Russia – First Sobibor Survivor to Remember Demjanjuk As Guard at Nazi Death Camp

Ryazan, Russia – A Russian survivor of the Sobibor Nazi death camp says he can identify accused guard John Demjanjuk, Czech Radio reported today, offering potentially crucial evidence for the former soldier’s trial.

Demjanjuk, who fought in the Russian Red Army before being captured and recruited as a Nazi camp guard, is on trial in Munich, accused of participating in the killing of 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland.

Demjanjuk denies a role in the Holocaust.

Former Sobibor prisoner Aleksei Weizen told Czech public radio in an interview that he remembered Demjanjuk. “I remember him as a guard, I saw him before he took a group of detainees to work in the woods,” the 87-year-old Russian told the station.

This would be the first time someone could identify the accused directly, the radio station said. The report did not mention Weizen had any evidence other than his own memory.

Demjanjuk’s lawyer Guenther Maull told Reuters he had heard of Weizen in conjunction with Sobibor before, but that he was not aware of the claims made in the Czech radio report.

Weizen is listed online as a survivor of the Sobibor camp by the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem. His name has also been transliterated from Russian as Alexei Vaytsen.

A spokesman for the office said it would pass on details of Weizen to prosecutors in Munich, but that it was for the court to decide whether they wanted to hear his testimony.

“He could be brought in at any time,” Kurt Schrimm, Germany’s chief Nazi war crimes investigator, told Reuters.

The radio said Weizen was in Sobibor from 1942 until an uprising there in 1943. A reporter interviewed Weizen last week in the city of Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, the station said.

Defence lawyers dispute that Demjanjuk was at Sobibor and say that even if he had been there as a “Trawniki” — a prisoner of war trained to perform duties at camps — he would have done so under duress and to save his own life.

He denies being at Sobibor, which prosecutors say was run by 20-30 Nazi SS members and up to 150 former Soviet war prisoners. But he has in the past acknowledged being at other camps.

But the top German investigator says he’s skeptical about the survivor’s new claim to remember John Demjanjuk as a guard at the Nazi death camp.

Thomas Walther says if the survivor did remember Demjanjuk, that almost certainly would have come up before, such as during his high-profile 1980s trial in Israel.

His trial is expected to be the last major Nazi-era war crimes case and is being followed closely abroad.