munich | Being sent to the Nazi’s Sobibor camp was a death sentence for all but a handful of Jews, a Holocaust expert testified Feb. 23 at the trial of John Demjanjuk.
Johannes Houwink ten Cate, a professor at the University of Amsterdam’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, told the Munich state court that aside from the few Jews chosen to work, the thousands of others who boarded trains for the death camp had no chance of escape or survival.
“In my 25 years of research, I don’t know of a single case in which someone who was said to have been murdered in Sobibor actually died elsewhere,” he testified.
Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old retired Ohio autoworker, was deported from the United States in May and is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor. Prosecutors arrived at that figure after tallying transport lists of Jews sent there during the months Demjanjuk is alleged to have been a guard at the camp.
The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk rejects the charges, saying he has been mistaken for someone else. He maintains he was a Soviet soldier captured by the Germans and spent most of the war in prison camps.
During the proceedings Feb. 23 he showed no reaction to the testimony, lying on a bed wearing sunglasses and a green parka with blankets pulled up around him. During breaks, however, he talked with his attorney and his Ukrainian interpreter.
The trial has been delayed four times due to Demjanjuk’s poor health and is now expected to finish in May at the earliest.
In testimony Feb. 24, a former Soviet soldier who was taken prisoner by the Germans said that he knew Demjanjuk from the Flossenbürg camp, a concentration camp in Bavaria.
“We were brought there and Ivan was already there,” 92-year-old Alex Nagorny testified, referring to Demjanjuk by his birth name. He said the two lived together in a barracks room at Flossenbürg and shared an apartment in Germany after the war.
But when asked to identify Demjanjuk in the courtroom, Nagorny walked over to the bed where Demjanjuk lay and looked at him closely. When Demjanjuk removed his sunglasses, Nagorny said quickly: “That’s definitely not him — no resemblance.”
A day earlier, Houwink ten Cate was called as an expert witness to testify about the 1943 transports of Jews from the Netherlands to Sobibor, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland.
He testified over the objections of Demjanjuk’s defense attorney Ulrich Busch, who said Houwink ten Cate was prejudiced against his client. He cited a 2009 interview in which the professor told Dutch radio that Demjanjuk was “beyond a shadow of a doubt” an accomplice to mass murder.
“The witness prejudged the defendant in the worst possible way,” Busch said.
Presiding Judge Ralph Alt allowed the witness but said his testimony would be limited to facts, not conclusions.
Houwink ten Cate told the court about 19 trains from Holland to Sobibor that went weekly starting in March 1943. Each carried between 1,000 to 3,000 men, women and children to be killed.
The prosecution argues that a Nazi ID document proves that Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor, and that the transport lists prove how many people died at that time. Busch argued again, however, that the ID document was a Soviet-era fake.
In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel, accused of being the notoriously brutal guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka extermination camp. He was convicted, sentenced to death — then freed when an Israeli court found that he was a victim of mistaken identity.