Former Nazi guard Demjanjuk on trial, faces 29,000 counts of accessory to murder

John Demjanjuk, A former Nazi Guard, was put on trial Monday facing 27,900 counts of accesory to murder. The 89-year-old retired Ohio autoworker arrived at the opening of the trial in a wheelchair.
Demdanjuk's attorney had opened the proceedings by filing a motion against the court's judge and prosecutors, accusing them of treating the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk harsher than Germans who ran the Nazi's Sodibor death camp in occupied Poland. A bold statement. Demdanjuk was deported in May from the United States to Germany, and has been in custody ever since. He could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted. Demdanjuk kept his eyes closed throughout the proceedings and remained mute in response to the judge's questions. Demdanjuk became a household name in the 1980s when he was extradited by the United States for trial in Israel on charges that he was the notoriously brutal guard at the Nazi's Treblinka death camp who earned the moniker "Ivan the Terrible" for his deeds. He was convicted in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and spent seven years in prison until Israel's Supreme Court in 1993 overturned the conviction. It ruled that another person, not Demjanjuk, was actually "Ivan the Terrible."
Some of the most damning evidence comes from statements made by Ignat Danilchenko, a now-deceased Ukrainian who once served in the Soviet Army and was exiled to Siberia following World War II for helping the Nazis. In 1979, he told the Soviet KGB that he served with Demjanjuk at Sobibor and that Demjanjuk "like all guards in the camp, participated in the mass killing of Jews."

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