Dov Eitan, a controversial former district court judge, has joined the defense team of convicted Nazi war criminal John “Ivan the Terrible” Demjanjuk.
He did so at the invitation of Demjanjuk’s Israeli defense lawyer, Yoram Sheftel.
Eitan will presumably participate in the appeal against Demjanjuk’s death sentence, which will be heard by the Israeli Supreme Court in December.
Demjanjuk was convicted of war crimes by a Jerusalem district court last April 18. He was given the death sentence a week later.
He was identified as the Treblinka death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” who operated the gas chambers where some 800,000 Jews perished.
Judge Eitan resigned from the district court in 1983 after running afoul of the authorities over his public advocacy of Israel’s withdrawal from captured territories.
Eitan subsequently angered then-Justice Minister Moshe Nissim by saying in court that he would “burn down the Israel Broadcasting Authority building.”
He made the remark while hearing a complaint by the broadcast authority that a Jerusalem man slapped a clerk at the authority’s licensing department.
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