[39] In 1979, three guards from Sobibor gave sworn depositions that they knew Demjanjuk to have been a guard there, and two identified his photograph. [71] The card had Demjanjuk's photograph, which he identified as his picture at the time. [132] Demjanjuk was tried without any connection to a concrete act of murder or cruelty, but rather on the theory that as a guard at Sobibor he was per se guilty of murder, a novelty in the German justice system that was seen as risky for the prosecution. [53] The first day of the denaturalization trial was accompanied by a protest of 150 Ukrainian-Americans who called the trial "a Soviet trial in an American court" and burned a Soviet flag. John Demjanjuk, 91, Dogged by Charges of Atrocities as Nazi Camp Guard, Dies. They used modern investigation tools such as biometrics to conclude this is the same person as Demjanjuk., This revelation marks the latest chapter in the long, convoluted story surrounding Demjanjuks wartime actions, a saga most recently depicted in the Netflix documentary series The Devil Next Door.. In September 1993 Demjanjuk was allowed to return to Ohio. [49] The defense also submitted the statement of Feodor Fedorenko, a Ukrainian guard at Treblinka, which stated that Fedorenko could not recall having seen Demjanjuk at Treblinka. [163] On 28 June 2012, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that Demjanjuk could not regain his citizenship posthumously. Demjanjuk admitted the scar under his armpit was an SS blood group tattoo, which he removed after the war, as did many SS men to avoid summary execution by the Soviets. According to legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, in spite of serious missteps along the way, the German verdict brought the case "to a worthy and just conclusion. )[23] Demjanjuk later claimed this was a coincidence, and said that he picked the name "Sobibor" from an atlas owned by a fellow applicant because it had a large Soviet population. In 1952 they emigrated to the United States. On Tuesday, the United States Holocaust. GettyPicture taken on May 11, 2009 shows police and media waiting in front of the home of John Demjanjuk before he was carried out on a stretcher in Seven Hills, Ohio. At trial in Israel, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging in, what had been admittedly, a show trial focused on young people. Demjanjuk's family had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Department of Justice to obtain access to all investigative files at the OSI that related to Demjanjuk . These documents placed Demjanjuk at the Sobibor killing center as of March 26, 1943, and at the Flossenbrg concentration camp as of October 1, 1943. [65], The prosecution team consisted of Israeli State Attorney Yonah Blatman, lead attorney Michael Shaked of the Jerusalem District Attorney's Office, and the attorneys Michael Horovitz and Dennis Gouldman of the International Section of the State Attorney's Office. Copyright 2020 WOIO. [19], Demjanjuk would later claim to have been drafted into the Russian Liberation Army in 1944. The stranger settled in Cleveland after World War II with his wife and little . [61] Demjanjuk was deported to Israel on 28 February 1986. [86], Following closing statements, the defense also submitted the statement of Ignat Danilchenko, information which had been obtained through the US Freedom of Information but had not previously been made available to the defense by OSI. They also gained an additional identification of the visa photo as Demjanjuk by Otto Horn, a former SS guard at Treblinka. With this new evidence, the OSI team had also developed a more thoroughly documented understanding of the importance of the Trawniki camp during the Holocaust as well as the process of how camp authorities made personnel assignments. He died in 2012 after legal battles that spanned 35 years. [105] OSI continued to investigate Demjanjuk, relying solely on documentary evidence rather than eye-witnesses. But two newly released photographs may prove otherwise. [88] Demjanjuk said he just wrote a common Ukrainian surname after he forgot his mother's real name (Tabachyk). Rosenberg then exclaimed directly to Demjanjuk: "How dare you put out your hand, murderer that you are! Rosenberg approached and peered closely at Demjanjuk's face. [159] As a consequence of his appeal not having been heard, Demjanjuk is still presumed innocent under German law. Powered by. [31], In 1975, Michael Hanusiak, the American editor of Ukrainian News, presented US Senator Jacob Javits of New York with a list of 70 ethnic Ukrainians living in the United States who were suspected of having collaborated with Germans in World War II; Javits sent the list to US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The issuance of the stay by the immigration trial court was therefore improper, as that court had no jurisdiction over the matter. None of them identified Demjanjuk as having served at Treblinka. [157] Prior to Demjanjuk's trial, the requirement that prosecutors find a specific act of murder to charge guards with had resulted in a very low conviction rate for death camp guards. