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). [7][8] On 12 May 2011, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. It chose to investigate the names as leads. He was married to Vera Demjanjuk and they had three children while he lived in the United States: John Jr., Irene, and Lydia. [88] While there, carpenters began building the gallows that would be used to hang him if his appeals were rejected, and Demjanjuk heard the construction from his cell. (The nearby Sobibor extermination camp was named after the village. Privacy Statement March 17, 2012. [12] In January 2020, a photograph album by Sobibor guard Johann Niemann was made public; some historians have suggested that a guard who appears in two photos may be 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. "[4] Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 for trial. [151], On 15 January 2011, Spain requested a European arrest warrant be issued for Nazi war crimes against Spaniards; the request was refused for a lack of evidence. John Demjanjuk, the 'littlest of little fish', convicted for Nazi 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 German case set an important precedent and led to subsequent prosecutions in Germany that are continuing more than 70 years after the Holocaust. [136] Busch would also allege that the German justice system was prejudiced against his client, and that the entire trial was therefore illegitimate. [88] The court declined to find him guilty on this basis because the prosecution had built its entire case around Demjanjuk's identity with Ivan the Terrible, and Demjanjuk had not been given a chance to defend himself from charges of being a guard at Sobibor. John Demjanjuk Jr: New pictures are not proof my father was a Nazi Prior to the Sobibor Perpetrator Collections unveiling, experts had never found any photographic evidence placing Demjanjuk at Sobibor, creating a gap in knowledge that accounts for the newly released images significance. The prosecution called expert witnesses to testify on the authenticity of the card including its signatures by various Nazi officers, paper, and ink. Evidence to assist this claim included an identification card from Trawniki bearing Demjanjuk's picture and personal information[88] found in the Soviet archives in addition to German documents that mentioned "Wachmann" Demjanjuk with his date and place of birth. Powered by. Convicted Nazi Camp Guard John Demjanjuk Dies : NPR Cookie Policy But an investigation conducted in the 1990s by the US Office of Special Investigations found this to be a cover story. [34] Hanusiak claimed that Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor concentration and death camp. With five years of careful review into thousands of Trawniki-related documents that had been unavailable before 1991, OSI investigators could track through wartime documents Demjanjuk's entire career as a Trawniki-trained guard and as a concentration camp guard from 1942 to 1945. [67] On 19 May 1999, the Justice Department filed a complaint against Demjanjuk to seek his denaturalization. [66] According to prosecutors, Demjanjuk had been recruited into the Soviet army in 1940, and had fought until he was captured by German troops in Eastern Crimea in May 1942. Vera yelled: Youre a liar! In July 2009, German prosecutors indicted Demjanjuk on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder at Sobibor. [161] On 31 March 2012, it was reported that John Demjanjuk was buried at an undisclosed US location. There he became a United Auto Workers (UAW) diesel engine mechanic at the nearby Ford automobile factory,[30] where a friend from Regensburg had found work. He lived at a German nursing home in Bad Feilnbach,[10] where he died on 17 March 2012. After five more years of litigation, the District Court in Cleveland restored Demjanjuk's US citizenship on February 20, 1998, but without prejudice, leaving the option open for OSI to proceed with a new case based on new evidence. Two photos, out of 361 from Sobibor and other camps, show Demjanjuk, a German Holocaust research centre says. [61] Demjanjuk was deported to Israel on 28 February 1986. Two grainy black-and-white pictures showing a man authorities believe to be convicted Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk working at the Sobibor death camp were published by German historians on. Most of the guards were executed after the war by the Soviets,[93] and their written statements were not obtained by Israeli authorities until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Israeli Supreme Court, however, overturned the conviction, citing evidence that Ivan the Terrible was in fact a different man. Another piece of evidence in the prosecution's case involved scars under John Demjanjuk's left arm, the