Demjanjuk Convicted — By the KGB
“John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders,” ran the headline on the BBC. The lede began:
“A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland.”
Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: “No evidence was produced that he committed a specific crime.”
That is correct. No evidence was produced, no witness came forward to testify he ever saw Demjanjuk injure anyone. And the critical evidence that put Demjanjuk at Sobibor came — from the KGB.
First was a KGB summary of an alleged interview with one Ignat Danilchenko, who claimed he was a guard at Sobibor and knew Demjanjuk. Second was the Soviet-supplied ID card from the Trawniki camp that trained guards.
There are major problems with both pieces of “evidence.”
First, Danilchenko has been dead for a quarter of a century, no one in the West ever interviewed him, and Moscow stonewalled defense requests for access to the full Danilchenko file. His very existence raises a question.
How could a Red Army soldier who turned collaborator and Nazi camp guard survive Operation Keelhaul, which sent all Soviet POWs back to Joseph Stalin, where they were either murdered or sent to the Gulag?
As for the ID card from Trawniki, just last month there was unearthed at the National Archives in College Park, Md., a 1985 report from the Cleveland office of the FBI, which, after studying the card, concluded it was “quite likely” a KGB forgery.
“Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB.”
This FBI report, never made public, was done just as Demjanjuk was being deported to Israel to stand trial as “Ivan the Terrible,” the murderer of Treblinka. In a sensational trial covered by the world’s press, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to hang.
But after five years on death row, new evidence turned up when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia opened up. That evidence wholly validated the claims of Demjanjuk’s defenders.
Not only had Demjanjuk never even been at Treblinka, the Soviet files contained a photograph of the real “Ivan” — a larger and older man.
To its eternal credit, the Israeli Supreme Court reversed the conviction, rejected a request to retry Demjanjuk as a camp guard elsewhere in Poland, freed him and sent him home to America.
Exposed as a laughing stock, and denounced for fraud by Ohio district and appellate courts, the Office of Special Investigations began crafting a new case, John Demjanjuk of Sobibor, to deport and try again the old man whose defense attorneys had made fools of them.
Thus the Sobibor story and Demjanjuk’s supposed complicity in the murder of 28,000 Jews — though, as the BBC notes, no one testified at the trial that they ever saw John Demjanjuk injure anyone.
Consider the life this tormented American has lived.
Born in Ukraine in 1920, as a boy he endured the Holodomor — the famine imposed on his people in 1932 and 1933 by Stalin and his hated henchman Lazar Kaganovich, which resulted in the starvation and death of somewhere between 5 million and 9 million Ukrainians.
It has been called by historians the “forgotten Holocaust.”
Conscripted into the Red Army, Demjanjuk was captured in the German blitzkrieg. Unlike American and British POWs, whom Germans regarded as racial equals, Ukrainians were untermensch who could be used for medical experiments.
Not only did Demjanjuk survive, he managed to evade the Allied order, under Keelhaul, for all Red Army POWs to be repatriated to Stalin, which was the Soviet dictator’s demand before he would return the U.S. and British POWs his troops liberated in the march to Berlin.
In the war’s aftermath, Demjanjuk married his wife Vera, who had been conscripted in the Ukraine and brought forcibly west to work in the German economy.
Thence he moved to Cleveland, became an autoworker, raised a family and practiced his Christian faith. But he made a mistake.
He sent his wife to Ukraine to tell his aged mother that he had survived the war and was living in the great United States of America.
Word got around the village. The KGB came calling. Swiftly, the payments his mother had been receiving for her war hero son were halted, and suddenly, there turned up an ID card that said John Demjanjuk had been trained at Trawniki to be a Nazi camp guard.
The KGB began feeding OSI from its “files,” as OSI began a manic persecution of Demjanjuk that has lasted 30 years.
Stalin died in bed in 1953. Kaganovich died with his family around him in Moscow in 1991. And John Demjanjuk, 91, after spending five years on death row for a crime he did not commit in a place he never was, is stateless and homeless in a Germany where veterans of the SS walk free.
