To the Editor:
“Demjanjuk: A Summing-Up” by Joshua Muravchik [April]—in fact, a prosecution brief—was fascinating and, of course, damning. I have written about this case myself and studied it, including the evidence the U.S. Justice Department failed to give Demjanjuk’s lawyers, for which the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held it had committed “fraud on the court.”
It is quite correct to say that John (Ivan) Demjanjuk’s absolute innocence has not been proved. No one knows for sure what happened a half-century ago. But that is not the point: the U.S. and British systems of justice, flawed as they may be, require that the guilt of a defendant for specific acts be proved—not by “persuasive” evidence but by evidence that is conclusive beyond any reasonable doubt.
Mr. Muravchik mentions eyewitness testimony identifying Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible,” but not the fact that one such witness, in the Israeli court, contradicted his own written statement made 40 years earlier. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, even over a much shorter time span. Furthermore (also not mentioned, but highlighted in a BBC documentary on the case), the photographic line-up the Israelis showed the survivors who later identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible was presented in a way that pointed to Demjanjuk’s picture and implied a foregone conclusion. And no defense test of the identity card issued to Demjanjuk at the Nazi training camp of Trawniki was allowed. All this, plus the Justice Department’s sabotaging of the defense case, would be enough to have the indictment thrown out of any honest court—as indeed it eventually was.
In Scotland there is a form of verdict that would have been much more appropriate to the Demjanjuk affair. When the prosecution’s case is not conclusive according to the standards of criminal prosecution—beyond a reasonable doubt—the indictment against the defendant may be judged simply “not proved.” This is not an acquittal, but does not allow punishment, either.
Did Demjanjuk serve in the SS? Mr. Muravchik says that this is proved, and much of the evidence is on his side. But “assisted in unspeakable crimes, against humanity”? Sorry, the accusation is grotesque. What crimes, specifically, did this man commit? Criminal guilt is the individual’s responsibility; proof of it must, absolutely and without any doubt, connect individual and act. That was not done in Demjanjuk’s case, and not all the nudge-wink “persuasion” in the journalistic world can make up for it.
Maybe Demjanjuk is guilty of horrible things. But “maybe” and “horrible things” (or “unspeakable crimes”) are not good enough for punishment, not in the American and British systems. Cheating by the authorities amounts, in fact, to a species of lynching. Among us even the probably guilty are not supposed to be lynched. The Israeli Supreme Court and the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed that. As for Mr. Muravchik’s brief, I like to think we have gotten beyond the justification of lynching by the standard of “everybody knows.” As for his appeal to Soviet justice—please!
Herb Greer
Manchester, England
_____________
To the Editor:
Demjanjuk’s defenders. may exaggerate, but he was accused of having committed the specific crimes of Ivan the Terrible—and Ivan the Terrible he was not, at least not by the standards of proof generally accepted in the West.
Mr. Muravchik acknowledges that Demjanjuk’s original accuser was a Ukrainian-American Soviet sympathizer. In fact, the accuser was an outcast in the Ukrainian-American community in which he lived and a suspected Soviet agent, not only because of his vehement pro-Soviet views but because he was permitted to travel freely between the United States and the Soviet Union when such travel was extremely difficult for the average citizen. Ordinarily, therefore, the list of “suspects” he brought back with him from the Soviet Union (on which Demjanjuk’s name appeared) would have been consigned to the dustbin of Soviet disinformation.
When the U.S. Office of Strategic Investigation (OSI) was formed to aid the Israelis in their search for Nazi criminals, there was considerable opposition. This was due both to the unreliability of eyewitness testimony after so many years and to the suspicion that attached to circumstantial evidence, including documents and sworn depositions, eagerly provided by the Soviet Union. Among other things, such evidence was considered suspect because it was known that the USSR was eager to punish the many Soviet soldiers, including particularly those of Ukrainian nationality, who had joined anti-Soviet units during World War II, not because they were pro-Nazi but because they despised Communism.
The Soviet-provided ID card alluded to by Mr. Muravchik played a prominent role in Demjanjuk’s Israeli trial. It showed a man with the collar of a Red Army soldier, the staple marks indicating it came from another source. The SS stamp on the card was in Roman, not Germanic, script and it was signed by an SS commandant who had been transferred before the card was issued. An American forgery expert wanted to testify for the defense but was denied a visa by Israel. Of course, anomalies may have a perfectly logical explanation, but under Western concepts of law, discrepancies are normally settled in favor of the defense.
