John Demjanjuk - Telegraph In May 2011 the German court convicted him of helping to murder almost 30,000 Jews at Sobibor, amounting to the number killed during the period when he was a guard there. A total of a quarter of a million people were murdered at the death camp. "The court is convinced that the defendant served as a guard at Sobibor from March 27 1943 to mid-September 1943," said presiding Judge Ralph Alt, sentencing him to five years in jail. As guard he took part in the murder of at least 28,000 people. John Demjanjuk was born Iwan Nikolai Demjanjuk on April 3 1920 at Dubovye Makhatintsy, a village in the Ukraine. As a young man he cut an impressive figure: tall, slim and strong with light-coloured hair and grey eyes, but simple and uneducated, with just four years of schooling. His family was said to be religious and therefore anti-Soviet, and possibly anti-Semitic too; many rural Ukrainians blamed Jews for their impoverishment at a time when famines and purges were the norm. Demjanjuk was driving a tractor on a collective farm when he was called up by the Soviet Army in late 1940. Serving in an artillery unit when the Germans invaded Russia, he was wounded in the autumn of 1941 and bore a scar on his back for the rest of his life. He returned to the front line with the Red Army until he was captured by the Nazis in the eastern Crimea in May 1942 and held at the Rovno prisoner-of-war transit camp in Poland. The question of what happened next would come to dominate the rest of his life. Demjanjuk insisted he was incarcerated in the notorious prison camp at Chelm in eastern Poland and that as the war came to an end he joined the Vlasov army, drawn by the Germans from the ranks of Soviet prisoners and ordered into Nazi uniform to fight Stalin's troops. When the conflict ended he spent six years in a camp for displaced persons, working as a driver for the US Army and emigrating to the United States in 1951. According to prosecutors, however, Demjanjuk was recruited from Rovno and trained at Trawniki as an SS guard, given a weapon, uniform and an identity card bearing his photograph, and sent to work at Sobibor before being posted to Treblinka. After six years" residence in America, Demjanjuk adopted the anglicised name John and in 1958, with his wife Vera - whom he had met and married in the displaced persons camp - applied for American citizenship. By now he had a steady job on the Ford assembly line and had bought his first house in Parma, a Ukrainian suburb of Cleveland. Quietly-spoken (neither he nor his wife ever bothered to learn much English), he was regarded as a model father, a devout churchgoer and pillar of his local community, hard-working, God-fearing and law-abiding. By the time he was arrested in 1981 he was living in retirement in a red-brick bungalow in the blue-collar Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills. There were serious contradictions in Demjanjuk's account, however, as well as much that was left out. He explained this by saying he had forgotten many events of 40 years before, but what he could not explain was an SS identification card from Trawniki, numbered 1393, that placed him in the camps. What seemed to clinch the case against Demjanjuk was the gut-wrenching testimony of survivors of Treblinka. "Ivan would push people into the gas chambers," one recalled, "slashing them with a bayonet. He would split open their heads, cut off ears, gouge out eyes and rip open the bellies of pregnant women. But this, in the opinion of some leading jurists, was not enough. "The prosecution's case," declared a former Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, "rested on identification by witnesses over 40 years later. But we all know how mistakes are made by witnesses at identification parades here. In 2011, doubt was cast on the very identity card that had seemed so damning, with FBI analysis appearing to show it might have been tampered with. After his successful appeal in Israel, Demjanjuk was deported to America, flying business class and returning to a hero's welcome from fellow Ukrainian expatriates in Ohio. Some media commentators seizing on his case maintained that Demjanjuk was not merely innocent but had become a modern-day Dreyfus . But his conviction in Germany meant that, despite the efforts of his family to repatriate him, Demjanjuk lived out his last days in a Bavarian nursing home, to which he had been released pending his appeal of a five-year sentence. "I am again and again an innocent victim of the Germans," he told his German judges. Germany is responsible for the fact that I have lost for good my whole reason to live, my family, my happiness, any future and hope. John Demjanjuk is survived by his wife, their two daughters and a son. John Demjanjuk, born April 3 1920, died March 17 2012