November 10, 2009

Demjanjuk: The Last Great Nazi Trial

Katie Engelhart, Maclean's

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It is being touted as the last great Nazi trial. In November, John Demjanjuk—now first on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most-wanted war criminals—will appear before a Munich court. He is charged with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder for his role as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk is 89, and those in favour of prosecuting him feel a sense of urgency. “It’s a race against time,” says Michael Scharf, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who has worked on the trials of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. “They’re trying to close the book on justice before [his] life ends naturally.”

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TAGGED: Germany

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