A Munich court’s guilty verdict in the case of John Demjanjuk, accused of being responsible for the murder of some 28,000 Jewish inmates at Nazi death camp Sobibor, was welcomed Thursday by former Supreme Court Judge Dalia Dorner, who said it was a way to “close the circle.”
Dorner, the judge who presided over the 1988 case in Israel in which Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death for being “Ivan the Terrible,” the notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp, also said she still had no doubt that he had been in both places and had committed terrible war crimes.
“As Dalia Dorner, the judge in the case of Ivan the Terrible, I have no doubt that he was the guard in Treblinka and he was only set free because of the legal process in this country,” said the judge, who served as a justice of Israel’s Supreme Court from 1993 to 2004.
“In my court room, I heard his victims identify him and I knew that he was guilty,” said Dorner, who was further convinced by his SS identification card that throughout both trials was claimed by the defense to be false.