John Demjanjuk

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John Demjanjuk

John Demjanjuk (b. April 3, [1] 1920 in Dubovye Makharintsy, Kiev Oblast, USSR - birth name Ivan Demjanjuk), is a retired auto worker who emigrated to the United States from Europe in 1951. He was later accused of, tried for, convicted of, and sentenced to death for war crimes, based on his identification by Israeli Holocaust survivors as "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious SS guard at the Treblinka extermination camp during the period 1942-1943 who allegedly committed acts of extraordinarily savage violence and murder against camp prisoners. He was later exonerated by Israel's highest court of crimes against humanity after new evidence came to light.

[edit] Background to alleged Holocaust involvement

Demjanjuk, his wife and a child arrived in New York aboard the General W. G. Haan on February 9, 1952. On November 14, 1958, Demjanjuk became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He and his wife, whom he met in a displaced persons camp, moved to Indiana with their daughter (they later had two more children) and then to Seven Hills, Ohio, where Demjanjuk became an engine mechanic.

In August 1977, the Justice Department submitted a request to the Northern District Court of Ohio that Demjanjuk's citizenship be revoked on the basis that Demjanjuk had allegedly concealed his involvement with Nazi death camps on his immigration application in 1951. On June 23, 1981, District Court Judge Frank Batisti ruled that Demjanjuk had lied on his application, that he had served as an SS guard at Treblinka and for a brief period at Sobibór, and that he had undergone training at the Trawniki SS training camp. Demjanjuk's attorneys appealed this ruling.

[edit] Trial in Israel

In October 1983, Israel issued an extradition request for Demjanjuk to stand trial on Israeli soil under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950. Demjanjuk was deported to Israel on February 28, 1986. He was put on trial between February 16, 1987 and April 18, 1988. The prosecution claimed during the trial that Demjanjuk had been recruited into the Soviet army in 1940, and that he had fought against Germany until he was captured by German troops in the eastern Crimea in May 1942.

Demjanjuk was then, according to prosecutors, brought to a German prisoner of war camp in Kulm in July 1942. Prosecutors claimed that Demjanjuk volunteered to collaborate with the Germans and was sent to the camp at Trawniki, where he was trained to guard prisoners and was given a firearm, a uniform, and an ID card with his photograph. Prosecutors based part of these allegations on the ID card, but defense attorneys countered that the card was forged by Soviet authorities to discredit Demjanjuk. In 1990, the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed. As a result, the KGB archives on the case were opened. In the KGB file dealing with Demjanjuk, the shocking truth was revealed - the Trawniki certificate had been forged to frame the Ukrainian as part of a campaign against Ukrainian nationalists.

Demjanjuk himself testified during the trial in Israel that he was imprisoned in a camp in Chelmno until 1944, when he was transferred to another camp in Austria, where he remained until he joined an anti-Soviet Russian military unit funded by the German government until the surrender of Germany to the Allies in 1945.

On April 25, 1988, a Jerusalem court convicted Demjanjuk and sentenced him to death by hanging.^[1] Demjanjuk was placed in solitary confinement until August 1993, when five Israeli Supreme Court judges ruled that there was not enough evidence to show that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible.

Their ruling was based partly on the written statements of 32 former guards and 5 former prisoners at Treblinka that Ivan the Terrible's true surname was Marchenko, not Demjanjuk. (Ivan Marchenko was last seen in 1945 shortly after the close of World War II, leaving a brothel in Croatia.) Demjanjuk was released to return to the United States. In 1993, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Demjanjuk was a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, as federal prosecutors had deliberately withheld evidence, and his sentence was overturned.

John Demjanjuk, still in his Israeli prison clothes, laughs with delight after his acquittal

Despite doubts the court might have had about whether Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible, and the subsequent acquittal, it was much more certain that Demjanjuk volunteered and served as a Nazi Wachmann in the Trawniki unit. Evidence included to assist this claim included a certificate from Trawniki bearing Demjanjuk's picture and his exact personal information in addition to German documents that mentioned Wachmann Demjanjuk and mentioned his date and place of birth. Statements of another Wachmann (Denilchenko), both in 1949 and again in 1979, identified Demjanjuk as the Wachmann who served with him at Sobibor. Demjanjuk's Trawniki certificate also imply that he served at Sobibor, as do the German orders of March 1943 posting the Trawniki unit to this area. The court considered Demjanjuk's insistence that the certificates-including those bearing his photograph- were forgeries; in light of the expert testimony and other corroborating evidence, it concluded that the likelihood of this was "reduced to zero." The court decided not to convict Demjanjuk on any charge and let him free. Speculation about why this happened still remains. Reasons may include doubt as to the extent of credibility of anyone's memory in such a trial almost 50 years after the events happened, and the court's possible reluctance to continue the issue when many were trying to move on from the events.

The Israeli Supreme Court's 405-page ruling read: "The main issue of the indictment sheet filed against the appellant was his identification as Ivan the Terrible, an operator of the gas chambers in the extermination camp at Treblinka. . . By virtue of this gnawing [new evidence indicating mistaken identity] . . . we restrained ourselves from convicting the appellant of the horrors of Treblinka. Ivan Demjanjuk has been acquitted by us, because of doubt, of the terrible charges attributed to Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. This was the proper course for judges who cannot examine the heart and mind, but have only what their eyes see and read." They also added "The matter is closed-but not complete, the complete truth is not the prerogative of the human judge." Indicating that despite the fact they could not find Demjanjuk guilty beyond reasonable doubt they also contained doubt that he was in fact innocent.

Despite this ruling (and as a result of the above quotes) there were still many who believed Demjanjuk to be guilty- if not on the charge of being Ivan the Terrible then guilty of the lesser charge of being a worker at the Sobibor and Flossenburg camps. This was brought up again by the U.S. Justice Department.

[edit] Charged Again and Deportation

On February 20, 1998, Federal District Court Judge Paul Matia ruled that Demjanjuk's citizenship could be restored. On May 20, 1999, the Justice Department filed a new civil complaint against Demjanjuk.

No mention was made in the new complaint of the previous allegations that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. Instead, the complaint alleged that Demjanjuk served as a guard at the Sobibór and Majdanek camps in Poland and at the Flossenburg camp in Germany. It additionally accused Demjanjuk of being a member of an SS-run unit that took part in capturing nearly two million Jews in the General Government of Poland. Demjanjuk was put on trial again in 2001, and in February 2002, Matia ruled that Demjanjuk had not produced any credible evidence of his whereabouts during the war and that the Justice Department had proved its case against him.

On May 1, 2004, a three-judge panel of the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Demjanjuk could be again stripped of his US citizenship because the Justice Department had presented "clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence" of Demjanjuk's service in Nazi death camps. Demjanjuk vowed to appeal the ruling.

On December 28, 2005, an immigration judge ordered Demjanjuk deported to Ukraine. "Having marked Mr. Demjanjuk with blood scent, the government wants to drop him into a shark tank," his lawyer, John Broadley, said during the hearing. Chief U.S. Immigration Judge Michael Creppy ruled that there is no evidence to substantiate Demjanjuk's claim that he would be mistreated if deported.

[edit] References

1. ^ Israel 50, 1997 edition, ISBN 965-474-005-2

[edit] External link

• Article about the Israeli ruling exonerating Demjanjuk. Alex Kozinski. The New Republic, September 13, 1993. Volume 209, Issue 11.