[COLUMN] Time to leave Demjanjuk's fate to Providence

John Demjanjuk, third from right, is taken from his home in Seven Hills, Ohio by immigration agents as his granddaughter, Olivia Nishnic, looks on, Tuesday, April 14, 2009. (AP Photo/Jason Miller)

It's time to leave Ivan "John" Demjanjuk alone.

Rule of law and a sense of justice are crucial elements in any free society.

Free human beings, after all, have the God-given natural right to defend themselves from those who would do them harm. To that end, we have collectively allowed the government to establish a judicial system to punish those who violate the rights of others.

However, there is another side of justice and that is protecting the rights of the accused, regardless of how despicable the crime. Here in the United States we have various protections in place, including laws against double jeopardy.

Enter Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian native who came to the United States in 1952 and became a citizen six years later.

Demjanjuk began World War II as a soldier in the Soviet Union's Red Army when he was captured by Germans in 1942. The belief is that he either volunteered or was conscripted as a prison guard and committed crimes at Nazi death camps.

Demjanjuk said he was imprisoned in a camp in Poland until 1944, and then transferred to another camp in Austria. In 1945, he joined an anti-Soviet Russian military unit funded by the Nazis.

Now, 64 years after the war ended, the German government, in a particularly ridiculous move, has charged Demjanjuk with more than 29,000 counts of accessory to murder.

Can the German government prove that Demjanjuk had a direct role in the deaths of more than 29,000 other human beings more than six decades ago during the fog of war?

Of course not.

In reality, Demjanjuk is just another victim of this fixation we have with punishing Nazis and the overzealousness of a German prosecutor/Nazi hunter, Kurt Schrimm, who cares more about his political future than the well-being of a frail 89-year-old autoworker in Cleveland.

The time for punishing those responsible for the Holocaust has long passed. We can no longer ensure a fair trial for those responsible. Subjecting Demjanjuk to a criminal proceeding more than six decades after the offenses is unfair given his age and the near impossibility of obtaining exculpatory documents and witnesses, or even of remembering the events under investigation.

This is pertinent in this case because there are serious doubts as to Demjanjuk's guilt.

The world had its shot at Demjanjuk more than two decades ago and he prevailed. In 1988, a court in Israel sentenced Demjanjuk to death by hanging after a trial accusing him of being the notorious guard Ivan the Terrible, who operated the diesel engines sending gas to the death chamber. Demjanjuk spent more than five years on death row there.

In 1993, the Israeli supreme court overturned the verdict when evidence surfaced that he was not Ivan the Terrible. In its opinion, the court said Demjanjuk, while not Ivan the Terrible, was probably a guard at the Trawniki unit and at Sobibor and other camps.

A few months later, after petitions were filed to retry Demjanjuk for crimes committed at those camps, the court rejected that idea for several reasons, including its belief that a conviction on the new charges would be unlikely, meaning there was little real evidence that he committed any crimes.

Of course, Demjanjuk's ordeal was not over. The United States, after reinstating his citizenship, immediately began proceedings to revoke his citizenship and have him deported.

The evidence used came from records found in Soviet archives and German documents. The most damning is a certificate from Trawniki that carried his information and said he also was posted at Sobibor and two other camps.

Still, even if he were a guard at those camps, that is not evidence he committed any crimes, let alone participated in the murder of 29,000 Jews.

If Israel decided 15 years ago that there was not enough evidence he committed crimes, why should we believe the Germans have suddenly developed such evidence?

Besides, the architects of the Holocaust are dead. It really makes no sense to go after low-level guards who were mere children when the tragic events occurred.

As the Israeli supreme court said in 1993, "The matter is closed, but not complete; the complete truth is not the prerogative of the human judge."