Kyiv Post | 14Jan2011 | Associated Press
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/nation/detail/94825/
Update: Spain wants to put
Demjanjuk on trial
MADRID (AP) -- A Spanish judge has
indicted John Demjanjuk on charges of being an accessory to genocide
and crimes against humanity while serving as a Nazi concentration camp
guard.
The 90-year-old former Ohio autoworker is already being tried in
Germany on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder while serving
as a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk denies ever serving as a Nazi guard at any
camp and maintains that he was a Soviet soldier captured by the Germans
and spent most of the war in prison camps himself, and is being
mistaken for someone else.
Already, the former Ohio auto-worker was stripped of his U.S.
citizenship in 1981 after the U.S. Justice Department alleged 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.
Spanish Judge Ismael Moreno has now accused Demjanjuk of working at the
Nazi concentration camp in Flossenbuerg in Bavaria in southern Germany,
where Moreno says 155 Spaniards were held, 60 of whom died. Moreno
indicted Demjanjuk in an order dated Jan. 7, 2011 and made available
Friday [14Jan2011]
by the National Court.
The judge issued a European arrest warrant for Germany to hand over
Demjanjuk, presumably after his trial in Germany ends.
The Bavarian justice ministry said it had not yet received any word of
the indictment or the European arrest warrant from Spain.
Moreno is acting under Spain's so-called universal justice law, which
allows particularly heinous crimes to be tried in Spain even if they
are alleged to have been commmitted abroad.
But Moreno also acted because thousands of Spaniards were among the
millions who died in Nazi camps. Moreno has been investigating the
issue since July 2008 at the request of several Spaniards who survived
their ordeals.
Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., told the AP in an e-mail that his
father had never served in any Nazi camp and suggested that Moreno was
grasping at straws.
"He has progressed from acquittal by Israel of killing 850,000 to
supposedly being a POW coerced to guard at a place where 27,000 were
killed and now some group in Spain alleges he was a guard over 155
forced laborers," he said. "He was a Ukrainian POW who survived the
Nazi's murderous onslaught and this is just another flash in the media
pan," the son said.
Demjanjuk was one of four alleged ex-Nazi camp guards named in an
initial complaint that the National Court took up at the request of a
handful of Holocaust survivors from Spain.
When the other three were indicted by Spain in September 2009, he was
left out because at that point the United States had already handed him
over to Germany for trial.
Moreno can act against Demjanjuk without risk of double-jeopardy
because the German trial focuses on his alleged presence as a guard at
Sobibor and the Spanish proceedings involve his alleged later presence
at Flossenbuerg, according to Equipo Nizkor, the human rights group
that filed the initial complaint in Madrid.
There is no known evidence accusing Demjanjuk of a specific crime, and
he was indicted in Germany on the argument that anyone who had served
in a death camp like Sobibor -- whose sole purpose was killing -- could
be considered an accessory to murder. Flossenbuerg, however, was a
concentration camp where many prisoners were used for forced labor,
though thousands were killed or died amid deplorable conditions.
"This is a remarkable and extraordinary development that poignantly
shows that the victims of the crimes that Demjanjuk is charged with
came from all of Europe and truly were crimes against all of humanity,"
Elan Steinberg, vice-president of the American Gathering of Holocaust
Survivors and their Descendants, said in a statement welcoming the
Spanish action.
[W.Z.
Whether it is the John Demjanjuk case or the struggle for Ukraine's
independence by OUN-UPA, the Ukrainophobes at Associated Press and
Reuters consistently bias their reporting to present the reader with a
distorted picture of the realities of the issues.]
[W.Z. We have earlier archived four articles on the interest of Spain's Ismael Moreno in promoting the Holocaust Industry:
Spain issues arrest warrants for three alleged ex-Nazi guards Deutsche Welle, 17Sep2009; S. Houlton
Spain to seek extradition of Nazi war criminals from US bignewsnetwork.com, 17Jul2008; IANS
Lawyers ask Spanish court to charge 4 alleged ex-guards at Nazi camps Haaretz.com, 25Jun2008; Associated Press
Civil rights group wants John Demjanjuk extradited to Spain for war crimes Cleveland Plain Dealer, 24Jun2008; J. Caniglia ]
Kyiv Post |
14Jan2011 | Reuters
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/nation/detail/94813/
Spain court requests Demjanjuk
arrest, extradition
MADRID, Jan 14, 2011 (Reuters) -- Spain's high
court requested an international arrest warrant for John Demjanjuk, an
accused Nazi war criminal on trial in Germany, according to a ruling
made public on Friday.
The high court wants to bring Demjanjuk, 90, to trial in Spain on
accusations he was responsible for the deaths of Spaniards held in the
Flossenburg concentration camp where he was a guard during World War
Two.
The high court issued the ruling on Jan. 7, 2011, but it was not made public
until Friday [14Jan2011].
Demjanjuk was born in Ukraine and fought in the Red Army before the
Nazis captured him and recruited him as a camp guard [W.Z. Mr. Demjanjuk was never a camp guard for the Germans]. He emigrated to
the United States in 1951 and became a naturalised citizen in 1958.
Demjanjuk, who was top of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most
wanted war criminals, is accused in Germany of assisting in killings at
the Sobibor concentration camp. The high court wants Demjanjuk to be
extradited to Spain after his trial in Germany. The ruling said that
150 Spaniards were imprisoned in the Flossenburg camp.