Demjanjuk

I wrote about John Demjanjuk a couple of years ago. He had been convicted in Israel in 1988 of being Ivan The Terrible, a sadistic guard at Treblinka camp during the war, and sentenced to death. Before they managed to do away with him the Israelis found they had the wrong bloke and sent him back home to America.

Then he was arrested, to stand trial in Germany as having been a guard at Sobibor camp. The Americans cancelled his citizenship and sent him off to Germany (even though there was no suggestion he had killed any German citizens). He was found guilty in May last year.

Now he is dead, aged 91.

I don't know if Demjanjuk was guilty - I suppose he was - but I do know that charging a man on the evidence of survivors more than 60 years after the event is dubious. And I do not believe it to be in the public interest to keep raking over the coals of the last war.

Let us hope Demjanjuk's departure to a higher court draws a line under this nonsense. I was born ten years after the war and am in my fifties. Enough.