Associated Press
BERLIN -- John Demjanjuk once was the focus of the world's attention for the bloodcurdling crimes of which he stood accused. Today, he's attracting notice for being the lowest-ranking person to go on trial for Nazi crimes in World War II.
The latest chapter in a 32-year legal saga brings the retired Ohio autoworker to a court in Munich in a case opening Monday that breaks new ground in Germany's pursuit of alleged Holocaust perpetrators.
If successful, it could significantly lower the bar for who is considered important enough to go to jail for being part of the Nazi apparatus.
In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel accused of being the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp. He was convicted, sentenced to death -- then freed when an Israeli court overturned the ruling saying the evidence showed he was the victim of mistaken identity.
Now, at age 89, he is accused of serving as a low-ranking guard at the Sobibor death camp, charged with being an accessory to the murders of 27,900 people during the time he is alleged to have been there.
Demjanjuk maintains he was a victim of the Nazis -- first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.
German prosecutors paint a different picture. After Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was in German captivity, they maintain, he volunteered to serve with the fanatical German SS and was posted to Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland.
It is the first time prosecutors have tried someone so allegedly low-ranking without proof of a specific offense. If Demjanjuk is convicted, other low-ranking suspects could face prosecution.
"This definitely marks a change in the decades-old policies of the German judiciary -- a positive change," said Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
