Nazi death camp guard Demjanjuk heads for a nursing home as he escapes with five-year sentence for his part in 28,000 murders

Demjanjuk driven to care facility in Munich

After looking so frail in court, 91-year-old retired Ohio car worker undergoes evil transformation pending appeal

Holocaust survivors furious at court's leniency

'No evidence he hurt a single person': Demjanjuk's family defend their father

John Demjanjuk today headed for a nursing home after being released from a Munich prison pending an appeal.



The 91-year-old was convicted yesterday of playing a part in Nazi death camps but showed no remorse for helping to murder more than 28,000 Jews.

Michael Stumf, director of the Stadelheim prison, admitted that it had been hard to find a care facility that would take in Demjanjuk at such short notice.



Stumf refused to give any details about Demjanjuk's destination, except to say that it was in the greater Munich area.

'He asked us to respect his privacy,' Stumf said.

Remarkable recovery: John Demjanjuk before the verdict (left) and after he was sentenced to five years for being accessory to murder - and set free

Looking down his nose: John Demjanjuk and his lawyers Ulrich Busch (left) and Guenther Maull (right) emerge from court today in Munich

There has been growing anger that the court had been so lenient.

If Demjanjuk's five-year sentence is ultimately applied, it emerged that time already spent in custody may shorten his stay in jail.

Holocaust survivors and families of the many victims who died at Sobibor Concentration Camp initially welcomed the guilty verdict, hoping he would be given a sentence that would see him die in jail.

But they then expressed dismay at Judge Ralph Alt's decision to free Demjanjuk.



'At the end he threw everyone in the courtroom a curveball and destroyed the hopes of the survivors of Sobibor,' said Martin Mendelsohn, counsel for the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre.



The court said that since Demjanjuk had already been imprisoned on remand for two years, more time in jail seemed inappropriate at his age.

A court statement cited two other reasons: Demjanjuk had already spent eight years in prison in Israel and the crime was 68 years old.

As the verdict was announced, he showed no emotion, but sat hunched in his wheelchair as he had done for so much of the trial.



It was only as he was led from court that he pulled off his 'uniform' to reveal that chilling look.



He has been in custody since being extradited from his home in Ohio two years ago. He is unable to travel so is likely to remain in Germany until a decision has been made on whether he will be jailed.



Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who fled to the U.S. after the Second World War and set up a new identify as a car mechanic, is the lowest-ranking person to go on trial for Nazi crimes.

Justice: Senior Judge Ralph Alt (L) and Jules Schelves, a Sobibor plaintiff who was in court today to see Demjanjuk sentenced

He denied serving as a guard and claims that he was a prisoner of war and a victim too.



There is no evidence he committed a specific crime. Instead he is charged with 28,060 counts of accessory to murder for the number of people who died in the time span - 27 March, 1943 to mid-September 1943 - that h e was a guard at the Sobibor camp in Poland.

The theory is that if he was there, he was a participant - the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts. It could set a precedent for future cases.

Presiding Judge Alt said Demjanjuk was a piece of the Nazis' 'machinery of destruction'.



Rudolf Salomon Cortissos, whose mother was gassed at Sobibor along with thousands of other Dutch Jews, cried softly in a back row of the courtroom, wiping his tears with a white handkerchief, as Alt sombrely read out the names of the brothers, sisters and parents of people who joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, as allowed under German law.

Horror scene: Sobibor train station in Poland, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were loaded into gas chambers and exterminated during the Second World War

'It's very emotional — it doesn't happen every day,' he said, adding that he was happy with the verdict and sentence. 'For me it is satisfying,' he said.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk has already been stripped of his U.S. citizenship.



In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel accused of being the notoriously brutal guard 'Ivan the Terrible' at Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.



He was convicted, sentenced to death - then freed when an Israeli court overturned the ruling, saying the evidence showed he was the victim of mistaken identity.

