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John Demanjuk in court during his trial in Germany in May 2011 AP Photo/Matthias Schrader
World War II
Nazi camp guard dies aged 91 after being convicted of crimes last year
John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker in the US, had been charged with 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder – one for every person who died at the concentration camp he was a guard at.
A FORMER GUARD at a Nazi concentration camp who was sentenced to prison last year for his part in thousands of deaths has died aged 91.
John Demjanjuk had been convicted of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder in May of last year and was sentenced to five years in prison.
He was released pending an appeal and died at a home for the elderly last night.
A German court had heard that the 91-year-old, who had been living in the US as a retired autoworker before being brought to trial, had been a guard at Sobibor camp in Poland in the early 1940s.
The prosecution case had been based on proving that if Demjanjuk had been at the camp, he was a participant in the killing, as there was no evidence that he had committed a specific crime. It was the first time that such a legal argument had been used in a German court.
The trial had lasted nearly 18 months. Demjanjuk had maintained that he was a victim of the Nazis who had been captured and held as a prisoner of war from his native Ukraine before fighting with the Germans against the Soviets in the final months of the war.
This was disputed by prosecutors who said that he had agreed to serve in the German SS.
An estimated 250,000 people died at Sobibor in the gas chambers, according to the BBC.
His son told the Associated Press that Demjanjuk had died during the night of natural causes. He had been suffering from chronic kidney disease and terminal bone marrow disease.
- Additional reporting by the Associated Press
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