The Nazis Next Door (35 page)

Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-YAHN-yuk) was no one of any great significance to American prosecutors before the Israeli survivors picked him out of the photo lineup. His name had surfaced in a book about the Nazi camps and on a list of reputed guards prepared by a Ukrainian immigrant in New York. But those accounts placed him not at Treblinka, where nearly nine hundred thousand people were killed, but at Sobibor, as a faceless Nazi guard of no particular note. American authorities were not actively investigating him. He was just one more mug shot in a photo album filled with Ukrainian immigrants who, based on random leads, might or might not have ties to the Nazis.

With eyewitnesses identifying him as a particularly notorious Nazi, however, Demjanjuk was now a much bigger target. American prosecutors had reason to suspect that he was not just a cog in the machine, but one of its most sadistic operators. The more evidence they gathered, the more confident they became. In all, eighteen Treblinka survivors, in addition to a German worker at the camp, ultimately picked out Demjanjuk’s photo as the man they knew as Ivan the Terrible. Another key piece of evidence came from the Soviets: a Nazi identification card with Demjanjuk’s name on it, beneath what looked like a photograph of him as a young man. The card placed him at the camps at Trawniki and at Sobibor, not at Treblinka, but at the very least, it seemed to confirm that this Cleveland autoworker had been a card-carrying Nazi guard.

Then there was the name itself. Demjanjuk had changed his first name to John when he came to the United States. His given name, investigators learned, was Ivan. Some of the Treblinka witnesses remembered the brutal Treblinka guard’s real last name as “Marchenko”; indeed, an Ivan Marchenko was listed as a guard at Treblinka in a document provided by Polish authorities. The investigators learned that Demjanjuk, in filling out his visa application to come to America, had listed his mother’s maiden name. It was Marchenko.

To American authorities, the connections seemed too overwhelming to be written off as coincidence. Prosecutors at the Justice Department were convinced: John Demjanjuk and Ivan the Terrible were one and the same. “Prosecuting him, for all of us, became an obsession,”
one prosecutor said.

On August 26, 1977, the Justice Department brought charges in Cleveland against John Demjanjuk alleging that he was Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka and seeking to strip him of his citizenship for war crimes. That evening, Demjanjuk returned to his home in suburban Cleveland
and found a local newspaper reporter, Walt Bogdanich, waiting for him outside with a photographer. Demjanjuk’s daughters, one a teenager, the other in her midtwenties, were there too. Bogdanich asked to speak with Demjanjuk in private; this might not be easy for his children to hear, he explained. They could hear whatever he had to say, Demjanjuk insisted. Bogdanich told him that the Justice Department was trying to revoke his citizenship because of his reputed role as a Nazi guard at Treblinka. “I don’t know anything—what do you mean?” Demjanjuk asked in a voice of quiet alarm. Bogdanich began to explain what exactly the Justice Department was saying about him. His daughters were in tears as they listened to the reporter’s account. Their father was being labeled a Nazi—and not just any Nazi, but a particularly sadistic one known as Ivan the Terrible.

Demjanjuk finally interrupted the reporter. He had heard enough. “People say things. I don’t know anything,” he said. The photographer started to snap his picture. Demjanjuk stuck his hand out in front of the camera—striking the familiar pose of an accused man trying to avoid the spotlight.

The next day, desperate to clear his name, Demjanjuk agreed to speak with a Cleveland television crew at his home. He was a German prisoner of war, not a camp guard, he insisted in his fractured English. His wife, Vera, sitting next to him on the living room couch, broke in to declare his innocence as well. “Is not true!
Is not true! Is not true!” she screamed at the camera. Then she slumped silently against her husband’s shoulder. She had fainted. The interview was cut short and an ambulance was called.

Demjanjuk was suddenly big news, not just in Cleveland, but around the country. “Ohioan Is Called Nazi War Criminal,” read the headline in the
New York Times
.
Just as prosecutors were beginning to move more aggressively against suspected Nazis after decades of indifference, they now had in their sights a man of monstrous savagery who seemed to put a bald and bespectacled face on Nazi evil. If Adolf Eichmann was the brutally efficient architect of Hitler’s Final Solution, then Ivan the Terrible, living in Cleveland, Ohio, was the barbaric executioner, a sadist who corralled women and children in the gas chamber, beating and torturing them as they went.