Trial: John Demjanjuk, who now lives in Ohio, arrives on a stretcher at the court building in Munich

'JUSTICE HAS BEEN DONE'



Helen Hyde, the headteacher at Watford Grammar School, Hertfordshire, had three family members killed at Sobibor during the time Demjanjuk was a guard. Mrs Hyde has visited the death camp where her aunt, uncle and cousin died in the gas chambers. She attended Demjanjuk's trial in Munich. She told the BBC: 'I had mixed emotions - I want to say I feel sorry for him because he's an old frail man, but I don't. 'I don't feel hatred or revenge when I think of him. I feel frightened, because I'm Jewish and I'm frightened about Holocaust deniers and I'm frightened of anti-Semites, and he might be one.' She added: 'I just feel that justice has to be seen to be done. For those that died at Sobibor, because they can't do it. 'It was unimportant if he got a day, a year or a hundred years. What is important is that this verdict tells the world the Holocaust happened.'

Demjanjuk maintains he was a victim of the Nazis - first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions before joining the Vlasov Army, a force of anti-communist Soviet PoWs.

But prosecutors said that after his capture, the evidence shows Demjanjuk agreed to serve the German SS and was posted to Sobibor in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Demjanjuk is accused of having served as a 'Wachmann', the lowest rank of volunteers who were subordinate to German SS men.

Integral to the prosecution's case is an SS identity card that allegedly shows a picture of a young Demjanjuk, and indicates he trained at the SS Trawniki camp and was posted to Sobibor.

Though court experts have said the card appears genuine, the defence maintains it is a fake produced by the Soviet KGB.

The U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations also has said the card is genuine.



However documents unearthed last month indicate that the FBI had doubts similar to those aired by Demjanjuk's defence about the evidence - though the material was never turned over to them.

In a 1985 report, the FBI concluded: 'Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB.'

The revelation has led to new court action in the U.S., with a district court judge in Cleveland agreeing on Tuesday to appoint a public defender to represent Demjanjuk there, raising the prospect of renewing the decades-old case.

The son of the convicted man, John Demjanjuk Jr, said: 'Fact is, the Germans are preparing a verdict based upon U.S. government fraud which, if necessary, will not survive German or U.S. judicial review.'

Demjanjuk's lawyer has previously said that with the time spent in custody in Israel, Germany and the U.S. adding up to more than ten years - more than two-thirds the maximum sentence - he should be immediately set free especially in view of his age.

But Demjanjuk, who is now stateless, has nowhere to go.





The quiet Nazi: How Demjanjuk outran his Holocaust atrocities until his final years

By

ALLAN HALL

Evidence: The military service pass of John Demjanjuk - which his defence say was faked by the KGB

John Demjanjuk was born Ivan on April 3,1920 in the small Ukrainian village of Dubovi Makharintsi and raised under Soviet rule.

As a young man he was employed as a farm worker due to his stocky frame.



With the dawn of the Second World War he joined the Red Army along with millions of his countrymen but was captured by Nazis in 1942.



Facing almost certain death in a PoW camp, he took a Nazi offer of staying alive by agreeing to work on a 'special project'.



He became a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland where a quarter of a million Jews were murdered.



The case against him involved 15 trains that arrived at Sobibor from Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, carrying 28,060 people.

Demjanjuk was captured by the Americans in 1944 and became a prisoner of war - but revealed nothing of his role during the war years.



After marrying a fellow Ukrainian Vera Kowlowa in 1947, he worked for the Americans after the war driving a truck through Germany.



He registered to be recognised as a refugee and sailed to New York with his family in the 1950s and became an American citizen.



The couple had three children, Lydia, Irene and John Junior. He spent his life working as a mechanic at the Ford car plant in Cleveland, Ohio.

In the mid-70s, the family settled in the Seven Hills suburb, in a ranch-style house on a half-acre lot.

On the morning of August 25, 1977, John Demjanjuk was working at the factory as usual, when the storm broke that the U.S. attorneys wanted to strip him of his American citizenship for having been a suspected Nazi War criminal.

He was accused of being ‘Ivan the Terrible’ - a particularly sadistic guard at another Nazi death camp called Treblinka in Poland.



