History will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to … History will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian POWs for the deeds of Nazi Germans. His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in a telephone interview from Ohio that his father apparently died of natural causes. "It's a question of how the German legal system will deal with these cases," he said in a telephone interview from Riga, Latvia. "He has become at least one of the faces" of the Holocaust, Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. "If these cases will be expedited and put on the fast track, there is time. And in 2012, John Demjanjuk Jr. told reporters, " [John Demjanjuk] loved life, family and humanity. Demjanjuk was first accused of being Ivan the Terrible in 1977 by the U.S. Justice Department. "Germany is responsible for the fact that I have lost for good my whole reason to live, my family, my happiness, any future and hope," he said.Despite his conviction, his family never gave up its battle to have his U.S. citizenship reinstated so that he could live out his final days nearby them in the Cleveland area. After being called up for the Soviet Red Army, he was wounded in action but sent back to the front after he had recovered, only to be captured during the battle of Kerch Peninsula in May 1942.After the war, Demjanjuk was sent to a displaced persons camp and worked briefly as a driver for the U.S. Army. Nichnic still advocates for his father-in-law’s innocence.
John Jr. said that 21 camp survivors who couldn’t identify his dad had their statements withheld.Nichnic (sometimes spelled Nishnic) and Demjanjuk’s grandson appear on the Netflix series. He was released pending the appeal, and died a free man in his own room in a nursing home in the southern Bavarian town of Bad Feilnbach.His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in a telephone interview from Ohio that his father apparently died of natural causes. December 8, 2018 John Demjanjuk was a retired Ukrainian-American auto worker, a former soldier in the Soviet Red Army, and a Prisoner of War during World War II. But in this case it is important to say that it was right to put him on trial and sentence him," said Dieter Graumann, the president of Germany's Central Council of Jews. His citizenship was reinstated in 1998 and then revoked again in 2002 based on new evidence from the Department of Justice. The son of famed John Demjanjuk has dismissed the claim that newly emerged photos of the Sobibor death camp show his father performing duties … DAVID RISING, The Associated PressBERLIN (AP) — John Demjanjuk was convicted of being a low-ranking guard at the Sobibor death camp, but his 35-year fight on three continents to clear his name — a legal battle that had not yet ended when he died at age 91 — made him one of the best-known faces of Nazi prosecutions.The conviction of the retired Ohio autoworker in a Munich court in May on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, which was still being appealed, broke new legal ground in Germany as the first time someone was convicted solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.It has opened the floodgates to hundreds of new investigations in Germany, though his death Saturday serves as a reminder that time is running out for prosecutors.The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk steadfastly maintained that he had been mistaken for someone else — first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions.He is probably best known as someone he was not: the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp. "Justice does not know a statute of limitation, and age does not protect from punishment. Demjanjuk returned to Cleveland in 1993. "Over the past three decades, the Justice Department has sought to identify and remove those individuals who denied so many the lives they themselves enjoyed, and give voice to those who were silenced. This was never about revenge, but about justice," he added.When they overturned his conviction in Israel, the supreme court judges there said they still believed Demjanjuk had served the Nazis, probably at the Trawniki SS training camp and Sobibor. That was the first accusation against him, which led to him being extradited from the U.S. to Israel in the 1980s. After nearly half a year of intense trial proceedings, John Demjanjuk, a Cleveland autoworker who stood accused of being Ivan the Terrible, an infamous Nazi extermination camp guard, was slated to testify at his own trial in Israel in 1987 — but he made an unexpected move, dramatically firing half of his legal counsel. He grew up during a time when the country was wracked by famines that killed millions, and a wave of purges instituted by Stalin to eliminate any possible opposition.As a young man Demjanjuk worked as a tractor driver for the area's collective farm.
That and other evidence indicating Demjanjuk had served under the SS convinced the panel of judges in Munich, and led to his conviction.Demjanjuk, who was removed by U.S. immigration agents from his home in suburban Cleveland and deported in May 2009, questioned the evidence in the German case, saying the identity card was possibly a Soviet postwar forgery.He reiterated his contention that after he was captured in Crimea in 1942, he was held prisoner until joining the Vlasov Army — a force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets in the final months of the war.But Presiding Judge Ralph Alt said the evidence showed Demjanjuk was a piece of the Nazis' "machinery of destruction.
When John Demjanjuk died in a German nursing home in 2012, he was in the midst of appealing a guilty verdict accusing him of acting as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews … They said evidence showed that a different man was Ivan the Terrible. During One of His Trials in the 1980s, His Wife & Children Yelled at the Prosecutors.