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MUNICH, Germany: Holocaust survivors on Tuesday accused John Demjanjuk of exaggerating his health problems to try to derail his trial ahead of harrowing testimony on the horrors of the Sobibor Nazi death camp.
A lawyer for the alleged Nazi guard - charged with helping to kill 29,700 Jews and others - in turn hit out at "double standards" in German justice by bringing action against a lowly soldier who did not give the orders.
Demjanjuk was wheeled, moaning, into the second day of his trial on Tuesday on a stretcher, although unlike on Monday he was propped up and not lying down. He had his eyes closed throughout but was clearly conscious.
He remained motionless as the judge read out the names of some of the tens of thousands of people murdered in the gas chambers of Sobibor at the time when Demjanjuk was alleged to have served there.
He groaned again as the charges were read out in the court, clutching his head. He was taken out of the courtroom for several minutes, returning this time with a blanket covering him from the neck down and lying on his side. Profile: John Demjanjuk
The judge then offered Demjanjuk the chance to speak but his lawyer Ulrich Busch said his client would exercise his right to remain silent.
On Monday, while at one point he was lying flat on the stretcher covered head-to-toe in a white blanket, he later was seen laughing and joking after the day's hearing.
His behaviour angered many of the elderly Holocaust survivors, some of whom made it out of Sobibor, who had come to Munich to testify in the trial either as co-plaintiffs or as witnesses. None, however, can place Demjanjuk at the camp.
"I am sure he is faking his condition," said Thomas Blatt, an 82-year-old Sobibor survivor, originally from Germany, now living in Los Angeles.
David Van Huiden, 78, whose entire family never came back from Sobibor, said he was cross because being on a stretcher meant that Demjanjuk would not have to come face to face with any of those giving evidence.
"It is difficult to accept that he does not have to face anyone. It doesn't matter whether I am here or not," he said.
Prosecutors are rely heavily on written testimony by people now dead, and accounts from survivors saying that as a guard, he had blood on his hands.
"The guards were all murderers," Robert Franzman, another Dutch plaintiff, told reporters.
The family of the 89-year-old Demjanjuk, who denies ever being at Sobibor, says he suffers from leukaemia and other illnesses and that he will probably not survive the trial.
But medical experts cast doubt on how ill Demjanjuk is and on Monday again told the court he was well enough to be tried. Proceedings are already limited to two 90-minute sessions per day.
Demjanjuk's defence lawyer Ulrich Busch argued that the case is a farce because German SS members - Demjanjuk was born in Ukraine and was taken prisoner while in the Soviet Red Army - were acquitted in earlier trials.
"How can it be that those who gave the orders can have been innocent?" he said, attacking what he called the German justice system's "double standards."
On Tuesday during a 45-minute statement - which drew jeers in the courtroom - he called for the trial to be abandoned because of Demjanjuk's health and because he said his client was being tried twice for the same crimes.
Demjanjuk, who changed his name from Ivan after moving to the United States after World War II, was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 for being "Ivan the Terrible", a sadistic Nazi guard at another camp, Treblinka.
But after five years on death row the conviction was overturned by Israel because of doubts about his identity, although it was ruled there that Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor and at other camps. - AFP/de
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