He was once thought to be Ivan the Terrible, the sadistic mastermind of the Treblinka death camp. But having spent seven years in an Israeli jail, John Demjanjuk was acquitted eventually on the ground of mistaken identity. Now Demjanjuk faces another trial, this time accused of being a rank-and-file prison guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. So Mr Demjanjuk faces being downgraded from one of history’s most infamous monsters to the lowest-ranking person to go on trial for Nazi war crimes.
There will be some who wonder why a shuffling, breathless, stateless Ukranian-born 89-year-old should be on trial at all, particularly given his theatrical performance yesterday. His family say he is terminally ill. Mr Demjanjuk’s lawyer paints him as a reluctant prison guard, even drawing a remarkable analogy between Mr Demjanjuk and the inmates of Sobibor — a line of defence unlikely to enhance the case for clemency.
But simply establishing the truth justifies the trial. Being an accomplice to 27,900 murders is not a crime that time can be allowed to wash away. A prison guard at Sobibor killed as many as a hundred people every day. He may not have been the Ivan the Terrible, but if found guilty, Mr Demjanjuk will have been worthy of the epithet all the same.
Mr Demjanjuk’s will probably be the last of the great Nazi war trials, a final legal staging-post in one of history’s bleakest narratives. All the more reason, then, that it is brought to a proper conclusion. It seems that history, and history of the very worst kind, will not leave Mr Demjanjuk alone. Nor should it.