Newly released photos suggest John Demjanjuk was Sobibor death camp He was 91. [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. At the trial, prosecutors said Demjanjuks job at Sobibor was to lead Jews to the gas chambers to be killed, writes Mahita Gajanan for Time. "[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. On 1 May 2009, the Sixth Circuit lifted the stay that it had imposed against Demjanjuk's deportation order. CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) - John Demjanjuk is at rest in a cemetery near Cleveland. 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. [110] On 22 December 2006, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the deportation order. These legal battles underscore the interdependence of the historical record and the long search for justice to redress crimes against humanity. [134] The indictment made almost no mention of Demjanjuk's service at Majdanek or Flossenbrg, as these were not extermination camps. David van Huiden, whose parents and sister were murdered in Sobibor while Demjanjuk was there, said the verdict meant. Niemann was killed there on 14 October 1943, during a prisoner revolt.[174]. [67] The prosecution alleged that Demjanjuk had listed Sobibor on his US immigration application in an attempt to cover up his presence at Treblinka. Vera Demjanjuk, John Demjanjuk's wife, never believed her husband was Ivan the Terrible. The trials of John Demjanjuk have attracted global media attention for three decades. [99], After Demjanjuk's acquittal, the Israeli Attorney-General decided to release him rather than to pursue charges of committing crimes at Sobibor. But the search for this Ivan the Terrible has never moved far from Demjanjuk. The German jurisdictional authority rested on the murder of people brought to Sobibor on 15 transport trains from the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands between April and July 1943, among whom were individual German citizens who had fled to Holland in the 1930s. John Demjanjuk's family raises concerns over Netflix documentary John Demjanjuk's defense claimed that the card was a Soviet-inspired forgery, despite several forensic tests that verified it as authentic. [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. When asked to identify Demjanjuk in the courtroom, however, Nagorny was unable to, stating "That's definitely not him no resemblance. On 28 December 2005, an immigration judge ordered Demjanjuk deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. In 1979, the newly created Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the DOJ took over prosecution of the case. John Demjanjuks Wife, Vera Demjanjuk: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, Copyright 2023 Heavy, Inc. All rights reserved. March 17, 2012. [102] Even before his acquittal by the Israeli Supreme Court, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had opened an investigation into whether OSI had withheld evidence from the defense. Following a lengthy investigation and a 1981 trial, the US District Federal Court in Cleveland stripped Demjanjuk of his US citizenship. Born in Soviet Ukraine, Demjanjuk was conscripted into the Red Army in 1940. [163] On 28 June 2012, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that Demjanjuk could not regain his citizenship posthumously. On 1 October 1943 he was transferred to Flossenbrg, where he served until at least 10 December 1944. It chose to investigate the names as leads. He was freed pending appeal of the conviction. [84] Demjanjuk also changed his testimony as to why he had listed Sobibor as his place of domicile from his earlier trials: he now claimed to have been advised to do so by an official of the United Nations Relief Administration to list a place in Poland or Czechoslovakia in order to avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union, after which another Soviet refugee waiting with him suggested Demjanjuk list Sobibor. [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. "[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. 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. In August 1977, Demjanjuk was accused of having been a Trawniki man. [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. [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. [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. Newly released picture may prove John Demjanjuk, who lived in Seven [68], Prosecutors based part of these allegations on an IDcard referred to as the "Trawniki card". [45][46] Five Holocaust survivors from Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka and having been "Ivan the Terrible. Vera and her son filed a complaint that their expenses were not reimbursed even though Demjanjuks proceedings were dismissed. The German case set an important precedent and led to subsequent prosecutions in Germany that are continuing more than 70 years after the Holocaust. [114][115] On 10 November 2008, German federal prosecutor Kurt Schrimm directed prosecutors to file in Munich for extradition, since Demjanjuk once lived there. [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. John Demjanjuk in 2010. [131], On 3 July 2009, prosecutors deemed Demjanjuk fit to stand trial. 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. All rights reserved. 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. [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. [108] The United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in November 2004.