If
someone worked at a Ford
plant, they made cars for a
living. If someone worked at
Sobibor, they killed Jews for
a living.
--
Neal Sher, who headed
the OSI from 1982 to
1994. |
Los Angeles, Saturday, July 14, 2001
COLUMN ONE Nazi
Saga Takes a New Turn By ERIC SLATER, Times Staff Writer CLEVELAND --
Twenty-four years ago this
summer, the U.S. Justice Department made a
remarkable allegation: One of World War
II's most notorious and malevolent
practitioners of genocide was not only
alive and well, he was living in
Cleveland. "Ivan the Terrible," the government
said, who drunkenly beat Jews as they
entered the gas chambers at Treblinka,
then turned on the gas himself before
heading out to rape local girls, now had a
wife, two children and a yellow-brick
house in the suburbs. He worked at the
Ford plant and went by the name John
Demjanjuk. | Once
accused of being 'Ivan the
Terrible,' John Demjanjuk,
81, is now the target of renewed
U.S. efforts to deport and
denaturalize him. | The government and its new Nazi-hunting
Office of Special Investigations, it would
turn out, had the wrong man.Yet 2 1/2 decades after the government
began pursuing him, eight years after
Israel's Supreme Court freed him from
death row when it became obvious the
Demjanjuk case had gone horribly awry, the
OSI is seeking once again to denaturalize
and deport him. Ivan "John" Demjanjuk, now 81, wasn't
Ivan the Terrible, government lawyers
acknowledge, and he probably was never at
Treblinka. But Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian farm
boy drafted by the Soviet army and quickly
wounded and captured by the Nazis, was
pressed into service as a guard at three
Nazi camps, government attorneys alleged
at a recent nonjury civil trial here. And
when he emigrated to the United States in
1948, the government says, he lied to
conceal that fact. Prosecutors have no witnesses placing
Demjanjuk at any of the camps, for he has
outlived most Jewish survivors as well as
any known guards. Prosecutors also allege
no specific criminal acts; courts have
ruled that a person who performed any duty
at a Nazi camp, willing or unwilling,
should be turned away at the U.S.
border. The OSI's case is based almost entirely
on a worn, yellowed identification card
issued by the Nazis to one Iwan Demjanjuk
and six other decades-old documents,
several of which were stored in secret
archives in the former Soviet Union and
discovered only after its breakup in
1991. Prosecutors say the paper trail shows
Demjanjuk served the Nazis at the
concentration camps Majdanek and
Flossenbürg and at the extermination
camp at Sobibor, Poland, where 250,000
Polish Jews were killed. Sobibor was a highly efficient killing
camp, the government and many historians
say, operated by just a few dozen members
of the SS overseeing 120 or so captured
Soviets ordered to serve as guards. Most
Jews were gassed the same day they
arrived. Anyone serving there in any
capacity at all, Jewish groups argue, has
much blood on his hands. "If someone
worked at a Ford plant, they made cars
for a living," said Neal Sher,
who headed the OSI from 1982 to 1994.
"If someone worked at Sobibor, they
killed Jews for a living." But Demjanjuk's defenders say the
documents underpinning the government's
case, which spell his surname four
different ways and were scattered across
two continents after the war, show little
other than that the OSI is again pursuing
the wrong man. And they contend the OSI--which was
found by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of
Appeals to have "acted with reckless
disregard for the truth" in its first case
against Demjanjuk--is seeking not justice
but misplaced vengeance against an
octogenarian who, as a wounded POW, would
have had little say over his wartime role
anyway. "To go from Ivan the Terrible to
Ivan-the-Bad-Enough . . . I don't know why
[OSI] would want to do this,
especially considering what the court had
to say about their behavior in the first
trial," said Mark O'Connor, one of
the attorneys who represented Demjanjuk in
Israel. "I don't think it does justice to
the Holocaust, and certainly not to the
survivors." The latest case against Demjanjuk,
which is expected to be decided sometime
this summer by U.S. District Judge Paul
R. Matia, is part detective story,
part war story, and it is filled entirely
with death and grief. It is also likely to be the OSI's last
major effort against an alleged Nazi.
Organized in 1979 to hunt Axis war
criminals, the office is fast running out
of quarry. Meanwhile, Congress is
preparing to decide whether to continue
funding the office and expand its charter
to hunt modern-day war criminals. During the quarter-century the OSI has
pursued Demjanjuk, several hundred
suspected war criminals, from places
including Sierra Leone, Bosnia, El
Salvador and Rwanda, have settled in the
U.S. Some are alleged butchers who would
face reams of fresh evidence and dozens of
living witnesses should they be
prosecuted. For now, though, the government wants
John Demjanjuk. Dienstausweis, the folded paper card is
called, a service identity pass. It was
issued at the SS-run Trawniki Training
Camp to new arrival Iwan Demjanjuk, whose
boyish face is pictured in the upper
right-hand corner, in black and white. The
card lists his job as Wachmann, or guard;
his date and place of birth, father's
name, national origin (Ukraine) and a
physical description, including a scar not
unlike the one on the back of John
Demjanjuk of Cleveland. It also has the
holder's signature, in Cyrillic
script. The card indicates the new POW was
dispatched to Okzow, a Nazi-run farm, on
Sept. 22, 1942. On March 27, 1943, it
says, he was sent to work at Sobibor. The ID card, scrutinized and analyzed
down to the iron content of its purplish
ink, is the linchpin of the OSI's latest
case. But it is not new to the OSI.
