It has been so long since the atrocities of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany that many people may no longer fully grasp the evil of those times. But a current reminder involves a man named John Demjanjuk.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was a Nazi prison guard in 1943, during World War II. He later became an autoworker in the United States. But on Thursday, Demjanjuk was convicted in Munich, Germany, of being an accessory to more than 28,000 counts of murder because of deaths that occurred when he worked as a guard at a Nazi death camp.

"The verdict sends a very powerful message that, even many years after the crimes of the Holocaust, the perpetrators can be brought to justice," a chief Nazi hunter told The Associated Press in an interview from Jerusalem.

Whether the 91-year-old Demjanjuk will go to prison is unclear. But the memory of the evils of Nazism should endure.