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) began investigating John Demjanjuk in 1975 and filed denaturalization proceedings against him in 1977, alleging that he had falsified his immigration and citizenship papers in order to conceal World War II service at the Treblinka killing center. Demjanjuk was an autoworker in Cleveland who was accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a Nazi concentration camp guard who committed terrible crimes. [162], On 12 April 2012, Demjanjuk's attorneys filed a suit to posthumously restore his US citizenship. [29][9][pageneeded] They moved to Indiana, and later settled in the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, Ohio. He grew up during the Holodomor famine,[14][15] and later worked as a tractor driver in a Soviet collective farm. [161] On 31 March 2012, it was reported that John Demjanjuk was buried at an undisclosed US location. You liar! He was deported to Germany, where prosecutors presented various pieces of evidence suggesting Demjanjuk was one of the Trawniki MenSoviet prisoners of war who were recruited by the Nazis to work as guards at the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka killing centers. [21], In August 1977, the Justice Department submitted a request to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio to revoke Demjanjuk's citizenship, based on his concealment on his 1951 immigration application of having worked at Nazi death camps. By Robert D. McFadden. Advertising Notice [145], As part of the prosecution's case, historian Dieter Pohl of the University of Klagenfurt testified that Sobibor was a death camp, the sole purpose of which was the killing of Jews, and that all Trawniki men had been generalists involved in guarding the prisoners as well as other duties; therefore, if Demjanjuk was a Trawniki man at Sobibor, he had necessarily been involved in sending the prisoners to their deaths and was an accessory to murder. Although Demjanjuk died before a German appeals court could review his conviction, German prosecutors successfully prosecuted subsequent cases against killing center and concentration camp guards using the same theory tested in the Demjanjuk case. [16], In 1940, he was drafted into the Red Army. [68], Prosecutors based part of these allegations on an IDcard referred to as the "Trawniki card". [107], In February 2002, Judge Matia revoked Demjanjuk's US citizenship. [108] The United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in November 2004.[109]. The BIA denied Demjanjuk's motion to reopen his deportation case. [38], Given that eyewitnesses attested to Demjanjuk having been Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka, decades before, whereas documentary evidence seemed to indicate that he had served at Sobibor with little notoriety, OSI considered dropping the proceeding against Demjanjuk to focus on higher profile cases. There is no evidence that POWs trained as police auxiliaries at Trawniki were required to receive such tattoos, although it was an option for those that volunteered. [67] On 19 May 1999, the Justice Department filed a complaint against Demjanjuk to seek his denaturalization. [114][115] On 10 November 2008, German federal prosecutor Kurt Schrimm directed prosecutors to file in Munich for extradition, since Demjanjuk once lived there. One man appears to resemble Demjanjuk, but researchers at a German museum believe another is Demjanjuk. Brigit Katz is a freelance writer based in Toronto. In 1999, US prosecutors again sought to deport Demjanjuk for having been a concentration camp guard, and his citizenship was revoked in 2002. [136] Busch would also allege that the German justice system was prejudiced against his client, and that the entire trial was therefore illegitimate. [94] However the Israeli justices noted that Demjanjuk had incorrectly listed his mother's maiden name as "Marchenko" in his 1951 application for US visa. [76] The most important of these was Eliyahu Rosenberg. Shame on you! [104], On 20 February 1998, Judge Paul Matia of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio vacated Demjanjuk's denaturalization "without prejudice," meaning that OSI could seek to strip Demjanjuk of citizenship a second time. The case had begun as an investigation into the Sobibor camp, due to Demjanjuk's alleged service at that killing center and to the testimony of a Soviet witness named Ignat' Danil'chenko in the late 1940s. [101], Demjanjuk was released to return to the United States. [32][36] Lawyers at the US Office of Special Investigations (OSI), in the Department of Justice, valued the identifications made by these survivors, as they had interacted with and seen "Ivan the Terrible" over a protracted period of time. This removed any obstacles to federal agents seizing him for deportation to Germany. John Demjanjuk's defense claimed that the card was a Soviet-inspired forgery, despite several forensic tests that verified it as authentic. In the summer of 1991, an OSI investigator searching in the Lithuanian National Archives in Vilnius for documentation related to a Lithuanian police battalion found by chance a document that placed Demjanjuk as a member of