On Saturday, March 17th, Nazi killer John Demjanjuk died at age 91. For the last 35 years courts all over the world debated if he was the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp.
That was the first accusation against him, which led to him being extradited from the U.S. to Israel in the 1980s. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death – only to have the Israeli Supreme Court unanimously overturn the verdict and return him to the U.S. after it received evidence that another Ukrainian, not Demjanjuk, was that Nazi guard.
Despite the overruling of the Israeli Supreme court, the Israeli judge Dalia Dorner, who sat on the Jerusalem District Court panel that convicted John Demjanjuk of war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1988, is still convinced the verdict was just.
"I believe without a shadow of a doubt that he was 'Ivan the Terrible," she says "But I still support the Supreme Court verdict that ruled he could not be convicted due to reasonable doubt."
Eventually Demjanjuk was convicted in a Munich court on May 2011 of helping to kill the Jews at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. He was sentenced to five years in prison but freed because of his age.
No justice can be done to justify what happened in the Holocaust. Even today, anti Semitism is alive and well - from Iran that threatens to wipe Israel off the map, to campuses across the world celebrating Israel Apartheid Week without any factual basis.
Germany is still battling the Nazis - just this weekend 46 neo-nazis were captured with Germany's police hunting down at least a hundred more.
I guess our answer to all that hate is to remember the Holocaust and never forget and to keep Israel stronger than ever so that it will never happen again.
Check out Yad Vashem's channel on YouTube for personal stories of those that survived. Sign up to receive Giyus.org alerts via email. Help us make Israel stronger online.
