Historian doubts Demjanjuk’s wartime account
A US military historian told the war crimes trial of John Demjanjuk that he doubted the retired Ohio car worker’s account of his whereabouts in the last years of the Second World War.
Demjanjuk, 89, who was deported from the US to Germany in last May, is accused of being a guard at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp and is being tried on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder. He denies the charges and says he was never a camp guard.
Historian Bruce Menning told the Munich state court that Demjanjuk’s claim he went to the Austrian city of Graz late in 1944 to join a Ukrainian force fighting the Soviets under German command was “implausible” as the group only came through the Austrian city in March 1945.
But defence lawyer Ulrich Busch rejected Mr Menning’s evidence, saying his account of historical events was partly wrong.
The defence says Demjanjuk was a Soviet soldier captured by the Germans and spent most of the war incarcerated in prison camps.
Mr Menning, an expert on the history of the Soviet Union who taught at the US Army Command and General Staff College in Kansas, also questioned other details of Demjanjuk’s account.
He said that Demjanjuk’s claim that he spent some 18 months until October 1944 as a German prisoner of war at a camp in Chelm, Poland, was highly implausible.
Mr Menning said the Germans moved the camp away from the front line by May 1944, from Chelm at the Ukrainian border to Skierniewice in the west of the country.
The historian previously gave evidenced as an expert in the denaturalisation proceedings against Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk in 2001, when Demjanjuk had his US citizenship revoked after the US Justice Department said he hid his past as the notorious Treblinka guard “Ivan the Terrible”.
He was extradited to Israel, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1988, only to have the conviction overturned five years later as a case of mistaken identity.
Mr Busch said Mr Menning was not an expert on the Russian or Ukrainian forces allied with Nazi Germany, such as the Shandruk or the Vlasov army.
He said Mr Menning was wrong to claim those forces did not exist until 1945. They were gathering their men months before they officially started their duty - suggesting Demjanjuk could have joined those fighters in 1944 as he claims, he said.