That is justice — in our world.
A very brave column.
I remember you took a lot of heat for your brave defense of Demjanjuk in the earlier case when he was falsely charged with being “Ivan the Terrible,” and you were ultimately proven right. You deserve a lot of credit for standing up for an innocent man then, Pat. It appears that the most recent conviction may be just as shaky as the first.
Not just veterans of the SS, but veterans of Ordnungspolizei walk free, which is worse.
If this is true it is very preposterous. Germans convicting a Ukrainian veteran of the Red Army who survived their murderous POW camps and married a woman that was victim of their slave labour programme.
Sounds like Germany clearing its name at the expense of its victim.
The Soviet Gulag preceded the Nazi concentration camp system by over a decade. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin showed Hitler how to structure and administer a totalitarian terror state. In sheer quantity, Communism’s tens of millions easily exceed Hitler’s mere millions. Stalin, who eclipsed Hitler as a butcher, was himself eclipsed by Mao, the reigning champion.
Yet as Pat says, thousands of Lazar Kaganoviches are still alive, still burrowed into government bureaucracies in Russia and Eastern Europe, or living quietly – or not so quietly – in Canada, Switzerland, even in Israel and New York City. Americans are lectured on their own history and poltical system by the children of Trotskyites and Stalinists – some reformed, some not. The children of Chinese Communist butchers now own the slave-labor industries that put millions of Americans out of work.
But it’s all OK, because the Germans finally convicted that bastard John Demjanjuk.
A very misleading column. The real question is whether the evidence that Demjanjuk was at Sobibor was credible. Buchanan basically ignored one whole side of the case. He didn’t refute it – he just ignored it.
Buchanan’s description of the Israeli Supreme Court decision is about as dishonest as it could be without technically being a lie. As I remember, the Supreme Court did accept the expert testimony that the documents showing Demjanjuk was a guard – which were submitted by the defense to show he wasn’t at Treblinka – were genuine. In any case, the Supreme Court ruled that there was persuasive evidence that Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor (from a summary: “The facts proved the appellant’s participation in the extermination process, the Court noted…”.) In their decision, the judges often pointedly referred to the defendant as “Wachman Demjanjuk,” the title of a camp guard. However, he was acquitted because he was clearly not “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka and because it would have been unreasonable (though legal) to switch the charges in the middle of such a long trial from Treblinka to Sobibor. Of course the Supreme Court judges may have been mistaken about the evidence, but they clearly believed that the person they were acquitting was a mass murderer. Buchanan mentions none of this, implying in his next sentence that the Sobibor charge was invented by the Americans, when in fact it was already part of the Israeli Supreme Court ruling which Buchanan himself praises.
This whole controversy is a question of fact, not of morality. If Demjanjuk is guilty, then he deserves punishment far, far worse than what he’s gotten. If he’s innocent, then he is the victim of a terrible injustice. The way to answer the question is to examine all the evidence carefully and completely. I haven’t done that, and neither has Pat Buchanan, and neither have most of the people commenting here. You just pick one side or the other to root for, like picking a football team in the Superbowl.
The German court released Demjanjuk to care in a nursing home pending his appeal. I suspect given Demjanjuk’s advanced age, the appeal will drag on for the rest of his life. It’s not justice, but at 91, it’s an approximation. I hope it’s a decent home.
My old hometown of Princeton is full of Russians now and I can’t help wondering what they were up to in the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s. Ditto NYC.
@Aaron –
You want facts? How about the fact that prosecution witness Alex Nagorny, the only eye-witness to testify at the Munich trial, pointed to the defendant and said, “That’s definitely not him [i.e., not the fellow guard he remembered from Sobibor] – no resemblance.” The prosecution presented no other witness who could testify that they saw the defendant commit any of the crimes of which he was accused, or even testify from personal experience that the defendant was even there at the camp. Buchanan is absolutely correct; this trial was a farce.