remains of a tattoo identifying his blood type. Demjanjuk had not mentioned Chelm in his initial depositions in the United States, first referring to Chelm during his denaturalization trial in 1981. In September 1993 Demjanjuk was allowed to return to Ohio. John Demjanjuk's family raises concerns over Netflix documentary [75] The testimony of one of these witnesses, Pinhas Epstein, had been barred as unreliable in US denaturalization trial of former camp guard Feodor Fedorenko,[74] while another, Gustav Boraks, sometimes appeared confused on the stand. )[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 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. [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. On 19 May 2008, the US Supreme Court denied Demjanjuk's petition for certiorari, declining to hear his case against the deportation order. Investigations of Demjanjuk's Holocaust-era past began in 1975. This is the latest chapter in the long, complex saga of John Demjanjuk, who was accused of participating in Nazi war 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. "[77] It was later learned that Eliyahu Rosenberg had previously testified in a 1947 deposition that "Ivan the Terrible" had been killed in 1943 during a Treblinka prisoner uprising. [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. 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. (Other reports say they have seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.). Now, a photo has emerged from the Nazi death camp at Sobibor, a camp where John Demjanjuk was accused of serving. CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) - John Demjanjuk is at rest in a cemetery near Cleveland. Proceedings in the United States twice stripped him of his American citizenship and ordered him deported. The photos, said Cueppers, are a quantum leap in the visual record on the Holocaust in occupied Poland.. One man appears to resemble Demjanjuk, but researchers at a German museum believe another is Demjanjuk. Born in Ukraine in 1920, Demjanjuk emigrated to the United States in 1952 and settled with his family in Cleveland. No wartime documentary evidence that definitively placed Demjanjuk at Treblinka has ever surfaced. [22] His application stated that he had worked as a driver in the town of Sobibr in eastern Poland. . [138], Doctors restricted the time Demjanjuk could be tried in court each day to two sessions of 90 minutes each, according to Munich State Prosecutor Anton Winkler. The BIA denied Demjanjuk's motion to reopen his deportation case. His. [124] The same day, Demjanjuk's son filed a motion in the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit asking that the deportation be stayed,[124] which was subsequently granted. Demjanjuk also said, "Your Honors, if I had really been in that terrible place, would I have been stupid enough to say so? [40], The proceeding opened with the prosecution calling historian Earl F. Ziemke, who reconstructed the situation on the Eastern Front in 1942 and showed that it would have been possible for Demjanjuk to have been captured at the Battle of Kerch and arrive in Trawniki that same year. Here is what you need to know about Vera. [35], INS sent photographs to the Israeli government of the nine persons alleged by Hanusiak to have been involved in crimes against Jews: the government's agents asked survivors of Sobibor and Treblinka if they could identify Demjanjuk based on his visa application picture. [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. Chief US Immigration Judge Michael Creppy ruled there was no evidence to substantiate Demjanjuk's claim that he would be mistreated if he were sent to Ukraine. [159] As a consequence of his appeal not having been heard, Demjanjuk is still presumed innocent under German law. SS authorities introduced the practice of blood-type tattooing into the Waffen-SS (Military SS) in 1942. The theme was never forget.. The son of famed John Demjanjuk has dismissed the claim that newly emerged photos of the Sobibor death camp show his father performing duties as a guard. 