The Last Trial
May 12th, 2011. 91 year-old John Demjanjuk is found guilty in the complicity of the
extermination of 28 060 Jews as he appeared to be the warden of the Sobibor camp,
in Poland. Initially sentenced to a five-year prison term, he left the tribunal after the
verdict without any charges against him.
This historical trial started on the 30th of November, 2009, in Munich.
And it probably was the last trial, concerning the last Nazi criminal.
Sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 (based on the proof that he would have been the warden of the Treblinka camp) John Demjanjuk, who has Ukrainian origins, was finally acquitted of all charges in 1993 because of his misleading identity. Back in the US, he is judged again in 2001 for having served in the camps, and loses his American nationality. Now aged 91, he has been sentenced by the Munich tribunal for complicity in the murder of 28 060 people, this time as a warden at the Sobibor camp. Former worker in the Cleveland automobile company, he has always denied the charges pressed against him, pretending he only was a mere soldier in the Red Army, and a prisoner amongst many others in a Nazi camp.
The Demjanjuk case is the first judiciary procedure in Germany involving a Trawniki – name given to the camp wardens who were recruited amongst the prisoners of the camps- Until then, international justice had mainly focused on chasing the brains of the Hitlerian regime – Goering, Hess -, before chasing the regime’s executives – Eichmann, Papon -, and finally the soldiers, along with some members of the SS army.
By sentencing Demjanjuk, the international justice condemns the responsibility of the least important figures, these of people who yet were essential to the functioning of the extermination process. This book thus redraws the story of the last important trial of Nazism. An opportunity for Germany to write one of the last pages of a story which had already begun sixty years ago, during the Nuremberg trial.
Born in Suttgart, Nicolas Bourcier has attended international relations and history studies. He wrote about contemporean Germany and Hitler’s opponents. He has been a journalist for 15 years, and works for the French daily newspapers Le Monde. In 2006, he collected the testimony of Hitler’s bodyguard.