After Germany denied extradition due to incomplete, missing crucial information regarding details of the deaths of Spanish citizens and Demjanjuk’s involvement in the deaths, it looks like Bavaria will be the next country accusing Demjanjuk of war crimes:
The new complaint accuses Demjanjuk of 4,400 additional counts of accessory to murder for the time when he allegedly guarded the Flossenbuerg concentration camp in Bavaria.
Even though thousands died or were killed in Flossenbuerg, its entire purpose was not extermination like Sobibor, Auschwitz or the other Nazi death camps.
But in the new complaint filed by Cornelius Nestler, who represented the families of Sobibor victims at the Demjanjuk trial as co-plaintiffs, the Cologne-based attorney argues there should be no distinction made between concentration camps and death camps.
"Legally, it doesn’t make a difference if the purpose is to murder everybody there, or if the purpose is to murder a third of the people there," he told The Associated Press. "It’s still murder."
The complaint was also filed against Alex Nagorny, who testified during the Demjanjuk trial that they were both guards at Flossenbuerg together and then had lived together in Germany after the war.
When asked to identify Demjanjuk, however, Nagorny told the court the man on trial bore "no resemblance" to the Demjanjuk that he knew.
Nestler, who filed his complaint jointly with Thomas Walther, a former federal prosecutor who led the investigation that prompted Germany to put Demjanjuk on trial, said the purpose is not to heap more jail time on one person, but to open the door to other possible convictions.
Demjanjuk is currently released awaiting awaiting appeal:
The 91-year-old retired Ohio autoworker was convicted in May of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder after a Munich court found that the evidence showed he was a guard during the war the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland.
The precedent-setting case was the first time someone was convicted in Germany on evidence of being only a guard, without evidence of a specific killing.
The court ruled that guarding a death camp meant, in legal terms, that Demjanjuk was an accessory to the murder of the people who were killed in the camp’s gas chambers even if it could not be proven that he was directly involved in the extermination process.
Certainly no stranger to appeals, Demjanjuk was freed on appeal by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993 while on death row, concluding he was not “Ivan the Terrible†in Treblinka.