If we are ready for Round 2 against Demjanjuk, by all means let us proceed, but this time with more regard for Western legal protocol.
Gloria Stewart
Thousand Oaks, California
_____________
To the Editor:
Joshua Muravchik’s article is the correct response to the claim of Demjanjuk’s Israeli defense attorney, Yoram Sheftel, that Demjanjuk was an innocent victim of a show trial. Mr. Muravchik marshals compelling evidence from the testimony of Ignats Danilchenko, a guard at Sobibor who admitted participating in the murder of Jews there and who identified Demjanjuk as also having been at Sobibor. But, as Mr. Muravchik observes, Danilchenko’s testimony still leaves open the question of whether Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible.
I would like here to offer a minor corrective to Mr. Muravchik’s treatment of the way in which the Israeli investigation proceeded that will support the conclusion that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, but was, in the words of historian Gitta Sereny, “Ivan the Less Terrible of Sobibor.”
Mr. Muravchik writes that when the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) turned the case over to the Israelis, nine names were sent to the Israeli police, accompanied by “photographs taken from immigration files, as well as photos of other Ukrainians to serve as ‘filler.’ ” Photographs of both Demjanjuk and Feodor Fedorenko, who was accused of having been a guard at Treblinka, were included in this group. But, as Mr. Muravchik recounts, when they were shown the photographs, several Treblinka survivors pointed not to Fedorenko but to Demjanjuk, calling him Ivan the Terrible.
This account is lacking in several small but potentially important details. Seventeen loose photos of Ukrainian suspects, none of whom was free of suspicion, had been sent to Israel. There were no “fillers.” In 1988, I saw a copy of the composite of the photographs the Israel police had shown to the survivors. The only person whose face was on a white background was Demjanjuk. The faces of all the others were on dark backgrounds. While it is certainly true that I noticed Demjanjuk because I recognized his picture from the Cleveland newspapers (where he had lived), it is also possible that this difference alone might have also caught the eye of some of the survivors.
Furthermore, Miriam Radiwker, the Israeli investigator, did not simply call survivors. She took out ads in Israeli papers stating that the police were conducting an investigation
against the Ukrainians Ivan Demjanjuk and Feodor Fedorenko. Survivors of the Death Camps at Sobibor and Treblinka are requested to report to Israel Police Headquarters. [Emphasis added.]
It is possible that the words Radiwker used—Ukrainians, Ivan, Treblinka—predisposed the survivors to seek out Ivan the Terrible. But Radiwker never asked any of the witnesses if they had picked up the idea that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible from the ads.
In addition, according to reports I have read, the initial interviews with the Treblinka survivors were carried out slightly differently from the way Mr. Muravchik describes them. The first witness Radiwker interviewed, Eugen Turowsky, who had been a mechanic in Treblinka’s machine shop, identified both men. But in that initial interview he did not identify Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. He did so when he returned the next day, even though he also admitted that he had never actually seen Ivan in the area in which he worked.
The second witness, who had been recommended by Turowsky, was interviewed a few hours after Turowsky left on the first day. He positively identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. Two days later, the third witness, who had also been recommended by Turowsky, affirmed the identification of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, even though he thought Ivan had been killed during a prisoner rebellion at the death camp.
There is one other piece of information, which Mr. Muravchik could not possibly know and which I offer only as a small piece of corroboration of the suspicions aroused by the interviewing procedure. Immediately after Demjanjuk was found guilty by an Israeli court in 1988,1 had a conversation with an Israeli friend of mine. He had attended a number of sessions of the trial in Jerusalem, and he told me the following story. At one session he spoke with a survivor who was sitting next to him. This person, who had been at Treblinka, said that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible. “Why don’t you offer to testify to that?” my friend asked. “Because the other survivors may kill me,” was the reply.
Whether or not the survivor’s concern was justified, the certitude of his statement, combined with what Radiwker had revealed about her interviewing procedure, does seem to support the claim that there is reasonable doubt about Demjanjuk’s identity as Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka.