[109]. [71] The card had Demjanjuk's photograph, which he identified as his picture at the time. He's the subject of Netflix's new documentary, The Devil Next Door.. In November 2009, he again sat in the defendant's dock. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including NYmag.com, Flavorwire and Tina Brown Media's Women in the World. This is the latest chapter in the long, complex saga of John Demjanjuk, who was accused of participating in Nazi war crimes. You have no heartnothing!, After Demjanjuk died in 2012, Vera Demjanjuk was still saying that the Justice Department had done a dirty job, Cleveland.com reported. 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. 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. Classrooms were set up in the auditorium where the trial was held. They married and were still living in the camps in the 1950s when she gave birth to Lydia. [147], On 24 February 2010, a witness for the prosecution, Alex Nagorny, who agreed to serve the Nazi Germans after his capture, testified that he knew Demjanjuk from his time as a guard. 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. 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. Testimony by Holocaust Survivors John Demjanjuk. 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. CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) - John Demjanjuk is at rest in a cemetery near Cleveland. During this trial, the evidence implicating Demjanjuk rested not on survivor testimony, but on wartime documentation of his service at Sobibor. 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. [21], After the end of the war, Demjanjuk spent time in several displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany. Demjanjuks citizenship was ultimately rescinded, and in 1986, he was extradited to Israel to stand trial. His return was met by protests and counter-protests, with supporters including members of the Ku Klux Klan. 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. "[4] Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 for trial. Demjanjuks wife attended the same church listed in the obituary: St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral. Demjanjuk returned to the United States, only for his citizenship to be revoked once again after the government accused him of working as a guard at several camps, including Sobibor. 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. . On 13 July 2009, prosecutors charged him with 27,900counts of accessory to murder for his time as a guard at Sobibor. [7][8] On 12 May 2011, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. [76] Through Baltic migr supporters living in Washington DC, the defense was also able to acquire internal OSI notes that had been thrown in a dumpster without shredding that showed that Otto Horn had in fact had difficulty identifying Demjanjuk and had been prompted to make the identification. [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. Hence this physical evidence only suggested, but by no means proved, that Demjanjuk might have served as a concentration camp guard. The authorities at Trawniki issued such documents to men detailed to guard detachments outside the camp. Copyright 2020 WOIO. Family of John Demjanjuk reacts to Netflix documentary 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. Shame on you! As a result, in 2002 Demjanjuk again lost his American citizenship, this time for good. Media related to John Demjanjuk at Wikimedia Commons. John Demjanjuk: Prosecution of A Nazi Collaborator 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. Rosenberg then exclaimed directly to Demjanjuk: "How dare you put out your hand, murderer that you are! Because his appeal was still pending when he died, he is now legally presumed innocent. Vera, also from Ukraine, told Cleveland.com that she lived through World War II and famine. John Demjanjuk : Untangling "Ivan the Terrible" - Jewish Virtual Library [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). Some facts of Demjanjuk's past are not in dispute. Danil'chenko had stated that he knew Demjanjuk from their service together in Sobibor and at the Flossenbrg concentration camp until 1945. "[47] Additionally, OSI submitted the testimony of former SS guard Horn identifying Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka. SS authorities introduced the practice of blood-type tattooing into the Waffen-SS (Military SS) in 1942. Eli Rosenbaum was the acting Director of the United States Office of. After 16 months of trial, proceedings closed in mid-March 2011. [73][74] Four of the survivors who had originally identified Demjanjuk's photograph had died before the trial began. [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. Since the earlier witnesses were now deceased, the Munich court accepted that survivor testimony be read into the proceeding to facilitate findings of mass murder and determine the identity and citizenship of many of the victims. [89], On 29 July 1993, a five-judge panel of the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict on appeal. Upon his arrival, German authorities arrested him and held him in Munich's Stadelheim prison. Conscripted into the Soviet army, he was captured by German troops at the battle of Kerch in May 1942. 