Revenge: A Dish Indeed Best Served Cold

JOSEF SCHEUNGRABER (ABOVE) AND JOHN DEMJANJUK

Like the last echoes of a enormous celestial event long, long ago, a 90-year-old former Wehrmacht lieutenant has been sentenced to life in prison and an 89-year-old former death camp guard has been deemed fit to stand trial in what may be the last prosecutions for Nazi era atrocities.

Josef Scheungraber had been charged with 10 counts of murder in the deaths of Italian civilians in Tuscany in 1944 in retaliation for the killing of two Nazi citizens. His life sentence was handed down this week in a Munich court.

Meanwhile, John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker who had emigrated to Cleveland after the war, awaits trial on charges that he was an accessory to the murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Demjanjuk suffers from Myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disease, and could only have months to live, but a Berlin court last month found him fit to stand trial, although testimony will be restricted to two 90-minute sessions a day when the proceedings begin in October.

Lawyers for Scheungraber denied the charges and his conviction was based on him being the ranking surviving officers at the scene and not on eyewitness testimony, while Demjanjuk's lawyers say the evidence against him is shaky.

While I cannot speak to the veracity of the Scheungraber conviction, I covered the Demjanjuk case following his deportation to Israel in 1986, where he was sentenced to death for war crimes (photo, above left).

The sentence was overturned due to a finding of reasonable doubt that he was "Ivan the Terrible, a notorious SS guard at Sobibor and Treblinka, and his case has taken innumerable legal twists and turns over the past 15 years, most of which he has spent back in Ohio, but there is no doubt that he was a guard at Sobibor and participated in the gas chamber executions there.

Revenge is indeed a dish best served cold, and as someone who lost three relatives in the Holocaust, I especially welcome the opportunity for Demjanjuk's accusers -- survivors of Sobibor -- to finally face him.

Top photo by Joerg Koch/DDP via AFP/Getty Images