Aaron, could you clarify a bit, and maybe because you seem to know this thing a bit double-check what you concede to be your memory on what I at least found important?
That is, did Demjanjuk himself at his trial in Israel indeed admit that he was indeed a guard at Sobibor? I.e., that which he has now been convicted of in Germany?
Or did he perhaps just argue in Israel that one could as well believe the KGB supplied evidence that he was at Sobibor as much as one could believe the KGB supplied evidence that he was Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka? (Thereby explaining why he might have produced the Sobibor evidence in Israel while still denying its veracity.)
I seem to recall him early on saying he had never been nothing, but then also him later vaguely but significantly admitting he had served the Nazis in some capacity, but I might be totally wrong on this. In any event if he did indeed admit he was a guard at Sobibor, well then it seems to me the complainers are “just” arguing the smartness of the German law here, not whether Demjanjuk was guilty of being a violator of same.
Gotta say the Wiki page on him is lots confusing.
PJB is right that the persecution of Demjanjuk has been a farce and a disgrace from the start. The whole idea of treating the losing side in a war or revolution as criminals got its start with the Nuremburg trials and has continued since. Ousted Communists are exempt unless they happen to be Serb.
Thank you Pat.
Interesting:
Reading the Wikipedia page on Demjanjuk more closely I think Buchanan missed the mark in one respect, with that seeming to me at least being very important indeed.
I.e., not associated with the KGB at all it seems that in 2009 a German agency found that Demjanjuk had applied after the war for the status of being a displaced person. And, contrary to his present story of where he was, he said then right after the war that on a certain important date he had not been in the Soviet Union.
Now, there’s a good reason why *anyone* at the time would have said that: If he said he *had* been in the SU on that date he would have been returned to the SU’s tender mercies. So he had lots of good reasons to lie.
*But* … where did he say he had been? Why … rather amazingly, at Sobibor.
So why did he say that, he was asked?
Oh well, he essentially said, he had no idea what to put down and another applicant there had … an atlas … and suggested he put down Sobibor because many Soviets had been there so he did.
Now … come on folks. Just what degree of coincidence can one accept? He just *happened* to put down Sobibor and that was false, long long before anyone said it was incriminating that he had been there?
And that “atlas” story ….
I don’t know, I haven’t immersed myself in the details for sure, but just from this alone, it smells like very bad fish.
Moreover, one gets lots of sense that people who seem to be on Demjanjuk’s “side” in this intertwine their “defenses” of him with their more real (but not to say invalid) objections to making criminal what he’s been charged with/how he has been handled as opposed to others and etc.
“If Demjanjuk is guilty, then he deserves punishment far, far worse than what he’s gotten.”
Wrong. This whole prosecution, and the actions of the US ‘Office of Special Investigations’, reeks of ethnic vendetta.
The man was, at worse, an unwilling actor who was caught up in events over which he had no control. He came from a country which, during his formative years, had experienced totalitarian brutality on a scale comparable to that of the Nazis. It is quite unreasonable to expect a 19-20 year old POW brought up in those conditions to essentially submit himself to a slow death rather than be a guard at a KZ Lager. He gave no orders, nor has any evidence been presented he even killed anyone. Perhaps if, just after the war, his activities had been discovered he might, might have deserved a few years in prison. But to pursue a man in his late 60s, for 35 plus years, for failing to be saintlike in a time of world-historical turmoil is unjust.
But of course we are talking more about ethnic solidarity than justice.
This is an outstanding piece of investigative journalism by Mr. Patrick J. Buchanan.
Unfortunately, the New York Times or the Washington Post does not produce this type of work often or if at all.