With Demjanjuk’s visibility now so high, prosecutors faced intense political pressures not to repeat the kind of legal missteps that had riddled Nazi prosecutions for years. On the House immigration committee, Congressman Joshua Eilberg made clear that he wanted the Justice Department to throw everything it had at deporting Demjanjuk. “We cannot afford the risk
of losing another decision,” he wrote to the attorney general regarding Demjanjuk.

With the Justice Department’s aggressive new Nazi office grabbing hold of the case, prosecutors were confident that there would be no slip-ups. Allan Ryan, for his part, had no doubts. As the case moved toward a trial in 1980, he laid Demjanjuk’s Nazi identification card side by side with the photo a decade later from Demjanjuk’s U.S. visa application. The similarities were striking. Beyond the photos, prosecutors had eyewitnesses—Holocaust survivors—who were ready to place Demjanjuk at Treblinka, running the gas chamber where hundreds of thousands were killed. They would no doubt make sympathetic witnesses. The case appeared airtight.

You son of a bitch
,
Ryan thought to himself as he studied the photos.
We’ve got you.

But doubts about the case were already beginning to emerge, even within the Justice Department.

One of the prosecutors on the case, George Parker, couldn’t get past one nagging question: How could Demjanjuk have been in two places at once? The Nazi identification card from the Soviets showed Demjanjuk as a nondescript, rank-and-file guard at Sobibor beginning in 1942, but the eyewitness accounts from the survivors identifying him as Ivan the Terrible placed him about a hundred miles away at Treblinka during essentially that same time period. One or the other could be true, Parker believed, but not both. “Demjanjuk could not have been Ivan the Terrible
at Treblinka as well as the Demjanjuk known to [another witness] at Sobibor,” he wrote to his bosses,
Ryan and Rockler, in a long memo.

Parker had “gnawing doubts” about the veracity of the case against Demjanjuk and about the ethical cloud hovering over prosecutors if they moved ahead anyway, he wrote. No one doubted the sincerity of the Israeli survivors in picking out Demjanjuk’s photo, but they were being asked to remember traumatic events nearly forty years earlier, and eyewitnesses to Nazi crimes had been wrong before. Parker believed that Demjanjuk probably
was
a Nazi guard at a death camp—just not the infamous guard the prosecutors thought he was, and not at the same camp where they thought he worked. In a line that would prove prophetic, Parker warned his supervisors that “we may have the right man for the wrong act.”

Parker proposed “radical surgery” to salvage the prosecution. Instead, the Justice Department went ahead with the case largely unchanged, tinkering with a few elements but holding steady on the central claim that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. Parker quit the Justice Department in frustration. He was now convinced that Demjanjuk was not the larger-than-life murderer that the Justice Department thought he was, and he did not want to put his own legal career at risk.

A year later, Demjanjuk went on trial in Cleveland. Five survivors from Treblinka were flown in from Israel to testify. One of them was Eliyahu Rosenberg, the man who had first identified Demjanjuk’s photo for the war crimes investigators at his warehouse outside Tel Aviv four years earlier.

Testifying in Hebrew through a translator, Rosenberg explained to the dead-quiet courtroom how he was forced to watch Ivan’s savagery every day. The Nazis had stationed Rosenberg outside the gas chamber to remove the corpses of the victims once Ivan was done with them, he said. Ivan would always have a weapon of some sort as he and his partner, Nikolai, herded prisoners into the gas chamber, Rosenberg testified. “He had a pipe, a sword, a whip,
and he tortured the victims with this before they entered the gas chambers, especially the women. He cut pieces between their legs. I saw this with my very eyes.” Such acts of brutality, he said, “happened every day.”

Rosenberg couldn’t go on. He broke into sobs,
with his head bowed and his body shaking as he sat silently on the witness stand. The memory of that place was too much for him. After a minute, he lifted his head, took a deep breath, and somehow kept going. The prosecutor showed him a batch of photographs and asked if he recognized the accused. Just as he had done four years earlier in Tel Aviv, he picked out one man from the group and identified him as “Iwan,” the Ukrainian derivation of “Ivan.” “Iwan was there, younger, he was thinner, the way he was in Treblinka,” Rosenberg said, pointing to the photo. It was John Demjanjuk’s visa photo from 1951. Rosenberg was shown a second batch of photos and picked out one of the men as Ivan. It was Demjanjuk’s Nazi identification card
from 1942. He was certain: it was Ivan.