Martin J. Plax
Cleveland, Ohio
_____________
Joshua Muravchik writes:
Herb Greer claims to have “studied” the Demjanjuk case. If so, it is shameful of him to claim that no defense test of Demjanjuk’s identity card was allowed. The defense brought to Israel no fewer than five British and American witnesses who testified as document experts in an effort to discredit the card. To prepare for the trial, they were given not only the document itself but also the use of a police laboratory in which to conduct examinations of the paper and ink. On top of this, as recounted by Demjanjuk’s Israeli attorney, Yoram Sheftel:
Dr. [Julius] Grant [the chief defense expert] completed his examinations [in Israel], but emphasized that he had much more work to do in his English laboratory and that with the aid of his notes and the high-quality enlarged photocopies he had been given, he could continue his work without needing the originals.
Mr. Greer also claims that “the photographic lineup . . . was presented in a way that pointed to Demjanjuk’s picture and implied a foregone conclusion.” Far from it. The original Treblinka survivors who identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible were interviewed in the hope that they could identify the guard Feodor Fedorenko (who later confessed), whereas Demjanjuk was believed to have been at Sobibor. The Israeli police investigator testified about the first such interview, with the survivor Eugen Turowsky:
I invited him for Fedorenko, so I thought—and suddenly, when the cardboards [photos] were on the table, Turowsky began to really shout, “Ivan, Ivan from Treblinka, Ivan Grozny [i.e., “the terrible”]. I was shocked . . . because I knew he [Demjanjuk] was at Sobibor, as far as American intelligence was concerned, and American intelligence was always correct.
Mr. Greer further observes that I neglected to mention that one of the witnesses contradicted his own earlier account. In fact, there was not much to mention. That witness, Eliyahu Rosenberg, reported in 1945 and 1947 that Ivan the Terrible had been killed in the uprising of the few Jews who served as slaves in the operation of the killing facility at Treblinka and in which he had participated. At the Demjanjuk trial he explained that the version he had given back then was based on apparently wishful accounts he had heard from his compatriots as they fled. But he was sure now, he testified, that Demjanjuk was Ivan. The court considered at great length both Rosenberg’s testimony and the strenuous efforts by the defense to discredit him. It concluded: “[T]he identification by [Eliyahu] Rosenberg of the defendant as Ivan reaches a high level of certainty. It is not sufficient, however, to be relied upon, by itself, without some support.” And support there was from numerous other witnesses.
But it is on the subject of Sobibor that Mr. Greer goes from merely uninformed to downright unpleasant. The evidence that Demjanjuk was a Wachmann (guard) based at Trawniki, the headquarters for death-camp guards, and that he served at Sobibor is quite persuasive; it is based on multiple documentary records as well as on the affidavits of a fellow guard, Ignats Danilchenko. Mr. Greer does not dispute this but demands proof of specific criminal acts and says that my accusation that Demjanjuk “assisted in unspeakable crimes” is grotesque. He is wrong both morally and legally. Sobibor was not a concentration camp but an extermination camp. There, in the course of about two years, 250,000 Jews were murdered. These murders were carried out under the direction of some 20 to 30 German supervisors by a staff of about 150 Wachmännerwho rounded Jews from nearby ghettos, guarded the cattle cars that shipped them to the camp, and herded them into the gas chambers. Various testimony confirms that all the guards participated in this process of extermination. Specifically, Danilchenko said:
Wachmann Demjanjuk took part in the mass extermination of Jewish citizens at the Sobibor camp. He guarded them to prevent their escaping prior to extermination, and accompanied them under guard to the gas chambers.
What does Mr. Greer want—a list of the names of the victims? Would that I could satisfy him. Even the law, much less moral judgment, does not require the kind of specificity Mr. Greer demands. Every party to a criminal conspiracy is liable for the acts of that conspiracy.
At the 1946 trial of the staff of the concentration camp at Mauthausen (a mild institution compared with Sobibor), the U.S. military tribunal at Dachau found that
the circumstances, conditions, and the very nature of concentration camp Mauthausen . . . was of such a nature as to cause every official, governmental, military, and civil, and every employee thereof, whether he be a member of the Waffen SS, Allgemeine SS, a guard, or civilian, to be culpably and criminally responsible.
