Demjanjuk Sentenced to Hang as Israelis Applaud and Weep : Automatic Appeal for ‘Ivan’; He Says, ‘I Am Innocent’

Retired U.S. auto worker John Demjanjuk was sentenced today to death by hanging for killing thousands of Jews at the World War II Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland, where he became known as “Ivan the Terrible.”

The courtroom packed with spectators, many of them Holocaust survivors, burst into applause and cheered when the death sentence was announced. Some wept, others shouted “bravo” and “death,” and many sang, “The people of Israel live.”

Under Israeli law, the sentence will be automatically reviewed by the nation’s supreme court, suspending Demjanjuk’s execution for at least 45 days.

Killed ‘With Own Hands’

“He served as an arch henchman who with his very own hands killed tens of thousands, humiliated, degraded, victimized and brutalized, persecuted innocent human beings zealously,” said Judge Zvi Tal, reading from the court’s sentence.

“The blood of the victims still cries out to us,” Tal said. “It is for this reason that we sentence him to the punishment of death.”

The court convicted Demjanjuk last week of four counts of Nazi war crimes for serving as “Ivan the Terrible,” the sadistic guard who crammed tens of thousands of people into the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp, and then fired up the engines.

More than 850,000 people, most of them Jews, perished at Treblinka in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942 and 1943.

‘I Am Innocent’

“I am innocent, innocent, innocent--and God is my witness,” Demjanjuk, 68, told the court earlier in a seven-minute plea to spare him the death sentence. “I have no doubt in my heart, my heart is pure.”

Demjanjuk claims he is a victim of mistaken identification and counterfeit evidence supplied by the Soviet KGB.

Only one other person has been tried under Israel’s war crimes law--Adolf Eichmann, the mastermind of the Nazi plot to exterminate the Jews, who was convicted in 1961 and hanged in 1962.

Demjanjuk appeared stoic as the sentence was announced, but his son, John Demjanjuk Jr., 22, wept outside the courtroom and denounced the court’s decision.

‘Time Will Show Truth’

“It will go on to shame the state of Israel, the Israeli Justice Department, the U.S. Justice Department and, most unfortunately, the 6 million innocent victims of the Holocaust,” the younger Demjanjuk said. “My father is innocent and always will be. Time will show the truth.”

Demjanjuk, who was complaining of back pain, was taken to and from court in a wheelchair. He shook his head back and forth and made the Christian sign of the cross as Prosecutor Yonah Blattman urged the court to hand down the death penalty.

Two death camp survivors who identified Demjanjuk at the trial expressed satisfaction at the sentence, but said it would not relieve their memories of the Holocaust.

Wound Won’t Heal

“The wound is still infected and it won’t be healed. I will live with it until the end of my days,” said Treblinka survivor Eliyahu Rosenberg.

Demjanjuk, a native Ukrainian, claimed at the trial that he was held at a prisoner-of-war camp in Chelm, Poland, during the time survivors charged he served as the most brutal of Treblinka guards.

He moved to the United States following World War II, became a naturalized citizen and worked for 30 years at a Cleveland auto plant. The U.S. Justice Department stripped him of his citizenship for lying about his past in 1981 and sent him to Israel for trial five years later.