobibor memorial site Photo Credit: Alan Collins

The photo above shows the spot in Camp III at Sobibor where a brick building with gas chambers once stood. A large block of stone, erected in 1965, represents the gas chambers in two buildings at Sobibor, which were torn down long ago.

Finally, Dutch Jews get justice, long delayed

According to the latest news about John Demjanjuk, which you can read here, “Families of Jews who were slaughtered in Sorbibor death camp said Saturday they were pleased with the conviction of John Demjanjuk, who was sentenced to five years in prison Thursday for his role in the killing of 27,900 Jews as a guard at the Nazi camp.”

Jews from many countries were sent to Sobibor to be “slaughtered.”  When will their relatives get justice?  Why were only Dutch Jews included as co-plaintiffs in the prosecution of Demjanjuk?   

Demjanjuk convicted under the “common design” theory of guilt

I read the news of John Demjanjuk’s conviction in the New York Times here.  The most important thing about his conviction is summed up in this statement:

In the absence of specific evidence against him, the case against Mr. Demjanjuk rested on the prosecution’s charge that anyone working at the camp at the time he was there shared responsibility for its function of systematic murder.

In other words, the legal basis for charging Demjanjuk with a crime was the ex-post-facto law that was dreamed up by Lt. Col. Murray C. Bernays specifically for the Nuremberg IMT, although it was also used by the American Military Tribunal at Dachau.  This is the first time that this legal basis has been used in German courts, thus setting a precedent that can be used in future trials.

Bernays was a Lithuanian Jew who had emigrated with his family to America in 1900 when he was six years old.  Robert E. Conot wrote, in his book “Justice at Nuremberg,” that Henry Morgenthau, Jr., a Jew who was the Secretary of the Treasury and one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s top advisors, had proposed that the German war criminals should be charged and then executed without a trial. But Bernays said, “Not to try these beasts would be to miss the educational and therapeutic opportunity of our generation. They must be tried not alone for their specific aims, but for the bestiality from which these crimes sprang.”

Now 66 years after the end of World War II, Demjanjuk has been tried and convicted on the theory that he is guilty because he was allegedly THERE.  It doesn’t matter if he actually did anything wrong, he is guilty by association.  

Dutch Jew wants Demjanjuk to be sentenced to 15 years in prison

John Demjanjuk, a 90-year-old American citizen, has been on trial in Germany since November 2009 on a charge of 27,900 counts of being an accessory to murder, based on the accusation that he was a guard at the Sobibor death camp. A verdict in the trial is expected next month and in the closing arguments given by the co-plaintiffs, Manuel Bloch, an attorney from the Netherlands who lost family members in the Holocaust, urged the court to convict Demjanjuk and sentence him to the maximum 15-year prison term.

The verdict will depend upon whether or not the prosecution has proved that Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor.  At least 27,900 Jews were allegedly gassed during the 5 months that Demjanjuk allegedly served as a guard.  The prosecution did not have to prove that anyone was gassed at Sobibor — only that John Demjanjuk was one of the guards that herded the Jews along the path to the gas chamber that was disguised as a shower room.

Sobibor was one of the 6 death camps used in the genocide of 6 million Jews during World War II; it was built by the Nazis in March 1942, for the sole purpose of killing Jews. An estimated 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor during a period of only 18 months, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

According to this news article, Manuel Blocht told the court that “the evidence against Demjanjuk is abundant” and “fits together like the pieces of a puzzle.”

Demjanjuk is back in court — testimony from the dead will be heard

Good news!  John Demjanjuk is back in court, after two days in a hospital, and a request by his attorney to hear testimony given by Dov Frieberg has been granted.  Freiberg is now dead, but a written statement that he gave in 1976 will be read in court.  In his statement, Freiberg said that he was assigned to clean the Sobibor barracks where the Ukrainian guards were housed, but he does not remember Demjanjuk being there.  

Will war criminal John Demjanjuk live long enough to get his “just deserts”?

Today I checked up on the progress of the trial of John Demjanjuk which has been ongoing since November 2009 and I learned that the trial has been delayed until May 2011 because Demjanjuk has been hospitialized.  Demjanjuk is being tried in a German court on charges of being an accessory to the murder of around 27,900 Jews, based on the testimony of two survivors that it was the Ukrainian guards who herded Jews into the gas chambers at the Sobibór death camp in German-occupied Poland.  Demjanjuk is Ukrainian but he denies that he ever worked at Sobibór.

Demjanjuk is now 90 years old and very ill; will he survive long enough to be convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison for his alleged crime? The survivors and the children of the survivors certainly hope so.  They want Demjanjuk to live long enough to be convicted so that he can die alone in prison without the love and support of his family.

Will 90-year-old John Demjanjuk live long enough for a third trial?

John Demjanjuk, now 90-years-old, is currently on trial in Germany, charged with being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Dutch Jews at the Sobibor death camp in 1943. Demjanjuk was previously tried and convicted over 20 years ago in an Israeli court after he was identified by eye witnesses as a Ukrainian guard nicknamed “Ivan the Terrible” at Treblinka. He spent 7 years in prison in Israel before he won the case on appeal.

John Demjanjuk as a young man and in a courtroom today

A verdict in the current case is expected in late March this year, but if 90-year-old Demjanjuk is still alive, he could be brought in on a stretcher to another courtroom in Spain for a third trial.