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. As US authorities moved to deport Demjanjuk, the Israeli government requested his extradition. [169] Author Philip Roth, who briefly attended the Demjanjuk trial in Israel, portrays a fictionalized version of Demjanjuk and his trial in the 1993 novel Operation Shylock. Testimony by Holocaust Survivors John Demjanjuk. In late September 2019, a Vera Demjanjuk of Ohio passed away. It was the first televised trial in Israeli history. In January 2019, the European Court of Human Rights held that this didnt violate Article 6 or the presumption of innocence. Its investigation reduced the list to nine individuals, including Demjanjuk. [76], On April18, 1988, the Jerusalem District Court found Demjanjuk "unhesitatingly and with utter conviction" guilty of all charges and being Ivan the Terrible. The authenticity of the Trawniki card was affirmed by US government experts who examined the original document as well as by Wolfgang Scheffler of the Free University of Berlin during the hearing,[42][43] Scheffler also testified to the crimes committed by Trawniki men and that it was possible that Demjanjuk had been moved between Sobibor and Treblinka. But the search for this Ivan the Terrible has never moved far from Demjanjuk. "[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. Conscripted into the Soviet army, he was captured by German troops at the battle of Kerch in May 1942. Family and friends claim that Demjanjuk himself was the . Though the card contained some information that was inconsistent with the testimony of the Treblinka survivors, it was the only document available that placed Demjanjuk at Trawniki as a police auxiliary (that is, in the pool of auxiliaries from which Treblinka guards were selected). [128] Demjanjuk sued Germany on 30 April 2009, to try to block the German government's agreement to accept Demjanjuk from the US. [17] After a battle in Eastern Crimea, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and was held in a camp for Soviet prisoners of war in Chem. He died in 2012 after legal battles that spanned 35 years. [119], On 2 April 2009, Demjanjuk filed a motion in an immigration trial court in Virginia. What The Devil Next Door on Netflix doesn't tell you - Digital Spy [94] Central to the new evidence was a photograph of Ivan the Terrible and a description that did not match the 1942 appearance of Demjanjuk. He was born in March 1920 in Dobovi Makharyntsi, a village in Vinnitsa Oblast of what was then Soviet Ukraine. While none recognized the name Ivan Demjanjuk, and no survivors of Sobibor identified his photograph, nine survivors of Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible", so named because of his cruelty as a guard operating the gas chamber at Treblinka. Born in Soviet Ukraine, Demjanjuk was conscripted into the Red Army in 1940. In 1952 they emigrated to the United States. He maintained his innocence, claiming that it was a case of mistaken identity. In an attempt to avoid deportation, Demjanjuk sought protection under the United Nations Convention against Torture, claiming that he would be prosecuted and tortured if he were deported to Ukraine. [127] On Thursday 7 May 2009, the United States Supreme Court, via Justice John Paul Stevens, declined to consider Demjanjuk's case for review, thereby denying Demjanjuk any further stay of deportation. They did, however, consistently refer to an Ivan Marchenko, who had served as a gas motor operator at Treblinka from the summer of 1942 until the prisoner uprising in 1943, and who had stood out as a particularly cruel police auxiliary, perpetrating acts that were consistent with the memory of the Jewish Treblinka survivors. Washington, DC 20024-2126 It is a card Demjanjuk disputed, but one a federal judge ruled was legitimate. [123], On 14 April 2009, immigration agents removed Demjanjuk from his home in preparation for deportation. The file on Demjanjuk was compiled by the German Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. [58] The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Demjanjuk's appeal on 25 February 1986, allowing the extradition to move forward. Shame on you! Just before he was sent to Germany, 19 News saw the same thing. [166], In early June 2012, Ulrich Busch, Demjanjuk's attorney, filed a complaint with Bavarian prosecutors claiming that the pain medication Novalgin (known in the US as metamizole or dipyrone) that had been administered to Demjanjuk helped lead to his death. In Israel, he was convicted of being Ivan the Terrible, a conviction that was later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court. He was freed pending appeal of the conviction. 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. 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. Vera lived at the same home in Ohio since 1975. On Tuesday, experts speaking at Berlins Topography of Terror museum presented a previously unseen collection of 361 photos that once belonged to Johann Niemann, deputy commander of Sobibor between September 1942 and October 1943. A critical piece of evidence was John Demjanjuk's Trawniki camp identification card, located in a Soviet archive. [74] Asked by the prosecution if he recognized Demjanjuk, Rosenberg asked that the defendant remove his glasses "so I can see his eyes." [106] The complaint alleged that Demjanjuk served as a guard at the Sobibr and Majdanek camps in Poland under German occupation and as a member of an SS death's head battalion at Flossenbrg. Originally Vera Bulochnik, she and John met in a German camp for displaced persons, The New York Times reported. [160], Following his death, his relatives requested that he be buried in the United States, where he once lived. TTY: 202.488.0406, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center. All rights reserved. 