When John Demjanjuk was heaved out of his wheelchair and into a bed in a Munich courtroom 18 months ago, it was the start of what was billed as the last Nazi war crimes trial in Germany, if not the world.
But now that the 91-year-old Ukrainian has been found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews – based on evidence proving only that he worked at the Sobibor death camp, not that he had committed a specific crime – it has lowered the standard of proof for convictions, opening the door to more nonagenarians standing trial for their part in the Holocaust.
"There are hundreds more Demjanjuks sitting in nursing homes here in Munich and in Germany," said Robert Fransman, a Dutch 70-year-old whose parents were gassed in Sobibor on the first day Demjanjuk started to work there.
A Red Army soldier, Demjanjuk was captured as a prisoner of war by the Wehrmacht in 1942. He trained as an SS guard before being sent to work at a concentration camp outside Sobibor, a Polish village near the borders with Ukraine and Belarus. His SS identity card from the time shows a chiselled, well-built young man, unrecognisable from the mute, bald pensioner who was deemed too sick to manage more than two 90-minute sessions a day.
Cornelius Nestler, a lawyer for families of Sobibor victims who joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, said Demjanjuk being found guilty purely because he was a guard in a camp where 250,000 people were killed "could be a beginning of a new last wave of many [such] proceedings".
A Dutch Nazi war crimes expert, Professor Christiaan F Rüter, has said Demjanjuk was not a key Nazi lieutenant but "the littlest of the little fishes". He is the lowest ranking person ever tried in Germany for Nazi war crimes.
David van Huiden, whose parents and sister were murdered in Sobibor while Demjanjuk was there, said the verdict meant his family's memory was finally being marked, almost 68 years after they were herded to the gas chambers.
"Did your newspaper report the death of my mother and father and sister on 3 July 1943?" asked the 79-year-old after Demjanjuk was given a five-year sentence. "This trial means that you might do so now. Until recently most people didn't know about Sobibor. Two years ago you probably thought it was a new kind of soap. Now you know, and it should never be forgotten."
Huiden survived only because he was sent to walk his dog when the Nazis rounded up his family and somehow escaped the Germans' notice. He hid with friends until the war was over, pretending to be a Christian orphan.
Ninety-year-old Jules Schelvis, one of two co-plaintiffs who survived Sobibor, said: "The verdict gives me peace." Schelvis managed to escape the camp but his wife, Rachel, was killed on arrival.
Lord Greville Janner of Braunstone, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust and former war crimes investigator, said: "Today's verdict sends an unequivocal message: that the passage of time is no barrier to justice. Age or poor health cannot absolve anyone of appalling crimes and today represents a triumph of justice in the memory of the millions brutally murdered during this darkest chapter in European history."
But on the pavement outside outside Munich's higher regional court, two banners held up by Martin Klugseder, 45, illustrated the difficulty many observers had with the prosecution of a man who was too old and weak to sit in the dock like an ordinary suspect, but lay mute in a hospital bed for the 93 days of hearings.
"Dignity demands freedom for John Demjanjuk," said the first banner. A second, smaller placard read: "I am not a Nazi."
Klugseder's point was that it was wrong to treat Demjanjuk like an "ordinary" war criminal. "He was a prisoner of war, captured by the Germans, who gave him a chance not to die of hunger like so many other POWs but to work as an SS guard. Of course he shouldn't have played any part in mass murder, and what he did was wrong, but he did it to survive," said the protester. "It was an act of self-defence carried out in extraordinary circumstances."
Others argue that Demjanjuk – who changed his first name from Ivan when starting his new life in the US – has already paid a heavy price for his part in the Holocaust. He spent over seven years in prison in Israel, five of them on death row, after being wrongly convicted of being a notorious concentration camp guard at Treblinka known as Ivan the Terrible, only to be set free when his lawyers were able to prove it was a case of mistaken identity. He was also in a US jail for 10 months while awaiting extradition to Germany, and has been on remand in the hospital wing of Stadelheim, the jail where Hitler once served time, since 12 May 2009.
After delivering his judgment the presiding judge, Ralph Alt, ruled that Demjanjuk would be allowed out of jail pending an appeal against his conviction – not uncommon in Germany. Alt said that Demjanjuk, who is not just immobile but also stateless after the US revoked his citizenship, has no opportunity to flee.
It wasn't immediately clear where he would go, though Ulrich Busch, his lawyer, previously said Munich's Ukrainian community had pledged to care for him on his release.
Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr, said he was confident an appeal would succeed. "The Germans have built a house of cards and it will not stand for long," he said.
• This article was amended on 13 May 2011. The original said that the Demjanjuk verdict had lowered "the burden of proof" for convictions. This has been corrected.
"Everybody knows about Auschwitz, but not Sobibor," said Helen Hyde, headmistress of Watford grammar school for girls, whose Dutch aunt, uncle and cousin were killed in the death camp in occupied Poland.
Sobibor, along with Treblinka and Belzec, was one of three Nazi concentration camps in eastern Poland built by the Nazis explicitly to wipe out the Jews of Europe under "Operation Reinhard", better known as "the final solution".
Though an estimated 250,000 Jews were killed in Sobibor, almost all within an hour of their arrival, the camp's name has not entered the public consciousness like Auschwitz – largely because all traces had been removed by the Nazis by the time Poland was liberated in 1945.It was men like Demjanjuk who told the Jews who arrived by train that they were going to have "showers", knowing full well they were herding them into a room to be gassed. They who would stand outside listening to the cries from within, the banging on the locked doors as the victims realised they had been tricked. After 20-30 minutes, they would drag out the corpses and put them in mass graves to be burnt. Then they would wait for the next train.