The Nazi war crimes trial of 91-year-old John Demjanjuk — accused of being
an accessory to the murder of at least 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor
concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II — took a new
twist on Wednesday when the defense team asked for the trial to be suspended
after new revelations emerged suggesting that crucial evidence in the case had been faked.
As lawyers wrapped up their closing arguments in Munich, Demjanjuk’s defense attorney drew the judges’
attention to an FBI report that had been kept secret for years — and was
obtained by the Associated Press on Tuesday — which appears to challenge
the authenticity of Demjanjuk’s alleged Nazi identity card that is central
to the prosecution’s case. According to the documents which date back to
1985, the FBI believed that KGB agents in the former Soviet Union “quite
likely fabricated” evidence as part of a campaign to smear anti-communist
émigrés. AP reporters say they discovered the FBI field office report at the National Archives in Maryland, among case files that were declassified after Demjanjuk was deported from the U.S. in May 2009 to face trial in Germany.
Demjanjuk, who was born in Ukraine, is accused of being a guard at the
Sobibor death camp from March until September 1943. Given the fact that some
70 years have elapsed since the alleged crimes took place, and there are no
living witnesses, prosecutors have encountered difficulties in their case
against Demjanjuk and have relied on historical documents, letters,
guard-duty rosters and testimony from witnesses who have since died. A key
piece of evidence is an alleged SS identity card bearing Demjanjuk’s photo, which prosecutors say proves he was at the training camp for SS
guards at Trawniki and that he was transferred to Sobibor in March 1943.
An estimated 250,000 people — mostly Jews — were systematically killed at
Sobibor. German prosecutors say their investigation shows that Demjanjuk was
drafted into the Red Army in 1940, was then taken prisoner by German forces
in 1942 and volunteered to work as a SS death camp guard, rather than face the prospect of dying in captivity.
“As soon as he arrived at Sobibor, he must have known its purpose was the
extermination of the Jews delivered there,” prosecutor Hans-Joachim
Lutz told the Munich courtroom in his closing arguments on March 22. “But
despite that, he did not desert, although he would have had the chance while
off duty or during assignments outside the camp.”
Responding to the FBI report which purports to cast doubt on the photo
identity card, Lutz told TIME that “extensive forensic tests have been
carried out on Demjanjuk’s identity card … and they show that
it is genuine.” Lutz dismissed the findings of the FBI report as “dated,”
adding: “They are the view of a single FBI officer back in 1985 and this
opinion has since changed.”
During the extraordinary trial which has been bogged down by delays since it
began in November 2009, including Demjanjuk’s health issues — he suffers from a bone marrow disease and other ailments — prosecutors insisted Demjanjuk was an integral
part of the “Nazi machinery,” and as a prison guard he shared the Nazi
ideology and was responsible for forcing Jews, mostly deported from the
Netherlands, into the gas chambers at Sobibor.
