FWD: The Demjanjuk Case, Part I

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1. The Demjanjuk Case: Getting Away with Murder

By Debbie Maimon



            Twenty four years after the U.S. Department of Justice first
unveiled John Demjanjuk as a Nazi concentration camp guard, and eight years
after Israel's Appeals Court overturned his death sentence and released
him-dismissing survivors' testimony that Demjanjuk was the sadistic Ivan The
Terrible of Treblinka-the Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations
(OSI), has reopened the case with fresh evidence.

            Ivan The Terrible (Ivan Grozny) was the nickname given to a
Ukrainian guard who served at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied
Poland in 1942-43. His job, witnesses testified, was to operate the diesel
engines feeding exhaust fumes into the gas chambers; within little more than
a year, some 800,000 men, women, children, and infants had been murdered in
this manner.

            But Ivan did not get his nickname, "the Terrible," merely for
causing so many deaths. In the Nazi cauldron of murder and darkest evil that
was Treblinka, he had managed to distinguish himself for the sadistic
tortures he inflicted on the victims as he whip-lashed and clubbed them on
their way to the gas chambers.

            The odyssey of Demjanjuk's arrest, imprisonment, trial, and
ultimate release began in 1976. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service had mailed Israeli Nazi-hunters 17 mug shots of suspected Nazi
collaborators. The INS was interested in another Ukrainian-born ZmigrZ then
living in the United States, a man named Feodor Fedorenko. Israeli
investigators placed the photos of the suspects on display and thru
newspaper ads, invited Treblinka survivors to view them, to see if they
could identify any as their tormentors. Several identified Fedorenko, who
was later deported to the Soviet Union and executed. Several others
identified the face in photograph No. 16. as the vicious guard prisoners had
dubbed "Ivan Grozny." That launched the case against Demjanjuk.

            Demjanjuk has denied the allegations. His story, which has
undergone several revisions over the years, was that he was held in two POW
camps after his capture and then sent by the Germans to fight the Soviets,
with a band of other Ukrainians in Austria. Never, he says, did he serve at
a concentration or extermination camp. U.S. District Judge, Frank Battisti,
didn't believe him. He believed the survivors, who testified about the
inhumanity of Ivan the Terrible, the man they said sat before them. In 1981,
the judge stripped Demjanjuk of his U.S. citizenship, and in 1986 he was
deported to Israel, to be tried for war crimes.

            Following well-publicized and lengthy legal proceedings, an
Israeli court convicted Demjanjuk of being the vicious Treblinka guard, and
in 1988, sentenced him to die, like Eichmann, on the gallows.

Conviction Overturned

            Five years of appeals and court delays followed until 1993, when
the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction, saying there was
"reasonable doubt" that Demjanjuk was the Treblinka guard. Prison workers
were building his gallows when the call came to set Demjanjuk free. He
returned to the United States, to his brick-yellow house in Cleveland, where
he fought successfully to have his U.S. citizenship restored. It was
officially reinstated in 1998.

            What lay behind the court's "reasonable doubt?" From a
declassified Ukrainian state archive had emerged the depositions of 37
Treblinka guards captured by the Red Army at the end of the war. Every one
of them identified another man, Ivan Marchenko, as Ivan the Terrible.

            While this development threw the Supreme Court judges off
balance, raising in their minds the "reasonable doubt," prosecutors pointed
out that Demjanjuk himself had given "Marchenko" as his mother's maiden
name, both on a 1948 sworn statement substituting for a birth certificate,
and on his 1951 immigration application!

            His attorneys now produced evidence showing that this had been a
deliberate falsification on his part-in a ruse to escape deportation back to
the Soviet Union where, during the Stalin years, a captured Nazi could be
certain of execution.

Kurt-Werner Pörtner