Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- The trial of John Demjanjuk, Germany’s most prominent Holocaust case in decades, may demonstrate the justice system’s limits in helping the nation come to terms with its troubled past, lawyers said.

Demjanjuk, 89, appeared in a Munich court today to face charges of being a Nazi guard who aided in the murder of 27,900 people in 1943 at the Sobibor death camp in then German-occupied Poland. About 35 relatives of the camps’ victims registered as co-plaintiffs. The first day of trial opened after a delay of more than an hour to handle media accommodations.

Demjanjuk’s case has been closely watched since a Munich court issued an arrest warrant for him in March and he was deported from the U.S. two months later. About 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and Germany has been criticized for allowing too many perpetrators to escape punishment.

“People are looking for the historic dimensions that transcend the narrow legal issues of the case,” Thomas Henne, a German legal historian currently teaching at Tokyo University, said in an interview. “The question is whether a criminal court is the right place to find historic answers. It’s difficult enough to judicially determine an individual’s guilt six decades after the fact.”

There is no evidence of his participation in any killings, Demjanjuk’s lawyers claim. “My father has never hurt anyone anywhere,” Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an e- mailed statement.

‘Cartel of Silence’

While prosecution of Nazis in German courts started only years after the war, some prominent cases helped break the country’s “cartel of silence,” Henne said, including the Auschwitz trials during the 1960s in Frankfurt where hundreds of concentration camp survivors testified. Still, some probes led to unconvincing acquittals or allowed Nazis to all too easily claim medical reasons to avoid trials, he said.

“With Demjanjuk, the current generation of prosecutors and judges aims to show they won’t repeat these mistakes,” Henne said. “The swift handling of the case is a sort of manifest demonstration saying: ‘Yes, we’re doing better now.’”

Demjanjuk, a Ukraine native and retired autoworker, lived near Cleveland until he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and extradited to Israel in 1986. He was tried in that country on charges he was “Ivan the Terrible,” the guard who tortured Jews while herding them into the Treblinka concentration camp gas chambers.

German Investigation

His death sentence and conviction in the case were overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court in 1993, saying there was reasonable doubt that he served at Treblinka. Demjanjuk returned to the U.S., regaining his citizenship. In 2002, a court again revoked it over his alleged role at Sobibor.

Germany’s central Nazi crime investigation unit started to look into Demjanjuk in 2008 after stumbling over his U.S. citizenship case on the Internet. After an eight-month investigation, they referred the matter to Munich prosecutors.

His lawyer says prosecutors rely on an identity card and a staff list to prove he served at Sobibor and wrongfully infer he must have aided in the murders because he was there. The lawyer, Ulrich Busch, said document experts found that the ID card was forged.

“It is all a farce and cannot withstand the test of litigation,” Demjanjuk’s son said in the statement.

‘Highly Problematic’

Documents from the time are generally reliable because Germans were “extremely diligent with paper work,” said Berlin historian Angelika Benz in an interview. Benz is studying Russian prisoners of war trained at the Trawniki camp in occupied Poland to become guards, a group to which prosecutors claim Demjanjuk belonged.

“Sobibor was an extermination camp, so anyone who worked there was part of the murder machinery,” she said. “There wasn’t anything else to do there, it wasn’t a labor camp.”

While historians may be able to come to such conclusions, a criminal court may require a more detailed account, both Henne and Benz said.

To rely solely on a general conclusion for a guilty verdict could be “highly problematic,” said Klaus Marxen, a criminal law professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University. A conviction normally requires evidence of individual acts, he said.

The judges will also have to examine whether Demjanjuk can escape punishment because he may have enlisted as a guard to save his own life, said Marxen. Prosecutors claim that Demjanjuk could have fled to avoid committing crimes.

‘Voluntarily’

While Trawniki guards fled on occasion, some of those caught were executed, Benz said.

“From today’s point of view, it’s difficult to determine why an individual acted in the way he did back then,” Benz said. “We should be very careful with the term ‘voluntarily’ here.”

The court has scheduled trial days until May. Three professional and two lay judges will hear the case. If convicted, Demjanjuk may face a prison term of as many as 15 years.

Because Demjanjuk suffers from an incurable bone-marrow disease, doctors said he’s only able to follow two 90-minute court sessions a day. If his health deteriorates, the court may have to drop the case, Marxen said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Karin Matussek in Munich via kmatussek@bloomberg.net;

Last Updated: November 30, 2009 07:25 EST