Ending a trial that had dragged on for almost 18 months, a court in the south German city of Munich on Thursday convicted 91-year-old John Demjanjuk of being an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and sentenced him to five years in prison. The presiding judge, Ralph Alt, said the court found that Demjanjuk served as a Nazi guard at the camp in 1943 and, as such, played a crucial role in the “Nazi machinery.” The court sentenced Demjanjuk to five years in prison, and then set him free, saying he would not have to stay in jail pending his appeal — a decision that provoked a furious response from the families of Holocaust victims.
