Seventeen Dutch relatives of Jews murdered in the concentration camp Sobibor are to act as co-plaintiffs in the trial of alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk.

The trial of the 90-year-old former SS guard begins on 30 November in the south German city of Munich. It may be the last ever nazi war crimes trial. Mr Demjanjuk is charged with acting as an accessory to the murder of the 27,900 people who died in Sobibor, now in Poland, during the time he is alleged to have been a guard there.
 

A total of 170,000 Jews were murdered in the camp, 34,000 of them from the Netherlands. The Dutch Jews were transported in 19 trains from the transit camp Westerbork in the east of the Netherlands. Only 19 of them survived.

Under German law immediate family members of homicide victims can be co-plaintiffs alongside the state. The Sobibor Foundation says that morally speaking, the Dutch co-plaintiffs are also appearing on behalf of all those exterminated during the period in which Demjanjuk was in Sobibor.