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munich  |  John Demjanjuk’s trial in Germany was postponed Feb. 3 after doctors reported that the 89-year-old defendant was experiencing medical problems.

Presiding Judge Ralph Alt said the doctors at the prison hospital reported Demjanjuk was suffering from dangerously low hemoglobin levels and needed treatment.

However, doctors thought the proceedings would be able to resume Feb. 4 as scheduled, Alt said.

Demjanjuk suffers from several medical problems but has been declared fit to face trial, so long as court sessions are limited to two 90-minute sessions per day.

Alt rejected motions from the defense to end the trial, which has been postponed three times due to health issues since it began Nov. 30. Demjanjuk lies in a bed with his eyes closed throughout the sessions, but he has indicated he understands what is going on, Alt said in his ruling.

Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker, is accused of serving as a low-level camp guard and charged as an accessory to 27,900 murders. He rejects the charges, saying he never served at the Sobibor camp or any other Nazi camp.

But on Feb. 1, German investigator Thomas Walther testified about hard evidence that shows that Demjanjuk was indeed a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland.

He cited postwar paperwork in which Demjanjuk noted “Sobibor, Poland” as a place of residence.

Walther told the Munich state court that “the Sobibor death camp was a hermetically sealed area in which only two groups of people had entry” — Nazi guards and their victims. “Every member of the first group, with very high probability, took part in the murder of the second group,” he testified.

Defense attorney Ulrich Busch said Demjanjuk didn’t live in the town, but even if he had it wouldn’t mean that he had anything to do with the neighboring camp. The paperwork “doesn’t matter at all,” Busch said. “It doesn’t show that he was in the death camp.”

Still, there is other evidence, including an SS identity card with a photo that says he worked at Sobibor, Walther said. The defense has disputed the card’s authenticity, however, saying a witness statement submitted by Walther raised questions about its validity.

Demjanjuk, who is being tried in Munich because he lived in the area briefly after the war, claims to be a victim of mistaken identity, saying he was a Red Army conscript from Ukraine who was captured in Crimea in 1942 and held prisoner until joining the Vlasov Army. That force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others was formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets.

The postwar paperwork submitted by Walther included a 1948 application for assistance from a refugee organization, in which Demjanjuk said that from April 1937 to January 1943 he worked as a driver for a company in Sobibor.

A 1950 report from the U.S. Commission for Displaced People also noted that Demjanjuk told them he was an “independent farmer” in Sobibor from 1936 to 1943.

Demjanjuk, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1952 and gained citizenship in 1958, has told investigators in the past that he named Sobibor on forms to try to avoid prosecution by the Soviets for serving in the Vlasov Army, Walther said.

In earlier testimony, one survivor of Sobibor, 84-year-old Philip Bialowitz, talked about how Jewish prisoners had to unload decomposed corpses there and were forbidden to warn new prisoners that they would be gassed within the hour.

Another survivor, 82-year-old Thomas Blatt, testified that Ukrainian guards outnumbered Nazi SS men 10-to-1 at Sobibor, but they fell strictly under the Germans’ authority.

On Feb. 2, Soviet war veteran Alexej Weizen said on Czech radio that he remembered Demjanjuk from the camp after recognized Demjanjuk from an old picture published in a Russian newspaper.

The prosecution has said there are no known witnesses who can identify Demjanjuk as a guard, and defense attorney Guenther Maull expressed skepticism about the claim.

 

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