John Demjanjuk
| John Demjanjuk | |
|---|---|
Demjanjuk (centre) hearing his death sentence on 25 April 1988 in Jerusalem, Israel. The guilty verdict was later overturned.
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| Born |
Ivan Mykolaiovych Demjanjuk 3 April 1920 Dubovi Makharyntsi, Berdychiv uyezd, Kiev Governorate, Ukrainian People's Republic |
| Died | 17 March 2012 (aged 91) Bad Feilnbach, Bavaria, Germany |
| Occupation | Auto worker |
| Criminal charge | War crimes, crimes against humanity |
| Criminal penalty | Death (overturned) |
| Spouse(s) | Vera |
| Children | 3 |
John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demianiuk; Ukrainian: Іван Миколайович Дем'янюк; 3 April 1920 – 17 March 2012) was a retired Ukrainian-American auto worker, a former soldier in the Soviet Red Army, and a POW during the Second World War.
John (Ivan) Demjanjuk was convicted in 2011 in Germany as an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews while acting as a guard at the Sobibór extermination camp in occupied Poland. Since his conviction was pending appeal at the time of his death, Demjanjuk remained not guilty under German law, his conviction not having undergone the appeal judgment. According to the Munich state court, Demjanjuk does not have a criminal record.
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. 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".
In 1986, he was deported to Israel to stand trial for war crimes, after being identified by eleven Holocaust survivors, many from Israel, as "Ivan the Terrible", a 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 death there in 1988. The verdict was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993, based on new evidence that cast reasonable doubt over the identity of "Ivan the Terrible". After the trial, in September 1993, Demjanjuk 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.
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Wikipedia