Israel extradited him to stand trial for his crimes there, found him guilty and sentenced him to death.

Demjanjuk spent his life working as a mechanic at the Ford car plant in Cleveland, Ohio

But during a five-year appeal process, it scoured the world for evidence and found that he was not in Treblinka but in Sobibor.



He was released and it was left to Germany to extradite him from America to stand trial in Munich.



Part of his trial, most of which he slept through while wearing a hat and dark glasses, involved the families of his victims talking about their loss.



He never displayed an ounce of emotion as they wept on the witness stand.



Ulrich Busch, his right-wing lawyer, enraged Jewish groups when he tried to equate his client’s suffering with the Jews in wartime.



'Ukrainians like him were considered subhuman; Jews, Ukrainians or Gypsies did not count' for the Nazis, he told the court.







'No evidence he ever hurt a single person': Children of Demjanjuk stand by their father

By JOHN STEVENS

'House of cards': John Demjanjuk Jr talks about his father's conviction in Munich during an interview at his home in Richfield, Ohio

The American children of John Demjanjuk vowed to stand by their father as he was convicted of playing a part in more than 28,000 Nazi death camp murders.

His three children - who all live close to his home in Cleveland, Ohio - have staunchly defended their father since he was first accused of playing a part in the Holocaust in 1977.

Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr, 45, who maintains his father's innocence, said there is not a 'scintilla of evidence he ever hurt a single person anywhere'.

'My father has suffered as a result of German brutality for nearly 70 years,' Mr Demjanjuk Jr said from his home in Richfield, Ohio.

'While the Germans arrogantly lay blame on a Ukrainian PoW in an attempt to atone for the crimes of their own, we will appeal and continue to fight to obtain the mountain of information still being intentionally concealed by Moscow and by the U.S. Department of Justice.

'While some may take satisfaction from this event, this verdict is no more definitive today than the wrongful Israeli conviction and death sentence was previously.

'The Germans have built a house of cards and it will not stand for long.'

He added: 'We have compassion for all of the victims of Nazi brutality.

'But the Germans, as their forefathers before them, have again exploited those it once considered subhuman for the purpose of showing the world that Germany is not guilty while its own nursing homes are still full of the real perpetrators.'

Demjanjuk's wife Vera (left) and his granddaughter Olivia wave goodbye as a van carrying John Demjanjuk leaves their home in Ohio in 2009; Demjanjuk's daughter Irene (right) arrives at the family home

Demjanjuks's three children, Lydia, 60, Irene, 50, and John Jr, have spent much of their adult life defending their father.

After the war, Demjanjuk, found a job as a truck driver in a displaced persons camp in southern Germany, where he met his wife, Vera, and the couple had Lydia.

U.S. authorities granted Demjanjuk citizenship in 1958 and the family moved to Ohio, where he began working at the Ford Motor plant.

The couple had their two other children and the family moved to a small house in the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills.

A van carrying John Demjanjuk leaves his home in Ohio after he was removed by immigration agents in 2009

On the morning of August 25, 1977, the family's world changed forever when Demjanjuk was first accused of being a Nazi death camp guard.

Through the first trial, when Demjanjuk was wrongly accused of being 'Ivan the Terrible', to the latest hearing, his family have given him unwavering support.

As Demjanjuk was removed from his home to be extradited to Germany two years ago, his children and grandchildren gathered in tears outside his home.

In February, Irene Nishnic appeared at her father's trial in Munich. She arrived into court with her son, holding a white rose that she later gave to her father.

At a break in the testimony, Demjanjuk motioned for the two to come over and they embraced him as he lay in his hospital bed.

Mr Demjanjuk Jr now says they are getting ready to fly back to Munich to visit their father.

But he said his 85-year-old mother, Vera, is now in too poor health and will not be able to travel.

Mr Demjanjuk Jr said he was relieved at the decision to free his father 'because he has never deserved to sit in prison for one minute'.

But 'after everything that he's gone through, it is hard to use a word like happy in any context', he said.