Jewish
World Review
March 22, 1998 / 24 Adar, 5758  The
Continuing Saga of Ivan Demjanjuk
by Neal M.Sher (First of two parts) LAST MONTH [Feb
1998], federal judge Paul Matia in
Cleveland gave back to Ivan Demjanjuk his U.S.
citizenship, despite the objections of Janet Reno
and the Justice Department. The Judge did, however,
leave the door open for the government to file
additional charges and to continue to the effort to
strip him of citizenship and ultimately deport him.
All indications are that the Department will do
just that, as the lawyers closest to the case
understand full well that Ivan Demjanjuk in no way
deserves the precious right of U.S citizenship.
Indeed, it is hard to think of anyone less worthy.
It would be a tragedy not to pursue him. Since the case has been out of the public's eye
for several years, background is in order to
understand the nature of the beast. Matia's decision follows the 1993 ruling by the
Israeli Supreme Court which overturned Demjanjuk's
conviction for mass murder. Several years before, a
three-judge trial court in Jerusalem determined
that he was the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" who
ran the gas chambers at the Treblinka death
camp. Although the Supreme Court left no doubt that
Demjanjuk had served the SS and had participated in
the "Final Solution", the judges decided that
statements from former Treblinka guards, which had
been obtained from the Soviet Union during the
appeal process, suggested that the "Ivan" who
manned the gas chambers was an Ivan Marchenko.
Intriguingly, after the war, when asked about his
mother's maiden name, Demjanjuk swore to U.S.
Immigration authorities as well as the Social
Security Administration that it was - you guessed
it - Marchenko. In Israel, he desperately argued
that he lied when he used that name, claiming he
picked it out of thin air. The Supreme Court judges not only accepted the
testimony of Treblinka survivors that Demjanjuk was
indeed Ivan the Terrible, they also found
irrefutable evidence of his service at other death
and concentration camps. Nevertheless, and despite
the curious circumstances surrounding the name
Marchenko, Israel's highest court gave him the
benefit of the doubt and reversed the conviction.
It chose to release Demjanjuk, over the objections
and protests of noted legal scholars and jurists
who strongly felt that the court's unequivocal
findings of his role in mass murder at places other
than Treblinka fully justified a life sentence. After the Israeli Court decision, the U.S. Court
of Appeals, under the heavy influence of its Chief
Judge Gilbert Merritt, ordered the government to
allow Demjanjuk to return to this country. Attorney
General Reno objected, arguing - quite properly -
that the uncontraverted evidence of Demjanjuk's
involvement in Nazi persecution, as well as his
repeated lies to American authorities, made him
ineligible to set foot on our soil. Merritt's court proved to be Demjanjuk's best
friend, not only by bending over backwards to
protect him, but also by slamming the Justice
Department by finding that OSI attorneys in 1980
failed to give Demjanjuk several documents they
thought he was entitled to. Merritt and company
went out of their way to attack OSI, despite the
fact that another federal judge - hand-picked by
Merritt to look into the matter - held hearings for
one and a half years and found no wrongdoing on the
part of OSI attorneys. But Merritt, it seemed, was
on a mission. [In Part II of this series, his
scandalous behavior will be revealed in much
greater detail]. Judge Matia's decision last month must be viewed
within the context of this background, as he
followed the lead of Merritt and his colleagues.
One must hope however, that once the Attorney
General authorizes a renewed prosecution focusing
on the overwhelming non-Treblinka evidence, Judge
Matia will have the strength and courage not to be
intimidated by Merritt. Treblinka aside, a review of the extensive
public evidentiary record - amassed both here and
in Israel - leaves not the slightest doubt as to
Demjanjuk's role in the destruction of European
Jewry. Born in Ukraine, Ivan Demjanjuk was a soldier in
the Red Army when he was captured by the Nazi
forces in the spring of 1942 during the battle of
Kerch in the Crimea and then held as a prisoner of
war. A select and relatively small group of Soviet
POW volunteers, Demjanjuk among them, was recruited
for a special mission: to implement the diabolical
plans of what was known as "Aktion Reinhard." Named in "tribute" to Reinhard Heydrich, the SS
chief who was assassinated by the Czech
underground, the objective of this operation can be
simply stated: to slaughter as many Jews as
possible in as short a period of time as possible.
To accomplish this, the death camps of Treblinka,
Sobibor and Belzec - places now synonymous with
mass murder - were built in Poland. They were
nothing less than factories of death. In preparation for their assignment, Demjanjuk
and his cohorts trained at the SS camp at Trawniki,
Poland. It was there that they were schooled in the
business of murdering Jews. The Israeli Supreme
Court described Trawniki: " it's assignment was
monolithic, namely aiding the SS…to round up
Jews from the cities, towns and villages and to
transport them to their death, to aid in carrying
out murder and to cover up, after the event, all
traces of the murder. This was, therefore, a unit
for aiding murder, in the plain meaning of that
expression". Demjanjuk then became part of an even more
"select" band of Trawniki "graduates" when he was
assigned to work in the death camps; only about 400
of the 4,000 men who trained at Trawniki served at
Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka. The Israeli Supreme Court - to which Demjanjuk
owes his freedom and life - specifically found that
he was "a member of the Wachmanner, a product of
the Trawniki unit, which was established for one
purpose - in order to study and teach its members
how to exterminate, annihilate, destroy and bring
about the 'final solution' of the 'Jewish
problem.'" The judges went on to find that
Demjanjuk served at the Sobibor extermination camp
and later worked as an SS guard at both the
Flossenburg and Regensberg concentration camps in
Germany. These are extraordinary findings. They hardly
amount to the clean bill of health which
Demjanjuk's advocates and apologists claim was
given him by the Israeli tribunal. On the contrary,
on the basis of these conclusions, one would be
hard pressed to find anyone today in any prison in
this country with more blood on his hands than Ivan
Demjanjuk. It is important to understand the nature of the
evidence establishing Demjanjuk's service at
Sobibor. First and foremost is an SS identity card
- bearing his name, date and place of birth,
father's name, physical scar, identification number
1393, as well as his photo. This card must be one
of the most tested, examined and analyzed piece of
documentary evidence in the annals of western
jurisprudence. Every judge on every court who dealt
with the Trawniki card - in both The United States
and Israel -found it to be fully authentic and
legitimate. Demjanjuk's relentless efforts to
discredit it as a KGB forgery went nowhere, as the
scientific and historical corroborating evidence of
its being kosher is overwhelming. The card bears a notation that Demjanjuk was
posted to Sobibor on March 27, 1943. That type of
evidence, in and of itself, can, indeed has, served
as a basis for stripping someone of citizenship.
