By: Scott Raab – Esquire Magazine
Funny thing is, he was never a Nazi, nor Ivan the Terrible, nor even German. So why now is he standing trial in Munich as accessory to 27,900 Nazi murders? Is this one last blow struck for justice for the Holocaust? Or is it a farce?
Were we not speaking of the Holocaust — Shoah, the Greatest Crime Ever Perpetrated, a Darkness Inexplicable, Pure Evil Incarnate — it would be funny.
Because it is the Holocaust, however, it is hilarious: No greater monster left alive, John Demjanjuk sits where Hitler once sat — in a cell in Munich’s Stadelheim prison — waiting for his lunch, and for justice to be done to him again.
Again. As the dwindling few real-life Nazis march day by day to hell, as their numbers shrink and our remembrance fades, the faceless face on atrocity’s Most Wanted poster is again — again — this recycled Ukrainian peasant, now eighty-nine years old.
Lunch eventually will come. As for justice, who knows when or what that will be. Justice took its time last time, seven years in all, dawdling till the gallows were built; Demjanjuk heard the work crew daily, hammering the planks. But there, at least — in, of all places, Israel — his jailers brought fresh vegetables, and tins of mystery meat, and let him thrust his thick arms through the bars of his cell and fix himself supper on a hot plate.
From those Jews — after he was found guilty of being one of two men who ran the gas chambers at Treblinka, where nearly a million Jews were killed — from them, he got a civilized evening meal.
From these Germans — who have now charged him with being a mere accessory to the murder of a mere 27,900 Jews at Sobibor, a different extermination camp — what does he get for dinner?
Here, presumed innocent, he gets bread and cheese at 3:00 P.M., and so to bed.
Historians generally agree that World War II claimed roughly sixty million lives, including roughly forty million civilians, roughly six million of whom were Jews butchered by the Nazis. Roughly.
For Jews, the wound inflicted by the Nazis will never heal. Our number is too small: Six million was two thirds of all the Jews alive in Europe then, half of all the Jews alive in all the world today.
Their loss was — is — irretrievable.
Funny thing, though: This story is not about the Jews. This story is larger than that.
This story is about truth, justice, and John Demjanjuk.
Who was a Ukrainian farm boy and a Red Army conscript.
Who survived famine and war.
Who took a boat from Germany and landed in America in 1952.
Who lived in Cleveland quietly for twenty-five more years.
Who first came to the attention of American Nazi hunters in the mid-1970s.
Who was stripped of citizenship and shipped to Israel to face his accusers — brought to justice onstage in a concert hall converted into a courtroom for a yearlong trial broadcast on Israeli television and radio, meant to remind the younger Jews never to forget the evil done to them — and heard the survivors, in simultaneous translation, identify him across all the years and miles as the Ukrainian savage so bloodthirsty, so unforgettably depraved — with a whip or a sword or a drill, it was his pleasure to maim Jews only a few moments away from being gassed — that inmates called him Ivan Grozny: Ivan the Terrible.
Who has spent thirty-three years now insisting he had nothing — nothing — to do with the Holocaust: that he was never a Nazi death-camp guard; that he was simply and only a Red Army prisoner of war enslaved by the Nazis as a farm laborer; that he is a victim of mistaken identity, of a Communist plot hatched by the KGB; that he would not, could not, hurt a rabbit, much less a fellow human.
Who was put on a plane in May and carried back to Germany to face his accusers, again, placed under arrest in Munich by — funny thing — the righteous progeny of Hitler-loving burghers who did nothing as Jewry burned.
Who sits in jail gnawing German bread and cheese, awaiting truth and justice.
Demjanjuk didn’t hang, of course. After five years alone on death row in Israel’s Ayalon prison — where Adolf Eichmann, too, had sat, the desk jockey who saw to it that the trains groaning with doomed Jews ran on time, and who was strung up in 1962; Eichmann and Demjanjuk are the only men Israel has ever tried for the Nazi genocidal crimes — Demjanjuk presented evidence on appeal that another man, one Ivan Marchenko, was Ivan the Terrible, and that Israel was about to hang the wrong Ukrainian.
Funny thing: The Israeli Supreme Court decided to let Ivan Demjanjuk walk.
The horribly funny thing — not to the Israelis, many of whom had doubts about prosecuting Demjanjuk from the start — was that some of the evidence that led to his release in 1993 had come to light years before and was withheld from the Israelis by the American government — the Office of Special Investigations of the Department of Justice, the very same cadre of Nazi hunters who had urged Israel to charge him with being Ivan the Terrible.