To give a clarification that was asked for: I don’t think Demjanjuk ever told the Israeli Supreme Court that he’d been at Sobibor. It was reported at the time (this is from memory) that the defense itself presented a document during the trial which apparently identified him as a guard at Sobibor during the time that he’d allegedly been at Treblinka. The judges carefully asked the defense attorney if he really wanted to submit that evidence – basically asking, do you really know what you’re doing and are you sure you want to do this? The defense said, yes. In retrospect that was a good decision, because the court decided not to prosecute Demjanjuk on a Sobibor charge. But I don’t think that Demjanjuk actually claimed during the trial to have been at Sobibor; his attorney just submitted the document as evidence.
On the argument that the punishment is unjust even if Demjanjuk really is guilty: reportedly, that’s similar to what his attorney said during the latest trial in Germany. He told the court that even if his client did do the things he was charged with, he had been a POW of the Germans and so he was under duress. “Even if” sounds to me like a tacit admission that your case is weak, or maybe it just indicates that Demjanjuk had a bad attorney. Anyway, I agree that you can argue over the morality of the punishment given the assumption that Demjanjuk really was a guard at an extermination camp. But that argument isn’t being made by Buchanan or, as far as I know, by any of Demjanjuk’s other defenders.
I read in some news release that he had been a member of Vlasov’s Army. If true, his membership would account for the Soviet and Russian willingness to lie and fabricate.
“Unfortunately, the New York Times or the Washington Post does not produce this type of work often or if at all.”
Actually, the NY Tmes had a pretty extensive article on Demjanjuk’s conviction in yesterday’s paper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/world/europe/13nazi.html?scp=2&sq=John%20demjanjuk%20&st=cse
The article touch on the two main points made by Pat, the dispute over whether he was at Sobridor and the fact that he was convicted merely because he was a guard at Sobridor:
“
(Sorry about the prior post which got accidentally posted before it was finished.)
The Times article stated:
“Mr. Demjanjuk’s defense lawyers argued that an SS identity card and other documents were falsified by the Soviets. But Judge Alt said there was a clear trail of documents and testimony that demonstrated Mr. Demjanjuk’s path from Soviet prisoner of war to Sobibor guard.”
and
“In an e-mail, Mr. Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said that “there remains not a scintilla of evidence he ever hurt a single person anywhere.”
“While some may take satisfaction from this event,” he wrote, “this verdict is no more definitive today than the wrongful Israeli conviction and death sentence was previously.”
But Judge Alt said that it was impossible for anyone to have worked at Sobibor and not be part of the Nazi death machinery. Every one of the guards “knew he was part of an organization with no other purpose but mass murder,” the judge said.”
The article further notes that “The two years he has spent in jail will be credited to his sentence” of five years. I wonder why he does not receive credit for the 5+years he was in custody being falsely accused of being “Ivan the Terrible”?
With regard to the very important point that Demjanjuk was convicted simply for :being there,” Iwould note that only one Southerner was convicted for a war crime after our Civil War, the commander of the Confederate prisoner of war camp Andersonville in Georgia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andersonville_National_Historic_Site He was hanged for his crime, but no other Conferates who served as guards at the camp were tried or convicted.
Hey, I’m just amazed that the traitor Jon Pollard is still in jail.
“Just what degree of coincidence can one accept? He just *happened* to put down Sobibor and that was false, long long before anyone said it was incriminating that he had been there?”
Excuse me, but the man was charged with murder; to believe that he is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, which is the standard for reasonable people, one doesn’t have to believe that Demjanjuk’s story is *likely* — one merely has to accept that it is *possible,* which of course it is. On the basis of presumption of innocence, it’s the prosecution’s job to *prove* it didn’t happen as Demjanjuk as claimed, which of course the prosecution didn’t.
