John Demjanjuk

From Metapedia

John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Demjanjuk on April 3, 1920 in Dubovye Makharintsy, Kiev Oblast, USSR), is a retired auto worker who emigrated to the United States from Europe in 1951. He was later accused of, tried for, convicted of, and sentenced to death for war crimes, based on false identification of by Israeli "Holocaust" survivors as being "Ivan the Terrible", a SS guard at the Treblinka labour camp during the period 1942-1943. He was later exonerated by Israel's highest court of crimes against humanity.

Demjanjuk, his wife and their child arrived in New York aboard the General W. G. Haan on February 9, 1952. On November 14, 1958, Demjanjuk became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He and his wife, whom he met in a displaced persons camp, moved to Indiana with their daughter (they later had two more children) and then to Seven Hills, Ohio, where Demjanjuk became an engine mechanic.

In August 1977, the Justice Department (acting under Jewish pressure) submitted a request to the Northern District Court of Ohio that Demjanjuk's citizenship be revoked on the basis that he had allegedly concealed his involvement with German work camps on his immigration application in 1951. On June 23, 1981, District Court Judge Frank Batisti ruled that Demjanjuk had lied on his application, that he had served as an SS guard at Treblinka and for a brief period at Sobibór, and that he had undergone training at the Trawniki SS training camp. Demjanjuk's attorneys appealed this ruling.

[edit] Trial in Israel

In October 1983, Israel issued an extradition request for Demjanjuk to stand trial on Israeli soil under the "Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950". Demjanjuk was deported to Israel on February 28, 1986. He was put on trial between February 16, 1987 and April 18, 1988. The prosecution claimed during the trial that Demjanjuk had been recruited into the Soviet army in 1940, and that he had fought against Germany until he was captured by German troops in the eastern Crimea in May 1942.

Demjanjuk was then, according to prosecutors, brought to a German prisoner of war camp in Kulm in July 1942. 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 and was given a firearm, a uniform, and an ID card with his photograph. Prosecutors based part of these allegations on the ID card, but defense attorneys countered that the card was forged by Soviet authorities to discredit Demjanjuk. In 1990, the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed. As a result, the KGB archives on the case were opened. In Demjanjuk's KGB file the truth was revealed - the Trawniki certificate had been forged to frame the Ukrainian as part of a campaign against Ukrainian nationalists.

Demjanjuk himself testified during the trial that he was imprisoned in a camp in Chelmno until 1944, when he was transferred to another camp in Austria, where he remained until he joined an anti-Soviet Russian military unit funded by the German government until the surrender of Germany to the Allies in 1945.

On April 25, 1988, a Jerusalem court convicted Demjanjuk and sentenced him to death by hanging. Demjanjuk was placed in solitary confinement until August 1993, when five Israeli Supreme Court judges ruled that there was not enough evidence to show that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible.

Their ruling was based partly on the written statements of 32 former guards and 5 former prisoners at Treblinka that Ivan the Terrible's true surname was Marchenko, not Demjanjuk. (Ivan Marchenko was last seen in 1945 shortly after the close of World War II, leaving a brothel in Croatia.) Demjanjuk was released to return to the United States. In 1993, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Demjanjuk was a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, as federal prosecutors had deliberately withheld evidence, and his sentence was overturned.

[edit] New Charges and Deportation

On February 20, 1998, Federal District Court Judge Paul Matia ruled that Demjanjuk's citizenship could be restored. On May 20, 1999, the Justice Department filed a new civil complaint against Demjanjuk.

No mention was made in the new complaint of the previous allegations that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. Instead, the complaint alleged that Demjanjuk served as a guard at the Sobibór and Majdanek camps in Poland and at the Flossenburg camp in Germany. It additionally accused Demjanjuk of being a member of an SS-run unit that allegedly took part in capturing nearly two million Jews in the General Government of Poland. Demjanjuk was put on trial again in 2001, and in February 2002, Matia ruled that Demjanjuk had not produced any credible evidence of his whereabouts during the war and that the Justice Department had proved its case against him.

• On May 1, 2004, a three-judge panel of the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Demjanjuk could be again stripped of his US citizenship because the Justice Department had presented "clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence" of Demjanjuk's service in German work camps. Demjanjuk vowed to appeal the ruling.

• On December 28, 2005, an immigration judge ordered Demjanjuk deported to Ukraine. "Having marked Mr. Demjanjuk with blood scent, the government wants to drop him into a shark tank," his lawyer, John Broadley, said during the hearing. Chief U.S. Immigration Judge Michael Creppy ruled that there is no evidence to substantiate Demjanjuk's claim that he would be mistreated if deported.

• On December 22, 2006, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the deportation order, stating "Simply put, the respondent's arguments regarding the likelihood of torture are speculative and not based on evidence in record".

Even if Demjanuk loses all appeals, he would remain in the United States if no other country is willing to accept him. This is a likely outcome, according to his attorneys, since European countries are reluctant to accept the aged and infamous. In that case, Demjanjuk would become a stateless alien and would lose all Social Security benefits.