Why? Because Ivan the Terrible was a trophy fish, and John Demjanjuk was small fry, and whatever doubt the OSI harbored about his true crimes — and the records show that some of its investigators there felt doubts galore — if the agency wanted to burnish its reputation and justify its budget, it needed a villain big and bad enough to convince the cautious Israelis to mount a show trial.
Funny thing: The strongest documentary evidence the OSI did give to Israel, an SS-issued ID card, clearly put Demjanjuk at Sobibor during the same time that Ivan the Terrible was at Treblinka. The three judges and the lawyers on both sides wrestled vainly with this inconvenience, but the Treblinka survivors’ eyewitness testimony — sanctified, consecrated, beyond need of proof by virtue of their hideous suffering and lifelong grief — condemned John Demjanjuk to death.
But the kicker, the real punch line, was yet to come. On appeal, the Supreme Court of Israel, faced with dozens of affidavits from Treblinka guards identifying Ivan Marchenko as Ivan the Terrible, unanimously overturned Demjanjuk’s death sentence, and also unanimously ruled that Israel could not retry him for crimes he may have committed at Sobibor — because he had not been extradited for Sobibor, because no Sobibor survivors could identify him, and because, as chief judge Meir Shamgar wrote, “The complete truth is not the prerogative of the human judge.”
Funny thing, though: The OSI, even after being rebuked by the U. S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals for its “reckless disregard for the truth” in its pursuit of Demjanjuk, continued to hound him for lying on his emigration forms in 1952.
Again the OSI stripped him of his restored citizenship, but prosecuting him for war crimes was beyond American jurisprudence. Doing so required a willing helper — another country with an ax to grind.
Poland, home to Sobibor, passed. Ukraine, his land of birth, said ni. Eretz Yisroel had long since had its fill of Demjanjuk.
Which left the Germans, ja?
Ja. Deported in May — in Washington, D. C., OSI officials watched a live television feed of his U. S.-government chartered Gulfstream taking off from Cleveland, still fretting that somehow their tar baby would stay stuck in the States — Demjanjuk was greeted in Munich by TV cameras trailing his ambulance as he was driven from the airport to the prison and headlines hailing the return to German soil of Iwan der Schreckliche — Ivan the Terrible….
Read more at
Esquire
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This article says MUCH about who the real purveyors of hate are, no ???
I've been aware of the persecution of this unfortunate man for many years. I also read transcripts of his Israeli trial. Most amusing was the occasion when the Israeli Judge asked to see a photo of the Treblinka camp. When finally he looked at one it must have seemed queer to him, so he asked what it was. He was told it was a model, actually a photograph of a model of the Treblinka Camp. When he asked why no real photograph was made available, he was told none existed. He was then told the model was made from the memory of a survivor of Treblinka. The Judge now asked if this survivor could be caused to appear in the Courtroom. He was advised getting him to appear in person would present some difficulty on account of the survivor having actually expired. Flummoxed, the Judge asked, 'who made the model'. 'The Israeli Police made the model, ' was the reply.
The transcripts of that show trial read like a comic opera script.. No wonder Jewish interests have criminalized refusal to believe their tale of woe in every Israeli occupied European territory.
The World is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo sick of the never ending Jewish fable regarding the Holohaux!…….Generations that once believed them now wish they would get the hell out of America's Foreign Policy, and carry their damn dual citizenship Israel Firsters back to Tel-Aviv with them! The Jewish people, once well respected in America, have now become a cancer on the back of both New York and Florida, with the balance of the Nation hoping that they stay there!
They have bankrupted our nation, stole our treasure through bailouts, and sold the American Citizenry on the idea of sacrificing their children to war on Israel's Paranoid behalf!……………………….America is waking up to this circus.
Currently the unfortunate trial in Germany I believe will only make a marytr of John Demanjanjuk. I under no circumstance would choose to judge his life and from all of the evidence I do not know how anyone in Germany can. I have however read accounts of Jewish Doctors regularly participating in the SELECTIONS of those who would live and died at the camps. To my knowledge none of these doctors been tried for their “war crimes?” I view this one way or another as horrible circumstances of the most injustice of wars and what some otherwise just human beings have done to survive. Of course I am in no way saying that John Demjanjuk committed any such crimes as equal to the never tried Nazi “Jewish Doctors”. But I do think that mercy in both circumstances can only apply.