But the Trawniki card does not stand alone. Another wartime document lists a number of
Trawniki men who had been assigned to the Sobibor
camp. Among them, Ivan Demjanjuk who was identified
by name, date and place of birth and ID number
1393. The date: March 26, 1943, one day before the
Sobibor entry on Demjanjuk's own Trawniki card. As powerful as those two documents are - there
is more. Confessions of another Ukrainian Trawniki
Wachmann, Ignats Danilchenko, identify Demjanjuk as
a fellow guard at Sobibor. He also later served
with Demjanjuk at both Flossenberg and Regensburg.
Danilchenko stated was "Demjanjuk was considered to
be an experienced and efficient guard". This evidence is bolstered even further by an
October 1, 1943 document (found in a Russian
archive) which lists both Demjanjuk and Danilchenko
(with their respective identification numbers and
dates and places of birth) as having been assigned
to Flossenberg. Additional corroboration can be
found in German national archives which house
documentation establishing that both Demjanjuk and
Danilchenko were posted to Flossenberg, along with
yet another guard mentioned by Danilchenko in his
affidavits. One further point about Sobibor: on his
application for a visa to America, he swore that he
had lived in Sobibor, Poland between 1934 and 1943.
At his trials he gave 2 versions as to why he gave
that information, which he now claimed to be false:
one story was that when he asked someone for the
name of a Polish town, Sobibor was mentioned; the
other was that he listed it after seeing the name
on a map. The courts saw right through this
nonsense - Sobibor was so small and remote that it
didn't register on many maps - and the Israeli
Court found that there is only one reasonable
explanation for having listed Sobibor: he must have
been there. On top of this incriminating evidence are the
consistent findings by American and Israeli judges
that Demjanjuk's alibi testimony and his versions
of his war record are not to be believed. No court
has found him to be a credible witness. It is crucial to understand the significance of
being an SS Wachmann at an Aktion Reinhard death
camp. First, to put things in perspective, it means
that Demjanjuk he was among a mere handful of
people responsible for effectuating the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of innocent Jewish men, women
and children. Somewhere between 3,500 to 4,000 men
were trained by the Germans at Trawniki. Of them,
about 120 guards served at Treblinka, 200 at
Sobibor and 600 at Belzec. In approximately 18
months nearly one and a half million Jewish men,
women and children were slaughtered at these sites.
One and a half million in a year and a half. The sole purpose of Sobibor was to annihilate
Jews. Only Jews. To have been a Wachmann at Sobibor
was to have directly participated in cold blooded,
systematic mass murder. Jews arrived by train and
were immediately taken to the gas chambers. Along
the way they were beaten tortured, humiliated, and
stripped of their dignity. All at the hands of the
Wachmanner. Within 2 hours they were dead. I remain haunted by both the enormity of the
crimes and the ruthless efficiency with which they
were carried out by so few: in the space of one and
a half years, 200 SS auxiliary guards at Sobibor,
Ivan Demjanjuk among them, effectuated the murder
of over 250,000 Jews. In the United States after the war, Demjanjuk
worked in a factory and built cars for a living. At
Sobibor during the war, he killed Jews for a
living. Don't let anyone dare tell you he is a
victim. JWR contributor, Neal M. Sher, is a partner in
the Washington law firm Schmeltzer, Aptaker and
Shepard and is the President of the American
section of the International Association of Jewish
Lawyers and Jurists. He is the former Director of
the Office of Special Investigations in the Justice
Department and the former Executive Director of
American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
. ©1998, Neal M.
SherJWR
contributor, Neal M. Sher, is a partner in
the Washington law firm Schmeltzer, Aptaker and
Shepard and is the President of the American
section of the International Association of Jewis
Lawyers and Jurists. He is the former Director of
the Office of Special Investigations in the Justice
Department and the former Executive Director of
American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
 Our
dossier on John Demjanjuk-
The
downfall on Neal Sher: -
Jan 1998 Shameful
Scapegoating At The Holocaust Museum: "THE
U.S. HOLOCAUST Memorial Museum, and everyone who
cares deeply about its sacred mission, suffered
a severe blow last week when Dr. Walter Reich
announced that he would not seek reappointment
as Director when his term expires in June.
Reich's departure came on the heels of last
month's public embarrassment when Museum
Chairman Miles Lerman dizzyingly flip-flopped on
whether Yasser Arafat would be extended an
invitation."
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