John Demjanjuk

John Demjanjuk was convicted in 2011 in Germany for war crimes as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews while acting as a guard named Ivan Demjanjuk at the Nazi extermination camp near Sobibór in occupied Poland.^[2][3]Since his conviction was pending appeal at the time of his death,^[3][4][5] Demjanjuk remains innocent under German law, and his earlier conviction is invalidated. According to the Munich state court, Demjanjuk does not have a criminal record.^[6]

Demjanjuk was born in Ukraine, and during World War II was drafted into the Soviet Red Army, where he was captured as a German prisoner of war. His whereabouts during the rest of the war are debated. In 1952 he emigrated from West Germany to the United States, and was granted citizenship in 1958 whereupon he formally anglicized his name from “Ivan” to “John”.^[7][8]

In 1986 he was deported to Israel to stand trial for war crimes, after being identified by eleven Holocaust survivors,^[9]many from Israel, as “Ivan the Terrible“,^[10] a notorious guard at the Treblinka extermination camp in Nazi occupied Poland. Demjanjuk was accused of committing murder and acts of extraordinarily savage violence against camp prisoners during 1942–43. He was convicted of having committed crimes against humanity and sentenced to deaththere in 1988. The verdict was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993, based on new evidence that “Ivan the Terrible” was probably another man, Ivan Marchenko.^[11] After the trial, in September 1993, he returned to his home in Ohio. In 1998 his citizenship was restored after a United States federal appeals court ruled that prosecutors had suppressed exculpatory evidence concerning his identity.^[12]