a Trawniki-trained guard detachment stationed at the Majdanek concentration camp between November 1942 and early March 1943. [90] The judges agreed that Demjanjuk most likely served as a Nazi Wachmann (guard) in the Trawniki unit[88] and had been posted at Sobibor extermination camp and two other camps. . [111] On 30 January 2008, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit denied Demjanjuk's request for review. On 1 October 1943 he was transferred to Flossenbrg, where he served until at least 10 December 1944. Demjanjuk's denial related both to the supposed operation of a truck's diesel engine by "Ivan the Terrible" for the gas chamber at Treblinka and to the SS's singling out of Ukrainians with experience driving trucks as Trawniki men. Demjanjuk, then 67 years old, testified on his own behalf, claiming that he had spent most of the war as a POW in German captivity in a camp near Chelm, Poland. The accounts of 21 guards who were tried in the Soviet Union on war crimes gave details that differentiate Demjanjuk from Ivan the Terrible in particular that 'Ivan the Terrible's surname was Marchenko, not Demjanjuk. [26][27] There he met Vera Kowlowa, another DP, and they married. The existence of these statements alone, however, created sufficient reasonable doubt that Demjanjuk ever served at Treblinka, moving the Israeli Supreme Court to overturn Demjanjuk's conviction on July 29, 1993, without prejudice, signifying that the Israeli prosecution could choose to try Demjanjuk on charges related to other crimes. [121] As the Government noted, a motion to reopen, such as Demjanjuk's, could only properly be filed with the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) in Washington, D.C., and not an immigration trial court. Danilchenko identified Demjanjuk from three separate photo spreads as having been an "experienced and reliable" guard at Sobibor and that Demjanjuk had been transferred to Flossenbrg, where he had received an SS blood-type tattoo; Danilchenko did not mention Treblinka. [9][pageneeded] His wife found work at a General Electric facility,[9][pageneeded] and the two had two more children. When John Demjanjuk died in a German nursing home in 2012, he was in the midst of appealing a guilty verdict accusing him of acting as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor. In 1979, the newly created Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the DOJ took over prosecution of the case. Danilchenko was a former guard at Sobibor and had been deposed by the Soviet Union in 1979 at the request of the OSI (US Office of Special Investigations). The existence of scars from an SS tattoo, particularly given confusion in popular culture between the blood-type tattoo (mandatory) and the SS-rune tattoo (voluntary), misled prosecutors both in the United States and Israel as to its significance. [123], On 14 April 2009, immigration agents removed Demjanjuk from his home in preparation for deportation. St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral. But an investigation conducted in the 1990s by the US Office of Special Investigations found this to be a cover story. Demjanjuk's lawyer argued that all of the ID cards could be forgeries and that there was no point comparing them. Because his appeal was still pending when he died, he is now legally presumed innocent. Demjanjuks citizenship was ultimately rescinded, and in 1986, he was extradited to Israel to stand trial. On 28 December 2005, an immigration judge ordered Demjanjuk deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. It is Ivan from Treblinka, from the gas chambers, the man I am looking at now." In Israel, he was convicted of being Ivan the Terrible, a conviction that was later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court. Sheftel focused the defense largely on the claim that Demjanjuk's Trawniki card was a KGB forgery. Shortly before his death, he was tried and convicted in Germany as an accessory to 28,060 murders at Sobibor. One month after the US Supreme Court's refusal to hear Demjanjuk's case, on 19 June 2008, Germany announced it would seek the extradition of Demjanjuk to Germany. Included in their evidence was an ID card showing that Demjanjuk was transferred from the Nazi training camp Trawniki to Sobibor.. Federal investigators never forgot, and after Demjanjuk returned to the U.S. after the Supreme Court decision, they investigated his claim that he was too ill to go to Germany where he had been newly indicted. [103] After Demjanjuk's acquittal in Israel, the panel of judges on the Sixth Circuit ruled against OSI for having committed fraud on the court and having failed to provide exculpatory evidence to Demjanjuk's defense. "[148] As Nagorny had previously identified Demjanjuk from his US visa application photo, his inability to recognize Demjanjuk in the courtroom was seen as unimportant. Demjanjuk appealed the deportation order on various grounds, including the argument that, given his age and poor health, deportation would constitute torture against which he was seeking protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW He is the lowest ranking person ever tried in Germany