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Demjanjuk gets five years for Nazi death camp crimes (UPDATE)

Other News Materials 12 May 2011 16:18 (UTC +04:00)
John Demjanjuk, 91, received a five-year sentence from a Munich court on Thursday for his role as an SS guard at a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II.
Demjanjuk gets five years for Nazi death camp crimes (UPDATE)

(previous news was posted at 15:47)

John Demjanjuk, 91, received a five-year sentence from a Munich court on Thursday for his role as an SS guard at a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II.

The court found him guilty of being an accessory to 27,900 murders at Sobibor camp during 1943, following a trial lasting a year and a half, DPA reported.

Demjanjuk had maintained his innocence throughout drawn-out legal proceedings that shifted from the United States, where he had emigrated after the war, to Israel where he was found guilty, sentenced to hang and ultimately acquitted on appeal, back to the US and ultimately to Germany.

Relations of Holocaust victims had pleaded with Demjanjuk to end his long silence about what he did in Nazi Germany after he was taken prisoner as a young Red Army soldier. Prosecutors say he became an SS guard at a series of concentration camps.

But to the last he remained silent, declining an offer from presiding judge Ralph Alt to make a statement to the court before the judges retired to consider their verdict. "No," said Demjanjuk curtly.

According to the indictment, Demjanjuk served for several months of 1943 as a guard at Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland. Some 27,900 Jews were killed in that period in the camp's gas chambers.

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