One last trial over Nazi war crimes

I don't know whether 89-year-old John Demjanjuk was a Nazi concentration camp guard 65 years ago. But I seriously doubt that the international prosecutors who are revoking Demjanjuk's American citizenship and shipping him to Germany to stand trial for accessory to 29,000 murders know either. I have no problem with the prosecution of former Nazis who were participants in what might have been the worst mass murders in history (the exterminations engineered by Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong are also in the running for this honor). Adolf Eichmann, who was executed by Israel in 1962, and other Nazi "final solution" architects were clearly criminals and deserving of the death penalty.

But the Demjanjuk prosecution is troubling both because of the age of the alleged crimes — he will be facing trial for crimes that occurred 65 years ago — and because of the fluidity of the charges against him. Can anyone unequivocally identify someone from 65 years ago and describe with legal certainty events of that long ago? When Demjanjuk was acquitted of being one notorious Nazi guard, prosecutors switched accusations and said, oh, if he wasn't that guard, then he must have been this other Nazi guard. That's where the prosecution stands now.

The Demjanjuk case goes back to 1977, when the former auto worker and World War II refugee was initially accused of being a Nazi death camp guard. Demjanjuk denied being "Ivan the Terrible," but some Holocaust survivors, more than 40 years after their confrontation with "Ivan," identified Demjanjuk as the Treblinka death camp guard. Demjanjuk had his citizenship revoked and was convicted in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But the Israeli Supreme Court, using newly released KGB files that identified another man as Ivan the Terrible, overturned the conviction and sent Demjanjuk back to Cleveland.

But prosecutors, seeing this as the last opportunity to charge someone with Holocaust crimes, filed new charges against Demjanjuk, identifying him as a Sobibor camp guard, not the Treblinka camp guard he had initially been accused and convicted of being. Demjanjuk was removed from his home by ambulance Monday and was being flown to Munich today. He will stand trial in Germany for a horrible crime. He will have to defend himself, if he is physically and mentally able, against evidence and memories that are 65 years old. Prosecutors, who have been stalking Demjanjuk for 32 years, hope to win a final conviction before the old man dies.