John Demjanjuk died Saturday in Germany, ending nearly 35 years of legal battles with officials in three countries who claimed he was a Nazi death camp guard.
During those years, the former Seven Hills autoworker was imprisoned in the United States, sentenced to death in Israel
until its highest court freed him ... last May, convicted in Germany for serving as an accessory in the deaths of more than 28,000 people at a death camp. He was sentenced to five years in prison but freed while he appealed the conviction.
"My father fell asleep with the Lord as a victim and survivor of Soviet and German brutality since childhood," Demjanjuk's son, John Jr., told the Associated Press. "He loved life, family and humanity. History will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian POWS for the deeds of Nazi Germans."
Attorney Joseph McGinness, who over the last two decades has represented guards who patrolled the perimeter of concentration camps, said the government wasted its time and tax dollars in dealing with Demjanjuk and others.
"These were nobodies -- if in fact they were even there," McGinness said Saturday. "They weren't the people making the decisions in the camps. There was no reason to chase any of them. None of them had a rank above private. Everyone of these people was nothing. They were draftees."
As a teenager, Demjanjuk survived by working as a plowman and a tractor driver on a farm. He was later drafted into the Soviet Red Army and in 1941, he was wounded in combat as the Germans tried to take control of Kiev. An explosive sent shrapnel into his back. He was hospitalized for four months, released and sent back to the front lines, where he was captured by German soldiers in the Crimea in May 1942.
His activities and whereabouts from that time until he found his way to an American-operated displaced persons camp in 1945 became the focus of the trials he would face decades later.
Demjanjuk had said he was sent to a series of prisoner-of-war camps after his capture and did heavy labor. In 1944, he said, he was transferred to Graz, Austria, where he joined a group of Ukrainian soldiers who began fighting the Soviets, in collaboration with the Germans.
After the war, Demjanjuk found refuge in displaced persons camps. In 1945, while in the camp in Landshut, Germany, he met a Ukrainian named Vera. They married two years later and moved to nearby Regensburg, another displaced persons camp, where Demjanjuk worked as a truck driver for the U.S. Army.
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2012/03/seven_hills_john_demjanjuk_con.html