By the time this article
reaches the readers of SHALOM, it is quite possible that the most
complex case ever of a prosecuted Nazi war criminal will finally
have reached its conclusion. I am referring to the trial of Ukrainian
Nazi collaborator Ivan Demjanjuk which will most probably have begun
in a Munich courtroom in late summer 2009 and will hopefully end
an incredibly lengthy saga which included numerous trials in three
different continents but has hereto failed to yield an unequivocal
verdict and an appropriate punishment.
The Demjanjuk story began in the mid-1970’s when Michael Hanusiak,
an American journalist of Ukrainian origin, returned from Kiev with
a list of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators who had escaped after World
War II to the United States. Demjanjuk’s name appeared on that
list and alongside it, a reference to “Sobibor,” one
of the three death camps in Poland used to carry out the notorious “Operation
Reinhardt,” the plan to annihilate Polish Jewry named for the
former head of the Reich Security Main Office Reinhardt Heydrich.
This allegation was sufficient to launch an investigation against
Demjanjuk, which was one of the first cases initiated in the United
States, where only in the mid-seventies did the government realize
that they had admitted numerous Nazi war criminals and/or collaborators
among the hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Displaced Persons
who flocked to the United States as immigrants during the years 1948-1952.
The problem was, however, that according to American law, such persons
could not be tried in the US for their crimes during the Holocaust
since they were committed outside the United States and their victims
were not Americans. Unwilling to ignore their presence in America,
the US decided to prosecute such individuals for violations of immigration
and citizenship laws (most of the immigrants obtained US citizenship)
since during the application process for immigration and citizenship
they lied by concealing their World War II service with Nazi units
or under Nazi aegis. (Each immigrant was asked for example, if he
or she had fought against the Allies or had ever been members of
a group which persecuted people because of their race, religion or
ethnic origin, both of which were true for a large percentage of
the escaped Nazi war criminals.) The punishments for these violations
were loss of citizenship, followed by deportation. If there was a
country seeking extradition, they would have priority over deportation.
In Demjanjuk’s case, his investigation, which initially focused
on his service as a guard at Sobibor, took a surprising turn when
in the course of interviews of survivors of the Treblinka death camp,
who were being questioned about a Ukrainian guard named Feodor Federenko,
several identified Demjanjuk, as “Ivan Grozny” or Ivan
the Terrible, one of two East Europeans known for their cruelty,
who operated the gas chamber in that death camp. The irony of the
story is that Demjanjuk’s photograph was shown to the survivors
purely by accident, but his identification as the notorious gas chamber
operator changed the entire course of his own investigation and prosecution.
In order to understand how this happened, one has to be acquainted
with the manner in which Nazi war criminals were investigated by
the United States Office of Special Investigations . In lieu of a
lineup, potential witnesses were shown photospreads of approximately
ten photos to determine whether they could identify the suspects
being investigated. According to OSI policy, all the photos shown
to survivors had to be of individuals of the same nationality and
the approximate age of the suspect and taken preferably during or
immediately after World War II. Thus all the photos shown to those
interviewed about Federenko had to be of Ukrainians, and Demjanjuk’s
photo was one of those in the possession of the Justice Department
which fulfilled all the necessary qualifications. To the investigators
dismay, quite a few of the Treblinka survivors, after identifying
Federenko, pointed to Demjanjuk’s photo as that of “Ivan
the Terrible,” and thus in the wake of these identifications
the investigators changed the focus of his investigation and indicted
him on that basis, rather then on the original suspicion against
him of service in Sobibor.
Demjanjuk was convicted in his original trial in Cleveland in 1981
and stripped of his American citizenship. The judge accepted his
identification as “Ivan Grozny” of Treblinka, based solely
on his identification by several Treblinka survivors, and the OSI
proceeded to file for his deportation from the United States. But
given the severity of the charges against him, (Ivan the Terrible
had personally helped murder as many as several hundred thousand
Jews!) the Americans obviously wanted to ensure that he would be
tried for his terrible crimes, whereas the maximum punishment which
could be implemented against him in the United States was deportation,
and thus was born the possibility of his extradition to stand trial
in Israel.