And as to whether I or other reasonable people, without a blood agenda against the man, would believe his story — versus the account from a prosecution which revealed its bias from the beginning through grievous prosecutorial misconduct, including the concealment of exculpatory evidence on the part of the OSI, and a case in the trial in Munich which depended solely upon “evidence” provided by a Soviet agency which has a long history of fabricating evidence, and which evidence, fabricated or not, contradicts itself, as the documentary witness against Demjanjuk originally testified that he had served with him in Sobibor a year after the camp had ceased operations, and which “evidence” was contradicted by the only living eye-witness to Demjanjuk having been at Sobibor, who testified in Munich that the defendant in court was *not* the man he had known at Sobibor…
Would I accept Demjanjuk’s account of events as being *credible* versus the mess provided by the prosecution? In a heartbeat. No reasonable person wouldn’t. But of course, as others have pointed out, we’re not talking about reasonableness here, and guilt proven beyond a shadow of a doubt — we’re talking about blood lust.
They were running out of camps in which to try and frame him for involvement. By releasing him pending his appeal, despite having “convicted” him of a ludicrous number of crimes, even the court itself has effectively admitted that it does not believe its own verdict but was only doing what was required of it politically. In which case, it must be said that it lacks the undeniable courage of the Israeli Supreme Court.
All the way back in 1969, when (indeed, precisely because) many senior and numerous middle-ranking Nazis were still alive, the Germans granted themselves a general amnesty. That is why they now feel the need to track down any poor Slavic squaddie in his extreme old age in order to “try” him, far beyond absurdity, as an accessory to twenty-eight thousand murders, none of them committed in Germany, a country of which he has never been either a citizen or a resident.
Over here, we should take note. To assuage much the same guilt, some poor British squaddie may very well be made to pay for the letting off the hook of every American who really mattered in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
If 91-year-old John Demjanjuk must stand trial in Germany, where his highly disputable alleged offenses did not occur, then why doesn’t 90-year-old Warren Anderson have to stand trial in India, where his indisputable offenses did occur?
Responding to my post K.W. Jeter wrote:
“to believe that he is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, which is the standard for reasonable people…”
Whoa whoa whoa, K.W.: That might be *your* standard for reasonable people but it isn’t the standard in the U.S. for one. Just to be clear, it’s “guilty beyond a *reasonable* doubt.”
“one doesn’t have to believe that Demjanjuk’s story is *likely* — one merely has to accept that it is *possible,*”
Again, most emphatically not in the U.S.at least; that’s just not the standard, K.W. Nor can I imagine any country having that standard and instructing its juries that that if they merely find an accused’s story “possible” that it must acquit them. My goodness, think of what that would mean!
Look, I again will shout from the rooftop that I have only casually followed this business over the years and only just yesterday peeked into it further in response to Buchanan’s post and Aaron’s comment. And I’ll shout further that you’re damn right the U.S. government has behaved atrociously and even tyrannically in it: Hell that Wikipedia page even recounts that Demjanjuk was found to be the victim of a fraud on the court by our government.
And I’ll further shout that the I think there’s all kinds of moral and intellectual and other problems in terms of the laws involved here as well, not to mention the politics. That, for instance, this can seem to be nothing but “winners justice.” That Germany can be seen as trying to expiate its guilt by doing this kind of thing. That it’s disgusting to have these laws about Nazis but to then see the NY Times upon the fall of the Soviet Union prate about how wrong it would be to prosecute commies for their mass crimes. That it’s hypocritical of Israel to pursue and urge others to pursue these ex-Nazis like mad but then, as they have, refuse for example to return to Poland some jewish communist thug who tortured people there. And on and on.
But, just as a point of apparent fact (“apparent” because I’ll also concede that maybe Wikipedia’s page on this is just flat wrong too), I’ll still say it’s a gob-smacking thing that decades before Demjanjuk was accused of it, per utter non-KGB evidence that he anyway *agreed* was genuine, he just happened to have said he was at Sobibor, and has now said that it was a lie due to him having to pick some non-Soviet place to have been.
Or, in other words, that via some one-in-a-googolplex coincidence, it just so happens that back then, of all the non-Soviet places on the globe to pick, he just happened to write down “Sobibor.”
