What the Demjanjuk Verdict Means for Germany

On May 12, a Munich court handed down a verdict of guilty to John Demjanjuk for accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor extermination camp, thereby ending three decades of legal proceedings to bring the former camp guard to justice.

The Demjanjuk case brings to mind “Deaths-Head Revisited,” the classic Twilight Zone episode where a former Nazi is put on trial by the ghosts of the inmates he tortured and killed at Dachau. Like the SS captain in the episode, Demjanjuk successfully managed to conceal his wartime past for decades. For Demjanjuk, who just turned 91 and may not end up serving any more prison time, the real punishment has consisted in being endlessly confronted and tortured by his past for nearly a third of his life.

Let us be very clear. The Munich trial, which began in November 2009 was never about Jews. It was always about Germany. 

In late October 2010, I went to Munich to report on the trial for the Jewish weekly newspaper The Forward. I was sent because the trial seemed to be winding down and the trial dates became scarcer and scarcer as Demjanjuk’s ailments (or alleged ailments) multiplied. At the time, I wrote: “One feels a palpable sense disconnect between the laudable goal of bringing a Nazi criminal to justice, and the humdrum grind of a long trial that sputters and slouches to an uncertain endpoint.”

Certainly, the defendant’s age and frailty were much commented-on. Pictures of Demjanjuk ailing and in bed gained him some sympathy from the press. But as Norman Moscowitz, a former lawyer for the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations reminded me at the trial, “There’s no statue of limitations for murder.”

One can also refer to Philip Roth’s characterization of Demjanjuk in his novel, Operation Shylock: “[Demjanuk] proves only that to be both a loving grandfather and a mass murderer is not all that difficult.”

The Holocaust is the largest crime of the 20^th Century. And while modern-day Germany confronts its grim past on a daily basis like no other country (try to name other countries that have monuments to national crimes), the prosecution of Nazi criminals here over the past sixty years has been deeply flawed. The judges and lawyers in the Munich trial came of age in a Germany that grappled with its darkest chapter through research, debate and historical inquiry. These are the same qualities that have spurred Germany to its many research and commemoration projects.

In Berlin, where I live, everywhere you tread the streets are scattered with gold stones, the “Stolpersteine” (stumbling blocks) that remember the Jews who lived here before the war.  The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, occupies the very center of this once-divided city. Next week, the documentation center on the grounds of former Gestapo headquarters will host an international conference on the Eichmann Trial.

It is right that Jewish groups and leaders applaud the Munich court’s decision, but this trial is far more important for Germany, who took the unprecedented step in 2009 of extraditing Demjanjuk from the United States to stand trial for serving as a guard at Sobibor.

The Munich trial represented a remarkable shift. The prosecution was based on a theory that could have lead to thousands of convictions over the past six decades: in the lack of evidence of a specific crime, the prosecutors argued that if Demjanjuk was at a death camp, he participated in the killings.

           

At the trial, I spoke with relatives of Sobibor victims, who under German law, were allowed to join the prosecution as co-plaintiffs. They all told me the same thing. This trial isn’t about revenge. It is about justice. One of them, a Dutchman named Robert Fransman, even told me that he didn’t care a stitch about a sentence, just the conviction.  

In 1993, when the Israeli Supreme Court overturned its 1988 conviction of John Demjanjuk as the notorious Treblinka guard “Ivan the Terrible” after hitherto unseen evidence from Soviet files had come to light, the judges ruled, “The matter is closed — but not complete, the complete truth is not the prerogative of the human judge.”

In Munich, too, justice has been imperfect, incomplete, human. 66 years after the end of the Holocaust, John Demjanjuk is finally convicted and sentenced. We can certainly see this as too little too late. But we can also take comfort in the fact that Germany is taking steps to ensure that not all the murders will die peacefully in their beds.