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. 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW To the end, Demjanjuk denied that he had ever stepped foot in the Nazi extermination camp. This page was last edited on 23 April 2023, at 19:42. Now John Jr. is a father. 19 News is not saying where for fear it could become a lightning rod for protests or vandalism. On May 12, 2011, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Main telephone: 202.488.0400 She wasnt able to go to Germany because of her heart problems. [19], Demjanjuk would later claim to have been drafted into the Russian Liberation Army in 1944. Demjanjuks wife attended the same church listed in the obituary: St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral. [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. The prosecution claimed that while Demjanjuk was a prisoner of war (POW) being held by the Germans, he volunteered to join a special SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons) unit at the Trawniki training camp (near Lublin, Poland), where he trained as a police auxiliary to deploy in Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Jews residing in German-occupied Poland. Gas . John Demjanjuk, the retired U.S. autoworker convicted on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, died Saturday at the age of 91. . John Demjanjuk's Wife, Vera Demjanjuk: 5 Fast Facts | Heavy.com He died in 2012. John Demjanjuk: Prosecution of A Nazi Collaborator Jewish organizations have opposed this, claiming that his burial site would become a center for neo-Nazi activity. In 1988, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death. [87] Demjanjuk was placed in solitary confinement during the appeals process. [79] Most significantly, Sheftel called Dr. Julius Grant, who had proven that the Hitler diaries were forged. While living in the United States, he was married to Vera Demjanjuk and they had three children. [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. She hadnt seen him since 2009, when he was taken to Germany for another trial. 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. The Jerusalem Post Customer Service Center can be contacted with any questions or requests: Sign up for The Jerusalem Post Premium Plus for just $5, Upgrade your reading experience with an ad-free environment and exclusive content, Copyright 2023 Jpost Inc. All rights reserved. On 1 May 2009, the Sixth Circuit lifted the stay that it had imposed against Demjanjuk's deportation order. [62], Demjanjuk's trial took place in the Jerusalem District Court between 26 November 1986 and 18 April 1988, before a special tribunal comprising Israeli Supreme Court Judge Dov Levin and Jerusalem District Court Judges Zvi Tal and Dalia Dorner. [58] The appeals court found probable cause that Demjanjuk "committed murders of uncounted numbers of prisoners" and allowed the extradition to take place. meaning "Terrible" in Polish and Russian. [112][113] The Supreme Court's denial of review meant that the order of removal was final; no other appeal was possible. [43] During the trial, Demjanjuk admitted to having lied on his US visa application but claimed that it was out of fear of being returned to the Soviet Union and denied having been a concentration camp guard. [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. [48] In 1982, Demjanjuk was jailed for 10 days after failing to appear for a hearing. 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. [52] Much of the money was raised by a Cleveland-based Holocaust denier Jerome Brentar, who also recommended Demjanjuk's lawyer Mark O'Connor. John Demjanjuk, initially convicted as "Ivan the Terrible," was tried for war crimes committed as a collaborator of the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. He settled in Seven Hills, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, and worked for many years in a Ford auto plant. In his third declaration Demjanjuk demanded access to a secret KGB file numbered 1627 and declared a hunger strike until he got it. OSI did not submit these deposits into evidence and took them as a further indication that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible, though none of the guards mentioned Demjanjuk having been at Treblinka. Demjanjuk's lawyer argued that all of the ID cards could be forgeries and that there was no point comparing them. [108] The United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in November 2004.