(Moreover I’d also note that my quick reading on this seems to note that both the Israeli court—who one can hardly fault given it wouldn’t even let him be tried again for same—and the German court, and I believe American courts too, have all said that Demjanjuk has given absolutely no good account of where he was during the time in question. Hard to believe there’s that many corrupt judges.)
I’d also say that I’ll shout from a rooftop that none of this is definitive and of *course* one would have to sit and listen to all the evidence before saying one was reasonably certain of whether he’s guilty or innocent of being in Sobibor. *But that goes too for those saying he’s innocent.* And thus, just from that same remove, again I just find his apparent “coincidence” story mind-bogglingly suspect.
Seems to me very likely that this is one of those matters where, while the upholders of a justice system—us—can have grave misgivings about how the process of “justice” has gone—and indeed can even feel the process went severely procedurally wrong—that nonetheless the accused is in the least valid place to criticize same due to probably being guilty of the substantive charge anyway.
I’d temper that here a bit though by saying I think Demjanjuk might be in his bind via some … possibly “reasonably understandable” way. That is, he was at Sobibor as he said, (and he had an SS tattoo given to its helpers), but when accused of same instead of just admitting it but arguing that he was just a helper and harmed no-one himself directly and was essentially forced into his position, he lied.
And now he’s forfeited his ability to argue his stronger point that the substantive law still punishing such people (if indeed he never harmed anyone “directly”) is wrong and hypocritical and etc.
Has the OSI ever proceeded to denaturalize and deport a Communist? I wonder.
@TomB –
Oh, I see; you would convict a man of *murder,* because you find his story unlikely, and you choose to disregard all the evidence — including eye-witness evidence — that he is innocent. You’re right; you and I *do* have different standards. Yours are despicable; mine are reasonable.
“the accused is in the least valid place to criticize [the case being prosecuted in a "procedurally wrong" (sic) way] due to probably being guilty of the substantive charge anyway.”
Wrong; not only is the original burden of proof on the prosecution (which they failed to carry), but in cases of prosecutorial misconduct — which obviously was the case here; the OSI concealed exculpatory evidence that was in its possession — the only reasonable standard is to throw the whole matter out of court, and for the court to sanction the prosecutors. Otherwise, you’re arguing that the prosecution should be allowed to violate the accused’s rights however they wish, and when caught doing so, be excused by saying, “Oh well, the guy’s probably guilty, anyway.” Even in cases without the sort of refuting evidence as was presented in Demjanjuk’s case, that’s obviously that simply opens the door to continued prosecutorial misconduct. “Go ahead and give it a shot, witch-hunters; after all, the targets of your persecution are probably guilty, anyway.” As I said, despicable.
Also, let’s not get carried away with this notion that the only reason the Israeli court over Demjanjuk’s previous conviction is that JD’s defense maintained that he couldn’t have been at Treblinka because he was busy manning the gas chambers at Sobibor. There was plenty of other exculpatory evidence presented, including more that the OSI had attempted to conceal — namely a hundred pages of documents that the American Embassy in Moscow had received from the Soviets in regard to the case of Feodor Fedorenko, which contained unequivocal data that John Demanjuk couldn’t have been the “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka, which he had been accused of being, because another man named Ivan Marchenko was the so-called “Ivan the Terrible.” If the Israeli court let JD go free on the basis of the OSI’s *claimed* — not proven — evidence that JD had been at Sobibor instead, do you really believe that JD and his defenders would have said, “No, go ahead and hang him; we’ll only accept complete exoneration based on the uncontested evidence that he had never been at Treblinka, which doesn’t involve any claimed — not proven — evidence that he had been at Sobibor instead.” He was being freed and allowed to go home to America; if that was done on the basis of the Israeli court, for its own reasons, claiming — not proving — that they were doing it because he had been at Sobibor instead of Treblinka, why would JD and its defenders turn it down? And of course, the Israeli court couldn’t even attempt to prove that JD had been at Sobibor rather than Treblinka, because he hadn’t been charged with being at Sobibor, so that was a matter that wasn’t even up before the court.