The decision on whether to extradite Demjanjuk was not as easy as
it appears, and aroused some controversy in Israel, which had hereto
only prosecuted (and executed) one Nazi war criminal in its entire
history (Adolf Eichmann). But the enormity of the crimes attributed
to “Ivan the Terrible,” the impossibility of his prosecution
in the US for the murders he committed, and the fact that the key
witnesses who had identified Demjanjuk as the Treblinka gas chamber
operator were Israeli, ultimately convinced Israel to seek his extradition
in 1986. Two years later, after a trial that attracted huge crowds
in Israel and worldwide attention, he was convicted by a panel of
three judges of the Jerusalem District Court and sentenced to death
by hanging.
Unlike numerous trials of Nazi war criminals, the primary focus
of the prosecution was to prove Demjanjuk’s identity as “Ivan
Grozny,” which he denied, whereas there was no doubt as to
the crimes committed. The strongest evidence presented by the prosecution
which linked the defendant to Treblinka was the testimony of several
Treblinka survivors who identified Demjanjuk as the Ukrainian sadist
who operated the gas chamber at Treblinka. There were no documents
of any sort which proved that a Wachmann named Ivan Demjanjuk had
ever served at the camp.
Although service at Sobibor was included in the Israeli indictment,
practically no attention was devoted to that camp, nor was any evidence
presented aside from Demjanjuk’s ID card from the SS training
camp at Trawniki, which clearly proved that following his training
as a guard at Trawniki, he had been sent to serve at Sobibor. The
card included an accurate physical description of Demjanjuk, his
photo, and signature. In his defense, Demjanjuk denied that he had
served at Treblinka, claiming that he had spent most of the war in
a German POW camp in Chelm, Poland after his capture by the Wehrmacht.
That claim was effectively refuted, however, by Israeli prosecutor
Michael Shaked.
Any defendant sentenced to death in Israel is automatically granted
an appeal, which in Demjanjuk’s case yielded a very surprising
result. In the course of the protracted legal proceeding before the
Supreme Court, Israeli prosecutors found evidence which cast serious
doubt on Demjanjuk’s identification as “Ivan Grozny.” According
to the testimony of thirty Treblinka guards who were prosecuted and
executed in the Ukraine for crimes in that death camp, the operator
of the gas chamber was Ivan Marchenko and he had a very prominent
scar on his cheek, which Demjanjuk clearly did not have.
In the light of this evidence, it was clear that more than a reasonable
doubt had been created regarding the verdict of the district court.
Under these circumstances, the Israeli Supreme Court convicted Demjanjuk
of membership in a Nazi organization, the punishment for which was
seven years’ imprisonment, which he had already served. While
the court expressed its unequivocal conviction that he had participated
in the Final Solution, it cancelled his conviction as “Ivan
the Terrible,” and ordered him expelled from Israel. Before
the expulsion could take place, several groups including the Wiesenthal
Center challenged the verdict, demanding that Demjanjuk be retried
for his role at Sobibor, but all these petitions were rejected by
the Supreme Court.
In 1993, Demjanjuk returned to the United States, where he was able
in 1998 to regain his American citizenship after his lawyers proved
that a document which could have helped in his defense was never
made available to them. Despite this initial victory, to OSI’s
credit, it refused to give up on the case and in 1999, it filed a
civil complaint against Demjanjuk for immigration violations, this
time based on his service in Sobibor. In 2002, he was again stripped
of his American citizenship and in 2005 Demjanjuk was ordered deported
from the United States. It was only in May 2009, however, that he
exhausted all his legal appeals, paving the way for his deportation
to Germany, where he is currently awaiting trial for his role in
the mass murder of 29,000 Jews killed at Sobibor from March to September
1943, while Ivan Demjanjuk served there as an armed guard. Perhaps
at long last, justice will finally be achieved in this case.
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