California – The Only Witness Against Alleged Nazi Demjanjuk Travels To Germany To Testify

California – Germany is preparing for its last Nazi war crimes trial and a courtroom duel between two old survivors: John Demjanjuk, accused of being a concentration camp guard in the killing fields of Eastern Europe, and Thomas Blatt, a former teenage inmate in one of the Third Reich’s most brutal outposts.

In a charge sheet to be read to him with the help of an interpreter, Mr Demjanjuk will be accused of helping to kill 29,000 Jews. There are questions, however, about his physical health and ability to stand trial and whether he is mentally competent to understand the charges.

Doctors gathered around his hospital bed in Munich’s Stadelheim prison yesterday taking blood samples to establish if the former Cleveland car mechanic, 89, has kidney disease and a leukaemic blood marrow condition. The US immigration authorities deemed him fit enough to be deported but the health requirements for a long trial are more stringent.

“If he is sick, they will first have to cure him,” said Mr Demjanjuk’s court-appointed lawyer, Gerhard Maull. “If he is incurably sick they have to find a place for him to live.”

On the other side of the courtroom will be Mr Blatt, 81, who has travelled from California to be the only witness to testify against Mr Demjanjuk. He was a teenage inmate in the Sobibor death camp, but no longer has a concrete memory of Mr Demjanjuk; he was in the camp, close to the present Polish-Ukrainian border, at the same time as the guard and can testify to the horrific conditions — but will not, he admits, be able to point his finger at the defendant’s face. “After 66 years I cannot even remember the face of my father,” says Mr Blatt — whose parent was clubbed to death in Sobibor.

“But I am sure that Demjanjuk and the other Ukrainians were there as guards . . . he is the last living criminal from Sobibor.”

The confrontation encapsulates the dilemma at the heart of Nazi-hunting more than 60 years after the Holocaust, with time making it more and more difficult to bring trials to a successful conclusion.

The camp buildings are decaying or flattened; little remains of Sobibor apart from two monuments at the site of the gas chambers and a plaque, quoting the Book of Job: “Earth conceal not my blood.”

Nazi hunters, such as Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, are underfunded. Its top ten most wanted war criminals are in their late 80s or 90s; some may be dead.

The trial of Mr Demjanjuk is a calculated risk for Germany. It is deemed important to remind Germans that the Holocaust was not a force of nature but a man-made, preventable tragedy; at a time when Holocaustdeniers are gaining ground in the neo-Nazi movement, the trial testimony is intended to educate a new generation.

At the same time, conviction may well depend on an elaborate paper trail and Mr Demjanjuk escaped the death sentence in Israel almost 20 years ago when lawyers, defending him from charges that he was “Ivan the Terrible”, a notorious guard at the Treblinka concentration camp, successfully questioned the veracity of incriminating documents.

The Munich state prosecutor says that he has information from seven separate sources that Mr Demjanjuk — a Ukrainian who fought originally for the Red Army before being captured by the Germans — was in the camp in the spring and summer of 1943.