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. [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. US officials had originally been aware, without informing Demjanjuk's attorneys, of the testimony of two of these German guards. [51], Demjanjuk's defense was supported by the Ukrainian community and various Eastern European migr groups; Demjanjuk's supporters alleged that he was the victim of a communist conspiracy and raised over two million dollars for his defense. Demjanjuk was extradited from the United States specifically to stand trial for offenses attributed to Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, and not for other alternative charges. [129] The German Administrative Court rejected Demjanjuk's claim on 6 May. As US authorities moved to deport Demjanjuk, the Israeli government requested his extradition. But two newly released photographs may prove otherwise. Investigations of Demjanjuk's Holocaust-era past began in 1975. 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 . [22] His application stated that he had worked as a driver in the town of Sobibr in eastern Poland. 19 News is not saying where for fear it could become a lightning rod for protests or vandalism. [105] OSI continued to investigate Demjanjuk, relying solely on documentary evidence rather than eye-witnesses. John Demjanjuk, Accused as a Nazi Guard, Dies at 91 - New York Times Shortly before his death, he was tried and convicted in Germany as an accessory to 28,060 murders at Sobibor. Based on eyewitness testimony by Holocaust survivors in Israel, he was identified as the notorious Treblinka extermination camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible. He was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp, where he was disciplined on 18 January 1943. 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, at 89 years old, claimed that he was too frail to stand trial, but the court ruled that the trial could proceed with two 90-minute sessions per day. Several Jewish survivors of Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, key evidence placing him at the killing center. [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. 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. 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. John Demjanjuk Jr: New pictures are not proof my father was a Nazi [24] Historian Hans-Jrgen Bmelburg noted in regard to Demjanjuk that Nazi war criminals sometimes tried to evade prosecution after the war by presenting themselves as victims of Nazi persecution, rather than as the perpetrators. 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. [91]The Trawniki certificate also implied that Demjanjuk had served at Sobibor, as did the German orders of March 1943 posting his Trawniki unit to the area. [133] Some 35 plaintiffs were admitted to file in the case, including four survivors of the Sobibor concentration camp and 26 relatives of victims. 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. (The nearby Sobibor extermination camp was named after the village. 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. But the trove of images, which was released by Niemanns descendants and will now join the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, undoubtedly holds significance beyond Demjanjuks case. The principal allegation was that three former prisoners identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, who operated the petrol engines sending gas to the death chamber. "I say it unhesitatingly, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. [125] The Government argued that the Court of Appeals has no jurisdiction to review the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which denied the stay. 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. 19 News is not saying where for fear it could become a lightning rod for protests or vandalism. [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. Demjanjuk became a US citizen in 1958. [44] Additionally, the former paymaster at Trawniki, Heinrich Schaefer, stated in a deposition that such cards were standard issue at Trawniki. When will the Demjanjuk case be put to rest? Because the Soviet Union generally refused to cooperate with the Israeli prosecutions, this IDcard was obtained from the USSR and provided to Israel by American industrialist Armand Hammer, a close associate of several Kremlin leaders, whose help had been requested by the personal appeal of Israeli president Shimon Peres. [76], On April18, 1988, the Jerusalem District Court found Demjanjuk "unhesitatingly and with utter conviction" guilty of all charges and being Ivan the Terrible. Born in Ukraine in 1920, Demjanjuk emigrated to the United States in 1952 and settled with his family in Cleveland. The photos, said Cueppers, are a quantum leap in the visual record on the Holocaust in occupied Poland.. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. [74] Asked by the prosecution if he recognized Demjanjuk, Rosenberg asked that the defendant remove his glasses "so I can see his eyes." [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. [159] As a consequence of his appeal not having been heard, Demjanjuk is still presumed innocent under German law. In 1988, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death. He was born in March 1920 in Dobovi Makharyntsi, a village in Vinnitsa Oblast of what was then Soviet Ukraine. 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. [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.