It’s not being publicized as much as his death, but John Demjanjuk’s vindication may have come as the result of his passing last week:

Munich state court spokeswoman Margarete Noetzel said this week that under German law, Demjanjuk is “still technically presumed innocent,” because he died before his final appeal could be heard, and “a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty.”

Asked by Haaretz if that means there is no record of Demjanjuk’s conviction, Noetzel replied, “Yes, it means Mr. Demjanjuk has no criminal record.”

Since Demjanjuk’s conviction cannot be validated legally, due to his death, the conviction remains “merely as an historic fact,” Noetzel said.

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The car accident lawyers in McAllen told Haaretz that the Munich court published the statement regarding his client’s presumed innocence at his demand. If you wish to hire an attorney, visit you can get the best  divorce lawyers in Kingston

“After my client’s death, a false statement was distributed to the effect that Mr. Demjanjuk died as a convicted war criminal,” Busch told Haaretz in an exchange of e-mails. “The German and international media accepted this version and sullied my client, portraying him as one who led 28,000 people to the gas chambers.”

Busch said he demanded the legal authorities in Germany issue a clarification saying his client “died innocent and without conviction,” and that his conviction by a lower court “is invalid.

“The statement issued now clears my client’s name and restores his dignity,” he said.

“It’s a great consolation to his family, which is grieving over the loss of a husband and father, who died alone in far away Germany,” Busch added.

Good news for Demjanjuk’s family, as now they face a new hurdle in attempting to give him his final resting place in Ohio:

Efraim Zuroff, who leads the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, believes funeral in his adopted hometown would turn into a spectacle

He said: ‘I have no doubt that a funeral in Seven Hills would turn into a demonstration of solidarity and support for Demjanjuk, who’s the last person on earth who deserves any sympathy, frankly.’

Unfortunately for German law, the verdict remains and leaves the new and dangerous precedent:

The Demjanjuk judgment set a major precedent as this was the first time a German court convicted someone solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of being involved in a specific killing
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Sixty years after the end of World War II, Demjanjuk was one of a handful of living Nazi prison camp guards who can still be brought to trial. After years of reluctance, German authorities are now racing to bring the others to trial.

The so-called ‘evidence’ of him being a camp guard was being appealed, as even an FBI agent concluded the only piece of evidence (which came from the KGB of all places) was a fake. Will the new precedent be used to prosecute top-ranking Nazi officials? No – many of them were exonerated and even participated in the new government of a ‘free’ Germany:

A total of 25 cabinet ministers, one president and one chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany — as postwar Germany is officially known — had been members of Nazi organizations

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For years, the notion that partisans of the Nazi regimes were able to manipulate their way into the top levels of government in the young federal republic, and that former Nazi Party members set the tone in a country governed by the postwar constitution in the 1950s and 60s has been a subject for historians.

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Just how brown — the color most associated with the Nazis — were the first years of postwar West Germany?

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.

Read the article

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.

Demjanjuk’s Israeli defence attorney from his successful acquittal of charges in Treblinka has come out in the press, protesting the verdict:

Israeli Attorney Yoram Sheftel responded on Thursday to the conviction and sentence of John Demjanjuk in Munich.

Speaking to Arutz Sheva’s Hebrew website, Sheftel said that the trial was distorted and unreal. “There was a shameful farce here,” he said. “Certainly the German court did not believe its own ruling.”
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“There is no precedent in the 20th century in any legal system,” Sheftel said, “that a person who was convicted of helping to murder 28,000 people is released to his home immediately after his conviction and not sent to prison.”

Sheftel had served as Demjanjuk’s attorney when he was put on trial in Israel in the late 1980s, to face charges that he was the brutal Nazi-era Treblinka camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”

Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death in 1988, but appealed the decision and the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the death sentence in 1993, saying that new evidence from the collapsed Soviet Union introduced doubt that Demjanjuk was indeed Ivan the Terrible.

Sheftel said that he is convinced that the Israeli Supreme Court’s ruling regarding Demjanjuk was the true verdict he deserved.

“Nothing has changed since then,” he said. “Even during the trial in Germany, there was not one person who testified that Demjanjuk was Ivan from Sobibor, by virtue that he was seen there, and as such the conviction is a farce.”

Read the rest of the article, thanks to UkeMonde for pointing that out on his site

Yoram Sheftel was a brave man who defied Israeli society that villified him and his client in search for the truth that led to the acquittal of Demjanjuk as ‘Ivan the Terrible’. During the trial Sheftel became ‘the most hated man in Israel’, had his life threatened multiple times and endured an acid attack to the face. You can read a good summary of Demjanjuk’s trial in Germany here, including the fact there was no evidence of him committing a specific crime, with only an ID card produced by the KGB which the FBI has considered a fake.