Spain wants to put Demjanjuk on trial

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110114/ap_on_re_eu/demjanjuk;_ylt=An3DyXxwsh.TcnSDbCMygtN0bBAF;_ylu=X3oDMTJnazZxb2RkBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTEwMTE0L2RlbWphbmp1awRwb3MDMzgEc2VjA3luX3BhZ2luYXRlX3N1bW1hcnlfbGlzdARzbGsDc3BhaW53YW50c3Rv#mwpphu-container

MADRID – A Spanish judge has indicted John Demjanjuk on charges of being an accessory to genocide and crimes against humanity while serving as a Nazi concentration camp guard.

The 90-year-old former Ohio autoworker is already being tried in Germany on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder while serving as a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk denies ever serving as a Nazi guard at any camp and maintains that he was a Soviet soldier captured by the Germans and spent most of the war in prison camps himself, and is being mistaken for someone else.

Already, the former Ohio auto-worker was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 after the U.S. Justice Department alleged he hid his past as the notorious Treblinka guard "Ivan the Terrible." He was extradited to Israel, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1988, only to have the conviction overturned five years later as a case of mistaken identity.

Spanish Judge Ismael Moreno has now accused Demjanjuk of working at the Nazi concentration camp in Flossenbuerg in Bavaria in southern Germany, where Moreno says 155 Spaniards were held, 60 of whom died. Moreno indicted Demjanjuk in an order dated Jan. 7 and made available Friday by the National Court.

The judge issued a European arrest warrant for Germany to hand over Demjanjuk, presumably after his trial in Germany ends.

The Bavarian justice ministry said it had not yet received any word of the indictment or the European arrest warrant from Spain.

Moreno is acting under Spain's so-called universal justice law, which allows particularly heinous crimes to be tried in Spain even if they are alleged to have been commmitted abroad.

But Moreno also acted because thousands of Spaniards were among the millions who died in Nazi camps. Moreno has been investigating the issue since July 2008 at the request of several Spaniards who survived their ordeals.

Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., told the AP in an e-mail that his father had never served in any Nazi camp and suggested that Moreno was grasping at straws.

"He has progressed from acquittal by Israel of killing 850,000 to supposedly being a POW coerced to guard at a place where 27,000 were killed and now some group in Spain alleges he was a guard over 155 forced laborers," he said. "He was a Ukrainian POW who survived the Nazi's murderous onslaught and this is just another flash in the media pan," the son said.

Demjanjuk was one of four alleged ex-Nazi camp guards named in an initial complaint that the National Court took up at the request of a handful of Holocaust survivors from Spain.

When the other three were indicted by Spain in September 2009, he was left out because at that point the United States had already handed him over to Germany for trial.

Moreno can act against Demjanjuk without risk of double-jeopardy because the German trial focuses on his alleged presence as a guard at Sobibor and the Spanish proceedings involve his alleged later presence at Flossenbuerg, according to Equipo Nizkor, the human rights group that filed the initial complaint in Madrid.

There is no known evidence accusing Demjanjuk of a specific crime, and he was indicted in Germany on the argument that anyone who had served in a death camp like Sobibor — whose sole purpose was killing — could be considered an accessory to murder. Flossenbuerg, however, was a concentration camp where many prisoners were used for forced labor, though thousands were killed or died amid deplorable conditions.

"This is a remarkable and extraordinary development that poignantly shows that the victims of the crimes that Demjanjuk is charged with came from all of Europe and truly were crimes against all of humanity," Elan Steinberg, vice-president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, said in a statement welcoming the Spanish action.

[Danno 1,228]

IT's hard to know what to believe in these stories, first he is Ivan the Terrible

and when that gets rejected by the courts, they come up with a whole new accusation of identity and crimes.

It angers me that so many got away with their crimes for so long... or escaped completely....

and I don't care how old or how much time has passed, if someone was guilty of being an "ivan the terrible".. they should pay.

But if the evidence is not there to be certain..........

[luckytxn 2,265]

I have gone from happy that this man was found guilty and getting the death penalty to disgust that they keep trying to find him guilty of anything after it was found he was never a guard anyway but only someone that resembled another. Let the old guy just die of old age.

[alienlovechild 75]

He was extradited to Israel, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1988, only to have the conviction overturned five years later as a case of mistaken identity.

The Israelis let him go over 20 years ago. I see don't why they continue to try him in court especially when there are been plenty of younger people involved in genocide in different countries and most of them will never face justice.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

What I don't understand...is West Germany harbored many NAZI war criminals...gave them false passports, etc... and some of them are still living today, yet they go for this guy when they have like no real evidence against him. Now you have Spain who's Franco regime was partly funded by the NAZI's and who has a few of those war criminals still hanging about yet they want to go for this old man to make the headlines. It makes you wonder what makes the EU tick at times.

[Ban Hammer 13,475]

I have gone from happy that this man was found guilty and getting the death penalty to disgust that they keep trying to find him guilty of anything after it was found he was never a guard anyway but only someone that resembled another. Let the old guy just die of old age.

agreed. it's like they keep throwing charges at him from around the globe trying to get something to stick.