Indeed, the Trawniki card was very nearly
the linchpin of the first case against
Demjanjuk. More than 20 years ago, the OSI was
prepared to argue essentially the same
case it has just presented here, with
fewer documents but potentially several
living witnesses. The primary allegation
then, as now, was to be that Demjanjuk
served as a low-level guard at Sobibor and
other camps--but not Treblinka--then lied
about that service upon entering the
U.S. Everything changed when an even darker
possibility arose: that the Cleveland auto
worker was not just another death camp
guard but rather someone who, even amid
the Nazi orgy of murder, managed to
distinguish himself as singularly
evil. The specter of Ivan Grozny arose
quite by accident. In 1976, before the birth of OSI, the
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service mailed Israeli Nazi-hunters 17 mug
shots of suspected Nazi collaborators. The
INS was most interested in another
Ukrainian-born emigre, a man named
Feodor Fedorenko. Israeli
investigators happened to place
Demjanjuk's 1951 visa photo next to the
picture of Fedorenko. In a newspaper ad, the Israeli
government asked Treblinka survivors to
come view the photos to see if they could
identify any as their tormentors. Several
identified Fedorenko, who would later be
deported to the Soviet Union and
executed. Several others, however, were more
interested in photograph No. 16. That man,
they said, was the one they called "Ivan
Grozny," Polish for Ivan the Terrible.
That launched the case against
Demjanjuk. By the time of the first trial in 1981,
the brand new OSI was under tremendous
political pressure to prove its worth. And
it went forward with the Ivan the Terrible
case, despite growing misgivings among
some in the office. One of the reasons for doubt: By 1981,
the OSI had learned of a sworn deposition
given to the KGB in 1949 by another
Ukrainian, Ignat T. Danilchenko,
who was captured by the Nazis and said he
served with Demjanjuk not at Treblinka but
at Sobibor, Flossenbürg and a nearby
camp called Regensburg. The government
neither introduced the Danilchenko
"protocol" at trial nor turned it over to
the defense for six years. Demjanjuk's story, which has shifted
repeatedly over the years, though not as
much as the government's, was that he was
held in two POW camps after his capture
and then sent by the Germans to fight his
former army, the Soviets, with a band of
other Ukrainians in Austria. Never, he has
maintained, did he serve at a
concentration or extermination camp. U.S. District Judge Frank J.
Battisti didn't believe him. He
believed the survivors, who testified
emotionally about the evils committed by
Ivan the Terrible, the man they said sat
before them. In 1981, the judge stripped
Demjanjuk of his citizenship, and in 1986
he was deported--not to his home country
of the USSR, which likely would have
charged him with treason, but to Israel,
which would try him for war crimes. The
trial was Israel's first against a Nazi
since 1962, when an unrepentant Adolf
Eichmann (right) was found guilty
and hanged for administering the
Holocaust. With Demjanjuk, soft-spoken and
ham-handed, described by prosecutors as
the devil in disguise, the trial served
not only as a Holocaust tutorial for a
generation of Jews born after the war but
also as a reminder of how many war
criminals continued to live freely. The Israeli tribunal found Demjanjuk
guilty and in 1988 sentenced him to die as
Eichmann died, at the end of a rope. Even as Demjanjuk's trial was winding
down, however, so too was the Soviet
Union. And from a Ukrainian state archive
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. It soon became clear that Demjanjuk was
almost certainly not Ivan the
Terrible. Israel's Supreme Court freed Demjanjuk
in 1993. In its decision, the court said
there was considerable evidence that
Demjanjuk was indeed a Nazi collaborator
who served at Majdanek, Flossenbürg
and Sobibor, but that since the
allegations were that he was Ivan of
Treblinka, he had not had a chance to
defend himself on these other
allegations. Prison workers were building his
gallows when the call came to set
Demjanjuk free. 'Forced
to Rely on Trial by
Archive'"The things we do in the name of
righteousness . . . historically have led
us down dangerous roads," said Michael
Tigar, a well-known Washington defense
attorney who is handling Demjanjuk's
latest case, free of charge. "Someone
needs to take a serious look at how these
cases are being done. With the deaths of
the live witnesses who can support or
contradict their version of events, the
government is increasingly forced to rely
on trial by archive." Indeed, the government's latest case is
almost entirely archival, and most of its
witnesses in the trial that ended in June
were experts who testified as to the
authenticity of the fragile documents--a
key point of dispute by the defense. Over the years, however, the archival
case against Demjanjuk has grown, ever so
slowly. At the same time, it has become
increasingly apparent that wherever and
however he spent the war, Demjanjuk has
never told the whole truth about it. In addition to the shrapnel scar on his
back, Demjanjuk, who fought successfully
to have his U.S. citizenship restored in
1998, has another notable scar, this one
