The guilty verdict reached in the John Demjanjuk trial
came nowhere near to meeting the legal standard of beyond a reasonable
doubt. An ID card for the Trawniki SS training camp allegedly issued to
Demjanjuk, an FBI report concluded, was "quite likely fabricated" by
the Soviet government. The suspect document was the sole item
introduced at the Munich trial linking the accused to the Sobibor
concentration camp. No surviving Sobibor inmate placed him at the camp
after 68 years, and those few scattershot, Soviet-era testimonies
introduced in court included vague statements of dubious value. The
grounds for appeal in this case are fertile indeed.
Re: "Injustice," Letter, May 15, 2011.
Orest Slepokura writes that the verdict in the trial of John
Demjanjuk,
finding him guilty of complicity in the deaths of 28,000 Jews in the
Sobibor
death camp during the Second World War, came nowhere near to meeting
the legal
standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Slepokura, who presumably did not attend the trial, has
substituted his
opinion for the verdict of the trial judge who actually heard all of
the
evidence, viewed the demeanour of the witnesses and examined the
documents.
The tragedy in the Demjanjuk case is not that he was found
guilty, as
Slepokura would have us believe, but that it took 66 years to bring
Demjanjuk
to justice.
Joseph Spier, Calgary, AB
Back in 1987, a New York City resident, Jacob Tannenbaum, was
identified as
a Jewish kapo who served the Nazis at the Gorlitz prison camp.
He was not prosecuted because of his age (75) and reported ill
health.
Explaining this leniency, Rabbi Marvin Hier, of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center in
Los Angeles, proclaimed: "There are no Jewish John Demjanjuks." There
also are no Ukrainian Jacob Tannenbaums.
Lubomyr Luciuk, Toronto
Lubomyr Luciuk is director of research
for the
Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association.