K.W.: As regards most of your latest post responding to mine because I think it just so clearly misreads me and otherwise mangles things out of haste that I’m content to just refer you back to what I wrote previously.
As to a few other things you wrote however I think a thing or two might additionally be stated:
For instance, while the OSI most certainly concealed exculpatory evidence with Demjanjuk in the case that stripped him of his citizenship because he allegedly was “Ivan the Terrible,” when that concealment was found and later proven the same court forthrightly restored his citizenship.
However, it was in the *different,* later case that Demjanjuk’s citizenship was stripped again—by Judge Matia, the same judge as before, who sits in Demjanjuk’s jurisdiction—on the grounds that Demjanjuk had indeed been at the training camp at Trawniki and went on to serve at other camps such as Sobibor.
And this is what the entire Sixth Circuit said in upholding that decision: “the district court found that the Government has proven by clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence that Defendant assisted in the persecution of civilian populations during World War II, based on evidence that the Trawniki service pass was an authentic German wartime document…”
Note then: Not just an entirely different case, but a finding based not on any eyewitness testimony but instead on documentary evidence.
(Here’s the link:
http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/04a0125p-06.pdf)
Moreover, while so much of your defense of Demjanjuk is based on that admittedly despicable withholding of exculpatory evidence by the OSI in that one case, I think this overlooks all of what many many *judges* have said in all the other cases about all the other exculpatory evidence Demjanjuk *did* have, and all the other inculpatory evidence that existed.
For instance, in stripping Demjanjuk of his citizenship due to having been at Trawniki/Sobibor Judge Matia noted that he had not produced any credible evidence whatsoever of his whereabouts otherwise during the war. (And again Judge Matia was upheld by all the judges on the Sixth Circuit.) Similarly, with the evidence it had a bunch of Israeli judges found that Demjanjuk had probably been at Sobibor, and now of course we have some German judge or judges having found that to be the case.
… all I believe after that wrongfully repressed exculpatory evidence was revealed.
… and again, with Demjanjuk *himself*—before he knew it was a bad thing—openly asserting that he had indeed been at Sobibor.
As I said there’s lots to criticize in the laws here but it’s a separate question as to whether Demjanjuk was innocent of them, and I think it’s a poor choice to try to assault the former by relying on the latter.
I find your blithe indifference to prosecutorial misconduct appalling. By your standards, the prosecution can have as many bites at the apple as it wishes, with no deterrence of its ability to persecute an individual, until it finally gets the verdict it wishes — at which point, you are apparently content to accept their crowing, “See? We told you he was guilty!”
I realize that I am somewhat at an advantage at judging the fairness of Demjanjuk’s continuing prosecution, as I’m one of the few individuals in the US to possess a copy of Yoram Sheftel’s DEFENDING IVAN THE TERRIBLE (the original Gollancz edition), which is his account of his defense of Demjanjuk in the Israeli court. Per Sheftel’s account — which is not disputed, AFAIK — there were plenty of other valid reasons for overturning Demjanjuk’s conviction, other than the allegation — not “proof” — that he had been at Sobibor rather than Treblinka. Once the documents were revealed that the OSI had attempted — illegally — to conceal, the prosecution’s case fell apart, and Demjanjuk walked. As you yourself say above, the Israeli judges found that Demjanjuk had “probably” been at Sobibor — excuse me, but “probably” doesn’t equal “beyond a reasonable doubt;” would you care to be sentenced for murder because a judge thought you “probably” did it? If the Israeli judges let Demjanjuk go based on the documents that the OSI had attempted to conceal, that was no more than their justification for doing so; per Sheftel’s authoritative account, there were plenty of other reasons the sentence against Demjanjuk had become embarrassing to the Israeli court. So for you to claim, “Oh yeah, and the Israeli judges said he was probably at Sobibor as well,” as further justification for your accepting the kangaroo-court verdict in Munich — frankly, that’s despicable as well.