on the inside of his upper left arm. He
created the scar himself, Demjanjuk
acknowledges, when he gouged out a
blood-type tattoo from the war. He said he
received the tattoo while fighting with
the German-sponsored Ukrainian unit in
Austria. There is little historical evidence
those fighters were tattooed, however,
while it is well documented that the SS
tattooed the blood types of many POW
conscripts on the upper left arm. Demjanjuk, at one point, claimed to
have been held at a POW camp in Chelm,
Poland, even after it had been overrun by
the Red Army. And he has offered various explanations
for why, on his visa application, he said
he lived in Sobibor, Poland, from 1936 to
1943. Before it became a death camp,
Sobibor was little more than a rail stop
that didn't even appear on most maps,
historians say. Prosecutors contend there was only one
explanation for why a former Ukrainian POW
would come up with the name Sobibor, and
that it is highly incriminating. "It would be like someone asking you,
'Where were you on Nov. 22, 1963?' and you
saying, 'Well, I happened to be in Dallas
that day, at the book depository, with a
rifle . . . [but] I'm not Lee
Harvey Oswald," said one government
official, who asked not to be
identified. While it has never been determined
whether the signature on the Trawniki card
belongs to Demjanjuk, he and his attorneys
have offered various theories as to the
card's authenticity. With the Soviet Union under attack in
the 1970s for its treatment of Jews, the
KGB may have forged the Trawniki card to
demonstrate its commitment to tracking
down those involved in the Holocaust,
Demjanjuk has suggested. In the most
recent trial, the defense argued that the
card was probably issued to Demjanjuk's
cousin, also named Ivan Demjanjuk, who
grew up in the same village, Dub
Macharenzi, in central Ukraine. The government, meanwhile, has
collected evidence in addition to the
Dienstausweis it says places him at two
concentration camps, including a
disciplinary report that turned up in a
Lithuanian government archive. Filled out
by an SS sergeant at the Majdanek
concentration camp on Jan. 20, 1943, the
report says Wachmann No. 1393, named
"Deminjuk," and another guard were given
25 lashes for leaving their posts to buy
onions and salt. OSI investigators discovered two
transfer rosters from Trawniki, both held
in Russian archives, one listing "Iwan
Demianiuk," the other "Iwan Demianjuk,"
both with ID No. 1393. They found a duty
roster from the Flossenburg camp and a
list of 117 Flossenburg guards in German
archives and indicating the presence of
guard No. 1393, "Demenjuk." And in German records they uncovered an
armory log from Flossenburg reporting the
issuance of a rifle and bayonet to
Wachmann "Demianiuk" on Oct. 8, 1943. "There can be no question," prosecutors
wrote in a trial brief, "that these seven
documents refer to Defendant." Thin
and Frail Now, He Rarely Leaves
HomeOnce the burly stereotype of a Rust
Belt auto worker, Demjanjuk is thin and
frail now, according to the few who have
have seen him in recent years. He seldom
leaves the yellow-brick house on the quiet
street where he lived before his first
trial and to which he returned after being
freed by Israel. He was expected to testify during his
trial but never appeared in court. His
attorney, Tigar, declined to say why. The
defense called only one witness,
Demjanjuk's son, John Jr., who was
11 when reporters and photographers filled
their frontyard on Aug. 25, 1977, asking
about Ivan the Terrible. Active in his
father's defense since his teens, John
Jr., now 35, testified for only a matter
of minutes, saying that in all his
conversations with his father, never had
the elder Demjanjuk told him he had aided
the Nazis. And then the defense rested its case.
Like that of the government, it is based
almost entirely on old papers. If Demjanjuk loses the denaturalization
case, he would face a deportation trial.
If he loses that, and is still alive, he
could theoretically face another war crime
trial in Israel. Sandra Coliver, head of the
Center for Justice and Accountability, a
group that tracks latter-day war
criminals, estimates that several hundred
have entered the U.S. in the last 25
years. There's an accused Serbian torture
expert and murderer living in Atlanta, she
says, an ex-member and alleged executioner
from former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet's secret police in Miami. "We certainly endorse the principle
that responsibility is something you carry
for life," Coliver said of the OSI's
prosecution of Demjanjuk. "We also believe
that there are hundreds of war criminals
living in this country and wish they'd get
the same attention as Demjanjuk." During its 22 years, the OSI has helped
extradite 54 people. Most were low-level
concentration camp guards. Only two were accused of serving at
extermination camps whose sole purpose was
to kill Jews: Fedorenko, executed by the
Soviet Union in 1986, and Demjanjuk. "We will pursue these individuals into
old age, if necessary, to locations
thousands of miles from the scenes of the
crimes," said one Justice Department
official. "You won't get away with it."
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dossier on John Demjanjuk
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