Suspected Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, accused of being involved in the murder of 28,000 Jews, told a German court Tuesday that he is “one of Hitler’s victims.”
Demjanjuk, who is standing trial for his tenure as a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, denied ever being at the camp, arguing that German authorities have mistaken his identity.
He told the Munich court, in a signed statement, that he was a Soviet prisoner of war and the Nazis used him as a slave laborer while they killed millions of his fellow Ukrainians.
“I find it an unbearable injustice that Germany is trying to make me, a prisoner of war, into a war criminal with this trial,” Demjanjuk said in the statement read by his lawyer.
“I am grateful to my medical staff who have helped to reduce the worst pain and allowed me to get through this trial which I feel is torture.”
“Germany is to blame for the fact that I have lost my whole reason for living, my family, my happiness and any future or hope,” the statement continued.
Demjanjuk’s statement is his first since his trial began in November 2009. If convicted, Demjanjuk could face up to fifteen years in prison for the crime of training as a guard in the SS camp Trawniki and working in Sobibor.
“It is not right that one wants to make a war criminal out of a prisoner of war,” his statement said. “Germany is guilty of a war of extermination in which I lost my home.”
