In February 1987, I found myself in a Jerusalem courtroom, captivated by the heart-wrenching testimony of survivors from the Treblinka death camp in Poland. This notorious camp claimed the lives of an estimated 700,000-900,000 individuals between 1942 and 1943.
These survivors, frail and elderly, were delivering their accounts during the trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-American accused of being the infamous camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible”. According to their recollections, “Ivan” operated the gas pumps that filled the chambers with deadly gas.
However, their memories had deceived them. Demjanjuk was not “Ivan the Terrible”. Soviet archives uncovered after the trial revealed that he was likely a guard at another Nazi death camp, Sobibor, where approximately 170,000-250,000 people were murdered. Demjanjuk, initially convicted and later acquitted in Israel, faced a second trial in Germany and was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 28,060 individuals at Sobibor.
Unfortunately, Demjanjuk died at the age of 91, less than a year after his conviction, before his appeal could be heard.
The complexities faced by prosecutors in the Demjanjuk case shed light on why only one alleged Nazi war criminal has ever been prosecuted and convicted in Britain. Andrei Sawoniuk, a Belarusian Nazi police auxiliary, faced trial at the Old Bailey in 1999 and was sentenced to life imprisonment for two charges of murder. He passed away in Norwich prison in 2005.
But these historical events are far from forgotten. The recent resignation of Anthony Rota, the speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, underscores this fact. Rota arranged a standing ovation for a 98-year-old alleged Ukrainian Nazi war criminal, Yaroslav Hunka, during an official visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Rota claimed ignorance of the allegations against Hunka. Meanwhile, war crimes investigators diligently gather evidence of atrocities in Ukraine and Syria, aiming to bring the perpetrators to justice.
According to a recent book called Safe Haven, which examines the UK’s attempts to investigate 400 Nazi collaborators who fled to Britain after World War II, the Demjanjuk case left a lasting impact on government lawyers. Senior Treasury counsel Sir John Nutting is quoted in the book, saying, “One thing which was absolutely clear to us right from the start was that we would not proceed with a case which depended on identification.”
As highlighted by recent reports in the Observer, the UK still faces unresolved issues surrounding Nazi war crimes. The truth about the Nazi slave labour camps on the Channel Island of Alderney, which were occupied for five years during the war, remains elusive due to allegations of deliberate cover-ups by British officials. To address these allegations, a government inquiry led by former Conservative minister Eric Pickles has been established to examine the evidence.
It has been nearly 80 years since the end of World War II, and the era of Nazi war crime trials has come to a close. However, historians and researchers maintain that there are still valuable lessons to be learned about the effective use of the law in bringing war criminals to justice.
Sadly, for victims like my grandmother, Ilse Cohn, justice will never be served. She was murdered in Lithuania in November 1941 by a Nazi death squad led by SS colonel Karl Jäger. Jäger, along with hundreds of thousands
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