John Demjanjuk, WWII Nazi Death Camp Guard, dies

German police say John Demjanjuk, who was convicted last year of serving as a Nazi death camp guard, has died.

Rosenheim police official Kilian Steger said that the 91-year-old died Saturday at a home for the elderly in southern Germany where he had been staying since his trial ended in Munich last year.

Demjanjuk had been released pending an appeal in a federal court, which had yet to take place.

Steger says prosecutors in nearby Traunstein are looking into Demjanjuk’s death as routine procedure.
Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker, was deported to Germany in 2009 to face trial in Munich after being stripped of his U.S. citizenship.

At the trial, judges found that evidence showed Demjanjuk was a guard during World War II at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in then-occupied Poland. They sentenced him to five years in prison.

Demjanjuk had consistently rejected the allegation, insisting he never served as a guard anywhere and was held in German camps himself for much of the war.

The case was viewed as one of the last — if not the last — major Nazi crimes trial. It also represented the first time someone was convicted in Germany on the basis only of having been a guard, without evidence of a specific killing, reported by The Associated Press.