[109]. While interviews with Demjanjuk's family portray him as an innocent family man unfairly maligned, the evidence against him is haunting. But there has been no rest in the debate over Demjanjuks wartime role. [9][pageneeded] His wife found work at a General Electric facility,[9][pageneeded] and the two had two more children. Holocaust: SS officer's photos reveal Sobibor death camp Vera said they moved to the U.S. in the 1950s and now that he had died, she expected to move out of their home in about a year. The evidence placing him at Sobibor was consistent with the information on Demjanjuk's Trawniki identification card and with Danil'chenko's testimony. [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. [97] Simon Wiesenthal, an iconic figure in Nazi-hunting, first believed Demjanjuk was guilty, but after Demjanjuk's acquittal by the Israeli Supreme Court, said he also would have cleared him given the new evidence. The defense used some evidence supplied by the Soviets to support their case while calling other pieces of evidence supplied by the Soviets "forgeries". [141] Because of the long pauses between trial dates and cancellations caused by the alleged health problems of the defendant and his defense attorney Busch's use of many legal motions, the trial eventually stretched to eighteen months. Since his death, Demjanjuk's family has continued to stand by him. [67] The complaint relied on evidence compiled by historians Charles W. Sydnor, Jr. and Todd Huebner, who compared Demjanjuk's Trawniki card to 40 other known cards and found that issues on the card that had fueled suspicions of fraud were in fact typical of Trawniki's poor record keeping. [105] OSI continued to investigate Demjanjuk, relying solely on documentary evidence rather than eye-witnesses. [44] Additionally, the former paymaster at Trawniki, Heinrich Schaefer, stated in a deposition that such cards were standard issue at Trawniki. Ten petitions against the decision were made to the Supreme Court. Upon his arrival, he was arrested and sent to Munich's Stadelheim prison. Sheftel focused the defense largely on the claim that Demjanjuk's Trawniki card was a KGB forgery. She said that John always worried about her and their children. When Demjanjuk smiled and offered his hand, Rosenberg recoiled and shouted "Grozny!" As Chelm was Demjanjuk's alibi, he was questioned about this omission during the trial by both the prosecutors and the judges; Demjanjuk blamed the trauma of his POW experience and said he had simply forgotten. When asked to identify Demjanjuk in the courtroom, however, Nagorny was unable to, stating "That's definitely not him no resemblance. [81] Additionally, Sheftel alleged that the trial was a show trial, and referred to the trial as "the Demjanjuk affair," alluding to the famous antisemitic Dreyfus Affair. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court's rulings on the authenticity of the Trawniki card and the falsity of Demjanjuk's alibi but ruled that reasonable doubt existed that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. #ECtHR backs #Germanys refusal to reimburse legal expenses of #Sobibr extermination camp guard John #Demjanjuk rejects #ECHR complaint from widow & son https://t.co/wLvIf1PPuu pic.twitter.com/9I7eFtV1qX, Council of Europe (@coe) January 24, 2019. Shame on you! Demjanjuk appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which on 30 April 2004 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. His return was met by protests and counter-protests, with supporters including members of the Ku Klux Klan. By Robert D. McFadden. After the war he married a woman he met in a West German displaced persons camp, and emigrated with her and their daughter to the United States. 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. [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. [92], The judge's acquittal of Demjanjuk for being Ivan the Terrible was based on the written statements of 37former guards at Treblinka that identified Ivan the Terrible as "Ivan Marchenko". "Ivan", Rosenberg said. However, Demjanjuk's family, who had always claimed he was a Ukrainian prisoner of war, and that the accusations were simply a case of mistaken identity, had fought vigorously to prevent his deportation to Germany, defended him, and stood by his side until his death. The issuance of the stay by the immigration trial court was therefore improper, as that court had no jurisdiction over the matter. Media related to John Demjanjuk at Wikimedia Commons. She was the same age as John Demjanjuks wife, but it is not yet confirmed if this is the same Vera. John Demjanjuk, Accused as a Nazi Guard, Dies at 91 - New York Times

Multimember Districts Tend To Promote Broad Representation, Articles J