As for claiming, “Oh yeah, and now we have a German judge saying that Demjanjuk had been at Sobibor, so he must be guilty” — sure, that’s a German judge making that verdict by disregarding the only eye-witness as to Demjanjuk’s presence at Sobibor, who testified *in court* that the defendant was not the man he had known at Sobibor. The German judge also disregarded all the contradictions in the dead man’s testimony, graciously provided by the oh-so-honest KGB, which somehow placed Demjanjuk at Sobibor a year after the camp ceased operations. And you can somehow claim without blushing that Demjanjuk’s guilt was proved beyond a reasonable doubt? Disgusting.
As to the Sixth Court stripping Demjanjuk of his citizenship, setting him up to be sent to the kangaroo court in Munich — would that have happened if there hadn’t been other exculpatory evidence concealed by the OSI, including the FBI’s doubts about the authenticity of the Trawniki ID card which supposedly placed Demjanjuk at Sobibor? Sure, maybe — but we don’t know that. All we know is that there was not an incident of concealing evidence on the part of Demjanjuk’s persecutors, there was a continued *history* of their doing so — which to any reasonable person, impeaches *all* of the evidence provided by these people. That is why prosecutorial misconduct, as happened over and over in Demjanjuk’s case, is considered so heinous by reasonable people. If nothing else, it should raise the bar for the prosecution far above the standard of “Oh well, he was *probably* there; let’s hang him,” which you find sufficient.
Some thoughts on all of the above.
Perhaps we should have been more carefull about whom we let into our country. Then neither Demjanjuk or Eli Rosenbaum (head of OSI) would be here to re-enact WWII at taxpayer expense.
Perhaps creating an organ of US Government committed just to pursue the grievances of one particular ethnic group is not a good idea.
Perhaps accepting evidence from one genocidal organization to convict an American Citizen of having once belonged to another genocidal organization is a bit much.
Perhaps our government could denaturalizing and deporting Mexican, Russian and other gangsters, just for a change of pace.
Perhaps consolodating OSI with the Domestic Security Section of Justice is doubling down on a bad idea, considering DSS’s bungling of the Ted Stevens case via extreme prosecutorial misconduct.
Demjanjuk obviously appears to have been the victim of selective prosecution. Rachel Corrie on the other hand was run over by a Israeli driven Caterpillar Tractor. Corrie was trying to stop a home from being demolished. A horrific crime yet the driver was given no punishment and the US Govt did nothing.
People, children being killed by snipers on and off with shots to the head in Gaza. Protestors being killed Sunday never are there legal repercussions for the killers. Pat once again you take on what others fear to.
On today’s op-ed page, Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt opens her opinion piece with the following sentence:
“LAST week a German court in Munich found John Demjanjuk guilty of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder, one for each of the Jews exterminated during the six months that he worked as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/opinion/17Lipstadt.html?ref=opinion
This underscores the most important point (in my opinion) that Pat made in his post, not whether Demjanjuk was at Sobridor, but that he was convicted merely for “being there” without any evidence or testimony tying him to specific crimes. The fact that he was deemed an accessory to the murder of everyone put to death at Sobridor highlights the tenuous nature of his conviction.
Lipstadt goes on to make two other statements which indicate the highly emotional nature of Demjanjuk’s trial:
“The Demjanjuk case matters, above all, because there was never much doubt that he had been a vicious prison guard under the Nazis.” and
“At the Demjanjuk trial we heard from the victims’ children. They joined the prosecutor in pointing their fingers at the man who facilitated their parents’ murders.”
I am not aware that there was any testimony regarding the “vicious” nature of Demjanjuk. Perhaps Lipstadt is confusing testimony from the prior trial where Demkanjuk was mistakenly tried for being Ivan the Terrible. As for the victims’ children pointing fingers at Demjanjuk, were they at Sobridor? If not, I don’t see what basis they had for pointing fingers at Demjanjuk or anyone else who served at Sobridor.