The trial of alleged war criminal John Demjanjuk continued in Jerusalem district Court Wednesday with the cross-examination of Helge Grabitz, a member of the district attorney’s office in Hamburg who specializes in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals.
Demjanjuk’s American attorney, Mark O’Connor, is seeking to demonstrate that his client was a prisoner of war of the Germans and not the sadistic Treblinka death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”
All of his questions are aimed at disproving the prosecution’s contention that Demjanjuk was trained at the Trawniki SS camp for his duties at Treblinka. He has dismissed as a forgery Demjanjuk’s identification card, signed by the Trawniki commandant, which Israel obtained from Soviet sources. Grabitz, who authenticated the signature on the card, said Tuesday that she had never come across the name Demjanjuk in the Trawniki documents she studied, but noted that she examined only a small portion of the documents, the rest being missing.
On Wednesday, O’Connor wanted to know whether non-German but Aryan-looking POWs were conscripted for guard duty at the death camp. He apparently sought to cast doubt that the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was one of them.
Demjanjuk was not in court Wednesday. He complained he was ill and watched the proceedings on closed circuit television from a cot in a makeshift cell adjacent to the courtroom.
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