Emotional scenes as former SS guard convicted for death camp role

John Demjanjuk in Munich. Photo / AP

John Demjanjuk - the man billed as one of the world's last Nazi war criminals - stayed silent to the end.

Holocaust survivors and their relatives wept as the 91-year-old was jailed by a German court this week for his role in the slaughter of thousands of Jews at the Sobibor death camp during World War II.

It was an emotionally charged ending to the trial of the Ukrainian-born former SS guard who was extradited to Germany two years ago after escaping justice in Europe, Israel and America for most of the past 66 years.

Wearing large black sunglasses and a grey prison sweatshirt, shaven-headed Demjanjuk sat motionless and expressionless in a hospital wheelchair as he was pushed in front of the judge at the court in Munich.

Throughout his 93-day trial, which began in November 2009, Demjanjuk had stubbornly refused to say anything. He maintained his silence as Judge Ralph Alt convicted him on 16 counts for complicity in the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942 and 1943. Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, but freed pending appeal. The prosecution sought only a six-year jail term because of his advanced age.

Explaining how as a so-called Trawniki SS guard, Demjanjuk played a key role at the death camp, Judge Alt said: "The people who arrived at the camp had no time to reflect. They were told that they had been brought there to work and had first to take a shower. But then they were stripped of their clothing and all of their possessions and beaten into 4sq m gas chambers."

Relatives of those slaughtered burst into tears as he continued: "Panic broke out, there was screaming and crying and those inside tried desperately but in vain to open the doors. Then the big engines were switched on. And then pumped in a poisonous mixture of gas. After 30 minutes everyone inside was dead. The Trawniki men took part in every stage of this mass murder - without them it wouldn't ever have functioned."

Among the 19 plaintiffs, most of them relatives of Dutch Jews murdered in the camp, was one of the last two men alive who witnessed the hell of Sobibor. Jules Scheldis, now 90, lost his wife and parents who were dispatched to the gas chambers as soon as they arrived in Sobibor in 1943. Scheldis was singled out for a labour unit and sent to another camp, where he managed to survive the war.

Now frail and white-haired, Scheldis sat in court opposite the man who helped murder his wife and family. Tears streamed down his face as he was hugged by his granddaughter and other close relatives. "Have we won or have we lost?" he asked. "We have lost more than we have won, but justice has been done and I am satisfied," he told the Independent.

Barbara DeJong, a psychologist from Utrecht, lost her grandparents in Sobibor. Her father, Rob, who was only 3 when the Nazis rounded up his parents, survived the war by going underground. He was brought up by a family of Dutch farmers. DeJong said her father never talked about what happened to his parents until they received an anonymous letter containing the wedding ring taken from her grandfather at the camp.

"Attending this trial has helped me to face up to the terrible fate suffered by my grandparents. I found solace by being in touch with the families of other victims," she said.

It was not immediately clear how much of his five-year sentence Demjanjuk would spend behind bars. His defence lawyer, Ulrich Busch, said he would immediately appeal against the ruling at a higher court.

Captured by the Americans at the end of war, Demjanjuk concealed his role as an SS guard and managed to convince his captors that he was one of the thousands of "displaced persons" roaming Europe.

In 1986, Israeli investigators who mistakenly believed he was the notorious Treblinka death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible", persuaded the US to extradite him to Israel.

Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in 1988 and spent five years in a condemned cell. He was finally freed in 1993 after Israeli judges found that he was not "Ivan the Terrible". It subsequently emerged that Demjanjuk, who by then had returned to America, had probably worked at Sobibor.

- INDEPENDENT