Four months later, a judge stripped Demjanjuk of his citizenship, concluding that he had concealed his service with the Nazis when he came to America three decades earlier.

But there was still the task of deporting Demjanjuk and finding a country that would take him. Earlier cases had taught prosecutors a painful lesson: as difficult as it was to take away suspected Nazis’ citizenship, it was only half the battle. Finding someplace to send them—preferably someplace that would try them for war crimes—took years. Many convicted Nazis died in America, stripped of their U.S. citizenship, before authorities could find a willing state to take them in. The Germans, despite their historic complicity, had made clear that they had no interest in accepting deported Nazis back on their soil. As one German official asked Allan Ryan ruefully, “Who would want to take back
America’s Nazi war criminals?”

Ironically, the Israelis hadn’t been terribly helpful either. Israel had not put any Nazi suspects on trial in two decades, since Eichmann’s stunning capture in 1960 and the historic trial that followed, and it had never been willing to seek the extradition of a Nazi suspect in America. Some Israeli law enforcement officials
believed that holding war crimes trials for lesser Nazis would dilute the impact of the Eichmann trial as a seminal moment in history. But there were signs of a thaw. Younger generations had forgotten the Holocaust, the new thinking went, and another major trial was needed to galvanize world attention.

In early 1982, just months after Demjanjuk was stripped of his American citizenship, Neal Sher, Eli Rosenbaum, and a third Justice Department prosecutor traveled to Jerusalem to talk with their Israeli counterparts about extraditing Nazi war criminals. The Israelis were willing, for the first time, to consider putting an American Nazi on trial. That would be a huge step. But they would not accept just anyone. If the Israelis were going to stage their first Nazi war crimes trial since Eichmann, they wanted to make a bold statement. They wanted someone who would be representative of the horrors of the Holocaust. It had to be a Nazi perpetrator who was accused of personally murdering Jews, and it had to be someone who would have to sit face to face in a courtroom with a Holocaust survivor in Israel testifying to his crimes, the Israelis told their American visitors. Some might call it a show trial. The Israelis called it justice.

Sher went over the American “candidates” with the Israelis. Colonel Menachem Russek of the Israeli national police, a Holocaust survivor himself, mulled over the Americans’ list of the accused. Finally, Russek settled on the one from Treblinka. “I think this fellow Demjanjuk
would be a proper case,” he said. After two decades, the Israelis were finally ready to put another Nazi on trial for war crimes, and they wanted Ivan the Terrible.

Demjanjuk’s lawyers in Cleveland tried to block his extradition. One of the appeals court judges who had to consider whether to send Demjanjuk to Israel was Judge Gilbert S. Merritt, in Tennessee. The judge was troubled by the case. He thought the evidence was weak; it relied largely on eyewitness testimony from Treblinka survivors who picked out Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. Could those eyewitness accounts really be reliable? “We know that eyewitness testimony,
even when it’s immediate, is very suspect,” he said to one of his clerks as he debated what to do. “And this was years ago.” Judge Merritt wanted his clerk to do more research: Were there grounds to block the extradition? The answer came back no. The appeals court didn’t have much discretion in a case like this, Merritt concluded. Grudgingly, he voted to uphold Demjanjuk’s extradition. He would come to regret that decision perhaps more than any he ever made on the bench.

Demjanjuk was sent to Israel and jailed almost immediately. His eleven-month trial in Jerusalem was largely a redux of his trial in Ohio, but on an even bigger stage, with Israeli prosecutors and Holocaust survivors reliving the horrors of Treblinka and painting a picture of a brute of a man named Ivan with no regard for human life. Just as he had done in Cleveland, Eliyahu Rosenberg, the sixty-five-year-old Treblinka survivor, testified against Demjanjuk, and again he was asked if he could identify the man he remembered as Ivan the Terrible. This time he was looking not at a photo album, but at the accused himself, an elderly man sitting in the courtroom before him. Rosenberg walked toward Demjanjuk; he wanted to look into his eyes, he said. Demjanjuk removed his eyeglasses and reached out as if to shake hands with Rosenberg. “Shalom,” a smiling Demjanjuk said in Hebrew. Rosenberg recoiled. “Ivan!” he shouted to a stunned courtroom. “I have no shadow of a hesitation or a doubt. It is Ivan from Treblinka, from the gas chambers—the man that I am looking at this very moment. I saw the eyes, the murderous eyes and the face. And how dare you give me a hand,
you murderer!”