Ivan‘John’Demjanjuk

The last known SS Guard to face the courts was Ivan ‘John’ Demjanjuk despite decades of legal wrangling and controversy, Demjanjuk died a free man, technically, innocent, as his appeal had not been heard nor decided under German law.

The alleged former SS guard had herded thousands of terrified new arrivals down a concentration camp walkway called the ‘Road to Heaven’. From here, they were taken into fake shower blocks and gassed with diesel exhaust from a U-boat engine. Most of them died within two hours of arriving at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, where a total of 250,000 recorded Jewish people were killed, so this may be an underestimate of the total killed.

After the war Ivan ‘John’ Demjanjuk had moved to America, had a family and buried his past behind him working at the Ford motor company. Then In 1986, he was extradited to Israel where he stood accused of being Ivan the Terrible. His defence argued the SS card had been forged by the KGB. He was convicted and faced a death sentence in 1988 for war crimes committed between 1942 and 1943. Some new evidence came to the surfaced that there was another Ukrainian who could’ve been Ivan the Terrible. This was successful and he was reprieved and sent back to the United States.

While Ivan tried to return to normal life, his 1988 trial had left many unanswered questions. Then In 2002, an American judge ruled there was evidence that he had in fact been a guard at Sobibor known for cutting off prisoners’ ears and whipping them as they walked passed him to their deaths. He was then extradited to Germany for what was dubbed The Last Nazi War Trial.

During his trial, he claimed to have been held at a camp in Chelmno, Poland, until 1944 – before being moved to another camp in Austria where he joined a Nazi-backed unit of Russian soldiers fighting communist rule. But according to German prosecutors, Demjanjuk was involved in the murders of tens of thousands of Jews at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland. They had obtained hundreds of documents, a number of prosecution witnesses, and lists of names of the people Demjanjuk led into the gas chambers. The Judge ruled there was now enough evidence to prove Demjanjuk had been a guard at other Nazi camps – and he was sent to Germany for trial again in 2009. The Munich case, in which he was given a five-year jail sentence, was Germany’s last big war crimes trial.

Demjanjuk was convicted of being a guard at the Sobibor death camp, and convicted on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder – a conviction he was still appealing when he died in 2012 at the age of 91, in a nursing home in the Bavarian town of Bad Feilnbach. Following his death, his relatives requested that he be buried in his adopted United States. Jewish organisations opposed this, claiming his burial site would become a centre for neo-Nazi activity. Demjanjuk was reportedly buried at an undisclosed US location, now known to be the Ukrainian section of the Brooklyn Heights cemetery in Parma, Ohio.

The information about Ivan ‘John’ Demjanjuk can be seen on NETFLIX’S THE DEVIL NEXT DOOR from this documentary it confirms America was complicit in accepting Nazis to rebuild America after the war. The most famous is Wernher Von Braun who invented the V2 that killed many people in England but put a man on the moon for America.