Now, to turn to Gloria Stewart: everything she says, important and unimportant, is erroneous, except for the assertion that the man who compiled the original list of alleged war criminals which included Demjanjuk was a Soviet sympathizer. U.S. government law-enforcement agencies (initially, in Demjanjuk’s case, the Immigration and Naturalization Service) do not merely consign allegations to dustbins; they look for plausibility, which in this instance they found. The OSI, which took over the case, is the Office of Special Investigations (not “Strategic Investigation”). It was not formed to aid the Israelis but as a purely domestic initiative following passage of the 1978 “Holtzman amendment” disallowing U.S. residency for Nazi collaborators, and it did not elicit considerable opposition (the legislation passed both houses of Congress by overwhelming voice vote).
Although after the war the USSR persecuted and killed those of its citizens who had joined anti-Soviet World War II units, there is no record of its manufacturing evidence of war crimes committed by naturalized Americans. Of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of veterans of such units who made their way to the U.S. after the war, why would the Soviets single out a few anonymous, apolitical ones like Demjanjuk and Fedorenko for false accusations?
Her comments on the identity card are equally fanciful. The man in the photo was wearing not a Red Army uniform but a Wachmann uniform. Various features of the card were adjudicated at great length in the trial, but its historical accuracy, including such things as the identity of the German officials who signed it and the design of the stamps, was attested to by expert witnesses and acknowledged by the defense. Hence, Gloria Stewart’s particulars are poppycock, as is her claim that an American defense expert was denied a visa. Will she name him?
Martin J. Plax is right on one point, although it is of little importance. I spoke loosely in calling the pictures of the other Ukrainians in the photo spread that included Demjanjuk and Fedorenko “filler.” These other men were being investigated in the United States. But since the crimes of which they were accused had been committed within the Soviet Union rather than in Poland, it was doubtful that any witnesses to their crimes had reached Israel. Hence, from the viewpoint of Israeli investigators, the inclusion of these others mainly served the purpose of creating a photo spread.
Even if Demanjuk’s photo were the only one on a white background, I do not see how this could have led one survivor after another to seize on it as Ivan. Moreover, I strongly doubt that this was the case. I have not seen the original spread (and apparently Mr. Plax has not, either), but Demjanjuk’s attorney, Yoram Sheftel, includes one page of it in his book and almost all the photos appear on a white background.
Mr. Plax’s conjecture about how the ad taken out by Israeli investigators might have misled the witnesses by conflating Demjanjuk, Fedorenko, Treblinka, and Sobibor is imaginative, but according to the court record, the facts are diametrically the opposite of his version. Far from mixing everything together, the ad, as recounted in the verdict,
notif[ied]the public of the investigation being conducted against Nazi war criminals presently residing in the United States, among them Ivan Demjanjuk—who was active in the Sobibor camp—and Fedorenko Theodor [sic] who was active in Lublin and in the Treblinka camp.
Mr. Plax again is just plain wrong in saying that Turowsky did not identify Demjanjuk in the initial interview. I have already quoted above the testimony of the investigator describing that first interview. Turowsky identified him at once and emphatically. It is true that the investigator asked Turowsky to return the next day to pursue the matter but only because she was so unprepared for his initial response. And contrary to Mr. Plax’s suggestion that Turowsky admitted that he had never actually seen Ivan, Turowsky said to the investigator: “I remember this Ukrainian well. I knew him personally because he would sometimes come to the workshop to repair something.”
Mr. Plax is apparently also wrong in saying that the other witnesses had been recommended by Turowsky, although even if they had been it is hard to see what would have been wrong with this. According to the verdict:
Mrs. Radiwker [the investigator] did not confine herself to the above-mentioned advertisement . . . but also invited people to her office who, as she knew from other investigations, had been in the Treblinka camp. It was actually in this way . . . that contact was established . . . and the statements [of the first three witnesses] were taken.
In his last point, Mr. Plax offers as “corroboration” the assertion that a friend told him that someone he encountered told him that Demjanjuk was not Ivan. Of what probative value is this?
As I think I have shown by now, these three letters offer a good illustration of the travesties that continue to be perpetrated by Demjanjuk’s defenders and repeated even by casual observers of the case.
_____________
