Former guard in Nazi camp testifies at Demjanjuk trial in Germany

Demjanjuk trial: Former Nazi camp guard testifies

MUNICH — A former Soviet soldier taken prisoner by the Germans during World War II testified at the trial of John Demjanjuk on Wednesday that he didn’t know he would be used as a concentration camp guard when he agreed to work for the Nazis.

Ukrainian-born Alex Nagorny told the Munich state court that, when he was recruited from a prisoner of war camp, he agreed to serve to stave off hunger.

“I was simply asked if I wanted to work and I was hungry,” the 92-year-old testified. “That was all.”

Millions of Soviet prisoners died in German captivity, and the defense has argued those who agreed to serve the Nazis had no choice.

Prosecutors allege that, like Nagorny, Demjanjuk agreed to serve the Germans and was trained at the Trawniki SS camp before being sent to work as a guard.

Demjanjuk is accused of serving as a guard at the Sobibor death camp and charged as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews there.

Demjanjuk, however, denies ever having served as a camp guard, saying he has been mistaken for someone else.

The 89-year-old retired autoworker from Ohio, who also was born in Ukraine, maintains that he was a Soviet soldier who was captured by the Germans and spent most of the rest of the war in prison camps.

Nagorny told the court that, after he agreed to serve the Germans, he was sent from his prisoner of war camp in Chelm, Poland, to the nearby Trawniki camp, where he received only rudimentary military training.

“They said go left, go right, there was nothing more,” he said, speaking Ukrainian that was translated for the court. “We were shown how to use a weapon, but we did not shoot.”

He testified that he guarded an aircraft factory in Rostock where forced laborers were used, and was then sent to the Flossenbuerg concentration camp in Germany as a guard near the end of the war.

In statements to German investigators, Nagorny has said he was sent from Trawniki to Flossenbuerg with Demjanjuk.

Though Demjanjuk is not charged with any crimes at Flossenbuerg, the statement is important to proving he was a guard, said Thomas Walther, who led the investigation that prompted Germany to prosecute Demjanjuk.

“Here is a living witness who can say, ‘I was a Trawniki man and with me was Demjanjuk who was also a Trawniki man,” Walther told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the trial. “That’s important here because Demjanjuk says he was not a Trawniki.”

In morning testimony, however, Nagorny did not mention Demjanjuk and failed to remember the names of many of his Ukrainian comrades during the war — and those with whom he lived after the war.

“I knew all their names, but they’re long dead,” he told the court.

He walked into the courtroom slowly but unaided, alternating the hand in which he held his cane. He did not make eye contact with Demjanjuk, who lay on a bed next to the door through which he entered.

The special German prosecutors’ office responsible for investigating Nazi-era crimes is investigating Nagorny himself, to see whether he might have served at the Treblinka death camp.

There is evidence implicating a “Nagorny” as having served as a Treblinka guard, but investigators have said that it is not clear whether it is the same person.

Prosecutors argue in the Demjanjuk case that to have served at one of the Nazi death camps in occupied Poland — whose sole purpose was extermination — is enough to accuse one of accessory to murder.

The argument does not extend to those who served in the scores of concentration camps like Flossenbuerg where, though scores were killed or died through inhumane treatment, people were not necessarily sent simply to be murdered.