The death of John Demjanjuk is no doubt going to be greeted by yet a new round of World War II revisionist weeping. The 91-year-old retired auto-worker from Cleveland departed for Hell from a nursing home at Bavaria, whence he was appealing his sentence, by a free German court, of five years of prison after having been convicted of what the Associated Press characterized as 28,060 counts of accessory to murder. For years he has been defended by Patrick Buchanan and others who contend that his was a case of mistaken identity. His own son was quoted by the AP as saying that his father “loved life, family, and humanity” and that history would show Germany used him as “a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian POWs for the deeds of Nazi Germans.”

Well, let us just say that our eyes are dry. Demjanuk became famous when he was extradited to Israel from America and tried for being Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. He was convicted and sat on death row until Israel’s supreme court acquitted him. At the time the acquittal was much praised as an example of punctiliousness of Israel’s court system, and it is true that the court discovered doubts in respect of Treblinka. What is less widely noted is that the same high court said there was no doubt that Demjanjuk had been at Sobibor, which had no purpose other than the extermination of Jews. The court’s decision to bow to the fine points of extradition law and send Demjanjuk back to America is one of the most disgraceful in the history of Jewish jurisprudence.

One of the memorable things about the Demjanjuk case, we pointed out in an editorial in 2004, is how it “flushed out an odd array of defenders.” It wasn’t just Mr. Buchanan, we noted. Congressman James Traficant, who went to prison for unrelated crimes, and Vanity Fair magazine also beat the drums for Demjanjuk. In Canada he was the subject of a cabaret play. At one point the New York Times said it would be opposed his execution by Israel even if the final appeal were to find him guilty. “Extreme retribution, even against the right man,” the Times said, “would only add another death to the Holocaust.” Yet few of those who argued that their interest in the case was not about Demjanjuk but about due process, few of them lifted so much as a finger to find out who did the crimes they said Demjanjuk didn’t commit.

All the greater the credit to prosecutors in America and Germany that they stayed with the case.* When our system finally reached the same conclusion that Israel’s court had reached, that Demjanjuk been at Sobibor, the killer was sent to Germany, whose own court reached the same conclusion. The presiding judge, Ralph Alt, was quoted by the AP as saying the evidence showed Demjanjuk was a piece of the Nazis’ “machinery of destruction” and the court was convinced that he had served as a guard at Sobibor. The president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, Dieter Graumann, told the AP the trial in Germany was “never about revenge, but about justice.” Of that he got but a small portion in the sentence of five years that he was appealing at the end of a life that would have more justly been concluded on the gallows.

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* As did a number of journalists, including Tom Teicholz, who wrote the definitive book on the Demjanjuk trial in Israel, Michele Lesie of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Ernie Meyer of the Jerusalem Post.