Was John Demjanjuk really Ivan the Terrible, was he ever charged and is he still alive?

AN evil former death camp guard is the subject of a new docu-series exploring the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Here’s what we know about the man known as Ivan the Terrible and his horrifying crimes.

Was John Demjanjuk really Ivan the Terrible?

Ivan “John” Demjanjuk was born in Ukraine, and drafted into the Soviet Red Army during the Second World War.

He was captured by Germans and became a prisoner of war, before volunteering to transfer to Tawniki concentration camp.

Demjanjuk was the guard at Sobibor camp from March to September 1943, where he was found to have helped murder 28,060 Jews by gassing them to death with exhaust fumes.

The former SS guard was complicit in herding thousands of terrified new arrivals down a concentration camp walkway called the “Road to Heaven”.

After the war he moved to the US, where he settled with his wife and child in  suburban Ohio.

There he reinvented himself as an unremarkable retired car mechanic, hoping to bury his dark past.

But numerous surviving prisoners identified him via an ID card with his name on it as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ – a Nazi murderer known for cutting off prisoners’ ears and whipping them as they walked passed him to their deaths.

Was he ever charged?

In 1986, he was extradited to Israel where he stood accused of being Ivan the Terrible.

His defence argued the SS card had been forged by the KGB – but he was convicted and faced a death sentence in 1988 for war crimes committed between 1942 and 1943.

But when new evidence surfaced that there was another Ukrainian who could’ve been Ivan the Terrible a few years later, he was reprieved and sent back to the States.

While Ivan tried to return to normal life, his 1988 trial had left many unanswered questions.

In 2002, an American judge ruled there was evidence that he had been a guard at Sobibor and he was extradited to Germany for what was dubbed The Last Nazi War Trial.

During his trial, he claimed to have been held at a camp in Chelmno, Poland, until 1944 – before being moved to another camp in Austria where he joined a Nazi-backed unit of Russian soldiers fighting communist rule.

But according to German prosecutors, Demjanjuk was involved in the murders of tens of thousands of Jews at the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp in Poland.

The Judge ruled there was now enough evidence to prove Demjanjuk had been a guard at other Nazi camps –  and he was sent to Germany for trial again in 2009.

The Munich case, in which he was given a five-year jail sentence, was Germany’s last big war crimes trial.

Demjanjuk was convicted of being a guard at the Sobibor death camp, and convicted on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder.

Is he still alive?

Demjanjuk he was still appealing the case when he died in 2012 at the age of 91, in a nursing home in the Bavarian town of Bad Feilnbach.

Despite decades of legal wrangling and controversy, Demjanjuk died a free man and, technically, an innocent one, as his appeal had not been heard nor decided.

Following his death, his relatives requested that he be buried in his adopted United States.

Jewish organisations opposed this, claiming his burial site would become a centre for neo-Nazi activity.

Demjanjuk was reportedly buried at an undisclosed US location, now known to be the Ukrainian section of the Brooklyn Heights cemetery in Parma, Ohio.