for Nazi war crimes. Demjanjuks wife attended the same church listed in the obituary: St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral. Based on a June 1993 finding of a US Special Master that OSI had inadvertently withheld documentation that might have been helpful to the Demjanjuk defense in 1981, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ordered the Attorney General of the United States, Janet Reno, not to bar Demjanjuk's return to the United States. He lived at a German nursing home in Bad Feilnbach,[10] where he died on 17 March 2012. Upon receiving these files, and after years of litigation, Demjanjuk's American defense team filed a suit against the US government to set aside the judgment stripping him of his citizenship, and accused the OSI of prosecutorial misconduct. In a second photograph, researchers identify one man as Demjanjuk, but another man has a prominent left ear much like what is seen on Demjanjuks Nazi ID card. "[85], Demjanjuk further claimed that in 1944 he was drafted into an anti-Soviet Russian military organization, the Russian Liberation Army (Vlasov Army), funded by the Nazi German government, until the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies in 1945. She hadnt seen him since 2009, when he was taken to Germany for another trial. [3] They settled in Seven Hills, Ohio, where he worked in an auto factory and raised three children. Demjanjuk died in a nursing home in Germany in 2012, age 91, while awaiting the appeal of his German conviction as accessory to the murder of 29,000 innocent civilians Jewish men, women and. One week later it sentenced him to death by hanging. SS authorities introduced the practice of blood-type tattooing into the Waffen-SS (Military SS) in 1942. We had a suspicion it was him and we were able to enlist the support of the state police, explained Cueppers, as reported by Erik Kirschbaum of the Los Angeles Times. [88] The former guards' statements were obtained after World WarII by the Soviets, who prosecuted USSR citizens who had assisted the Nazis as auxiliary forces during the war. Media related to John Demjanjuk at Wikimedia Commons. Cookie Policy [94][96], Demjanjuk's acquittal was met with outrage in Israel, including threats against the justices' lives. 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 as part of Operation Reinhard. Privacy Statement [179] The Niemann family has donated the originals to the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. They believe the collection includes two photos showing Demjanjuk with fellow guards at the camp, which would be the first documentary evidence to conclusively establish he had served there. Based on eyewitness testimony by Holocaust survivors in Israel, he was identified as the notorious Treblinka extermination camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible." [4] Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 for trial. The prosecution charged that he was the Treblinka killing center guard known to prisoners as Ivan the Terrible, and that he had operated and maintained the diesel engine used to pump carbon monoxide fumes into the Treblinka gas chambers. On 18 August 1993, the court rejected the petitions on the grounds that, During the trial, the prosecution argued that Demjanjuk should be tried for crimes at Sobibor; however, Justice Aharon Barak was not convinced, stating, "We know nothing about him at Sobibor". Washington, DC 20024-2126 Some members of SS Death's Head Units in the German concentration camp system also received such tattoos, as they were considered linked to the Waffen SS administratively after 1941. " It's all been lies from beginning to end," his daughter, Irene Nishnic, said through tears during his trial in Jerusalem in. After returning to Trawniki in August 1943, Marchenko transferred to Trieste, Italy, and disappeared towards the end of the war. [160], Following his death, his relatives requested that he be buried in the United States, where he once lived. Two of the images probably show Demjanjuk, said historian Martin Cueppers, as quoted by Reuters Madeline Chambers. [153][154][155][156] Presiding Judge Ralph Alt ordered Demjanjuk released from custody pending his appeal, as he did not appear to pose a flight-risk. As US authorities moved to deport Demjanjuk, the Israeli government requested his extradition. Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics, Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically, Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust, Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust. Previously, historians knew of only two photos taken at Sobibor while it was still operational; the camp was dismantled after a prisoner revolt in 1943. Family and friends claim that Demjanjuk himself was the . "[4] Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 for trial. [110] On 22 December 2006, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the deportation order. For the first time in a German case, prosecutors argued that a guard at a facility whose sole purpose was mass murder shared responsibility for the deaths of those killed during his service there. Now John Jr. is a father. [32] INS quickly discovered that Demjanjuk had listed his place of domicile from 1937 to 1943 as Sobibor on his US visa application of 1951. Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., dismissed the possible identification as "baseless," telling the Associated Press ' Kerstin Sopke and Geir Moulson that "the photos are not proof of my. Working as a mechanic at a Ford plant, he lived a quiet, suburban lifeat least until 1977, when the Justice Department sued to revoke his citizenship, claiming he had lied on his immigration papers to conceal war crimes committed at another Nazi extermination camp, Treblinka. This was the first time someone has been convicted by a German court solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of being involved in the death of any specific inmate. On 9 December 2008, a German federal court declared that Demjanjuk could be tried for his role in the Holocaust. [73][74] Four of the survivors who had originally identified Demjanjuk's photograph had died before the trial began. She wasnt able to go to Germany because of her heart problems. In late September 2019, a Vera Demjanjuk of Ohio passed away. Until it is, there are always questions and no rest for those who accuse him and his family, who steadfastly defends him. Vera lived at the same home in Ohio since 1975. [157][158] His release pending appeal was protested by some, including Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. [30] 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. [58] In April 1985, he was detained and held at United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. For three years she lived in the front line. Though key to the American government's and the Israeli prosecution's case, the identity card did not place Demjanjuk in Treblinka, but rather as a guard at an SS estate in Okzw, near Chelm in September 1942, and as a guard at the Sobibor killing center from March 1943. [144] Demjanjuk's defense team argued that these documents were Soviet forgeries. The identification was based on historic research and modern biometric technology, which measures anatomical or physiological characteristics. [142], On 14 April 2010, Anton Dallmeyer, an expert witness, testified that the typeset and handwriting on an ID card being used as key evidence matched four other ID cards believed to have been issued at the SS training camp at Trawniki. [174][175] The following day, the Ludwigsburg Research Center qualified the announcement, saying that it is likely that one of the men in the noted photos is Demjanjuk, but that this cannot be said "with absolute certainty" ("mit absoluter Gewissheit"), given the time that had passed since they were taken. No wartime documentary evidence that definitively placed Demjanjuk at Treblinka has ever surfaced. While interviews with Demjanjuk's family portray him as an innocent family man unfairly maligned, the evidence against him is haunting. The video, shot in Demjanjuk's living room, showed a smiling John Demjanjuk playing with a grandchild born during the trial . This is the latest chapter in the long, complex saga of John Demjanjuk, who was accused of participating in Nazi war crimes. Terms of Use Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including NYmag.com, Flavorwire and Tina Brown Media's Women in the World. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. She said she had 10 grandchildren and was very worried about their future. Demjanjuk also said, "Your Honors, if I had really been in that terrible place, would I have been stupid enough to say so? [20] These documents were found in former Soviet archives in Moscow and in Lithuania, which placed Demjanjuk at Sobibor on 26 March 1943, at Flossenbrg on 1 October 1943, and at Majdanek from November 1942 through early March 1943; administrative documents from Flossenbrg referencing Demjanjuk's name and Trawniki card number were also uncovered. In 1999, OSI filed a new denaturalization proceeding against Demjanjuk, alleging that he served as a Trawniki-trained police auxiliary at Trawniki itself, Sobibor, and Majdanek, and, later, as a member of an SS Death's Head Battalion at Flossenbrg. Hundreds of thousands of pages of previously unknown documents became available to both the prosecution and the defense. As a result, in 2002 Demjanjuk again lost his American citizenship, this time for good. [59] Demjanjuk appealed his extradition; in a hearing on 8 July 1985, Demjanjuk's defense attorneys claimed that the evidence against him had been manufactured by the KGB,[60] that Demjanjuk was never at Treblinka, and that the court had no authority to consider Israel's request for extradition. He died in January and she said she hadnt spoken to him since March. In November 2009, he again sat in the defendant's dock. [20] OSI was unable to establish Demjanjuk's whereabouts from December 1944 to the end of the war. A critical piece of evidence was John Demjanjuk's Trawniki camp identification card, located in a Soviet archive. His first child was due in late October, just when this magazine will hit the newstands.
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