A year and a half after the start of the trial of John Demjanjuk in Munich, the former guard at the Sobibor concentration camp (Poland) has been sentenced to five years in prison for "complicity in the death of 28,000 Jews" – a "jugdement of Solomon" argues Trouw. The Amsterdam daily points out that the verdict "is close to the demand made by Jules Schelvis, one of the camp’s survivors [and a plaintiff in the case]” in his final plea in the Munich court room: “Sentence him but do not punish him, this man is too old." While awaiting his appeal, "Demjanjuk has been released in view of his advanced age [he is 91 years old] and his delicate health."

“Study of the liberation,” headlines Tagesspiegel, on the 28 October publication of a new report on postwar Germany “Das Amt und die Vergangenheit” [The administration and the past]. Offering new information on the diplomatic service’s role in the extermination of the Jews, the document reveals that Nazi Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs played a much more active role in the Shoah than was previously thought. The group of four historians (two Germans, one American and one Israeli), commissioned by the former minister of foreign affairs Joschka Fischer to write the report, also show how the ministry and the German administration in general, continued to shelter former Nazis after 1951. In the years that followed, “the actions and identities of the executioners were revealed in waves. But in the intervening periods between these waves, the administration took steps to cover their tracks,” notes the daily.

For the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the "Arbeit macht frei" sign is a copy. Stolen last December, the original has to be restored, as does the whole camp. "The 190 hectares complex, which was opened as a museum in 1947, is in a state of decay," reports the Frankfurter Rundschau. Over 200 million euros will have to be invested in the next 20 years. The International Auschwitz Committee has suggested that EU partners participate with Poland, where the camp is located. "Berlin has paid 60 million euros," notes the daily paper. Süddeutsche Zeitung headlines that there is a "sad [human] toll on commemoration day." Almost half of the 517,000 Jewish survivors still alive are living beneath the poverty line, "most of whom are now in Israel and the former Soviet Union." Banned at the time from formal education and traumatised by the camps, few of them have managed to build a professional career to make a proper living. "An issue that was hardly brought up when compensation payments were made by the young Federal German Republic," writes the SZ. Germany paid 65 billion euros to various states and annually negotiates aid with the Jewish Claims Conference.

In what is probably the last great Holocaust trial to be held in Germany, John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor Nazi death camp in Poland, stands accused of having been an accomplice in the murder of 27,900 people in 1943. His trial opened on 30th November in a Munich court that was “badly prepared and overtaken by events,” reports the Süddeutsche Zeitung. For example, the newspaper criticises a court sign reading ‘Demjanjuk meeting area’ for its “lack of historical sensitivity. There was great injustice even in the size of the courtroom chosen for the trial [only 147 seats for several hundred observers],” the Munich daily writes. In its comment pages, the SZ argues that the trial against this ‘subordinate’ should still go ahead, even if some of Demjanjuk’s superiors were cleared or have not appeared before German courts.

The Arab European League (AEL, a Belgian-Dutch movement classified as anti-Semitic by the Belgian government) has struck up a tug o’ war match with the Dutch courts by refusing to comply with the public prosecutor’s demand of 18 August that it pull a negationist caricature off its web site, reports De Volkskrant. According to the Dutch daily, the prosecutor finds that the cartoon, which portrays two Jews staging the Holocaust, constitutes an "insult to all Jews as it suggests the murder of six million of them was a fabrication”. Abdou Bouzerda, AEL spokesman and author of the cartoon, says the prosecutor’s office is applying a “double standard”: on 18 August the latter also announced it was not going to prosecute websites that had published the Danish caricatures of Muhammad in 2006 – on the grounds that those caricatures concern the Prophet, not Muslims as a group, in contrast to the AEL cartoon.