john demjanjuk family
[131], On 3 July 2009, prosecutors deemed Demjanjuk fit to stand trial. The trial opened in Jerusalem on February 16, 1987. [T]his is a piece of hard evidence, and there was not a lot of hard evidence at Demjanjuks trial, said Hajo Funke, a historian at Berlins Free University, per the Los Angeles Times. [139] On 30 November 2009, Demjanjuk's trial, expected to last for several months, began in Munich. [51], Demjanjuk's defense was supported by the Ukrainian community and various Eastern European migr groups; Demjanjuk's supporters alleged that he was the victim of a communist conspiracy and raised over two million dollars for his defense. . The prosecution claimed that while Demjanjuk was a prisoner of war (POW) being held by the Germans, he volunteered to join a special SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons) unit at the Trawniki training camp (near Lublin, Poland), where he trained as a police auxiliary to deploy in Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Jews residing in German-occupied Poland. She said that John always worried about her and their children. [147], On 24 February 2010, a witness for the prosecution, Alex Nagorny, who agreed to serve the Nazi Germans after his capture, testified that he knew Demjanjuk from his time as a guard. The German case set an important precedent and led to subsequent prosecutions in Germany that are continuing more than 70 years after the Holocaust. David van Huiden, whose parents and sister were murdered in Sobibor while Demjanjuk was there, said the verdict meant. [87] Demjanjuk was placed in solitary confinement during the appeals process. The stranger settled in Cleveland after World War II with his wife and little . The file on Demjanjuk was compiled by the German Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. The identification was based on historic research and modern biometric technology, which measures anatomical or physiological characteristics. [75] The testimony of one of these witnesses, Pinhas Epstein, had been barred as unreliable in US denaturalization trial of former camp guard Feodor Fedorenko,[74] while another, Gustav Boraks, sometimes appeared confused on the stand. He was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp, where he was disciplined on 18 January 1943. By Robert D. McFadden. Vera, also from Ukraine, told Cleveland.com that she lived through World War II and famine. Getty [3] In 2009, Germany requested his extradition for over 27,900 counts of acting as an accessory to murder: one for each person killed at Sobibor during the time when he was alleged to have served there as a guard. Vera said they moved to the U.S. in the 1950s and now that he had died, she expected to move out of their home in about a year. [97] Simon Wiesenthal, an iconic figure in Nazi-hunting, first believed Demjanjuk was guilty, but after Demjanjuk's acquittal by the Israeli Supreme Court, said he also would have cleared him given the new evidence. The son of famed John Demjanjuk has dismissed the claim that newly emerged photos of the Sobibor death camp show his father performing duties as a guard. Vera was 86 when John died at the age of 91. [58] The appeals court found probable cause that Demjanjuk "committed murders of uncounted numbers of prisoners" and allowed the extradition to take place. [94] However the Israeli justices noted that Demjanjuk had incorrectly listed his mother's maiden name as "Marchenko" in his 1951 application for US visa. [41] Demjanjuk died in a nursing home in Germany in 2012, age 91, while awaiting the appeal of his German conviction as accessory to the murder of 29,000 innocent civilians Jewish men, women and. As a result, in 2002 Demjanjuk again lost his American citizenship, this time for good. He was deported to Germany, where prosecutors presented various pieces of evidence suggesting Demjanjuk was one of the Trawniki MenSoviet prisoners of war who were recruited by the Nazis to work as guards at the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka killing centers. [99], After Demjanjuk's acquittal, the Israeli Attorney-General decided to release him rather than to pursue charges of committing crimes at Sobibor. [34] Hanusiak claimed that Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor concentration and death camp. After a required hearing, US authorities extradited Demjanjuk to Israel to stand trial on charges of crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. John Demjanjuk in 2010. 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 as part of Operation Reinhard. 19 News is not saying where for fear it could become a lightning rod for protests or vandalism. [152], On 12 May 2011, aged91, Demjanjuk was convicted as an accessory to the murder of 28,060Jews at Sobibor killing center and sentenced to five years in prison with two years already served. However, Demjanjuk's family, who had always claimed he was a Ukrainian prisoner of war, and that the accusations were simply a case of mistaken identity, had fought vigorously to prevent his deportation to Germany, defended him, and stood by his side until his death. Demjanjuk's US citizenship was reinstated and he returned to the States, where he went back to living his family life. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine In 1993 the verdict was overturned. On 18 August 1993, the court rejected the petitions on the grounds that, During the trial, the prosecution argued that Demjanjuk should be tried for crimes at Sobibor; however, Justice Aharon Barak was not convinced, stating, "We know nothing about him at Sobibor". Chief US Immigration Judge Michael Creppy ruled there was no evidence to substantiate Demjanjuk's claim that he would be mistreated if he were sent to Ukraine. Upon his arrival, German authorities arrested him and held him in Munich's Stadelheim prison. TTY: 202.488.0406, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center. [64] Despite initially attracting little attention, once survivor testimony began the trial became a "national obsession" and was followed widely throughout Israel. "I say it unhesitatingly, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. [103] After Demjanjuk's acquittal in Israel, the panel of judges on the Sixth Circuit ruled against OSI for having committed fraud on the court and having failed to provide exculpatory evidence to Demjanjuk's defense. [3] They settled in Seven Hills, Ohio, where he worked in an auto factory and raised three children. Conscripted into the Soviet army, he was captured by German troops at the battle of Kerch in May 1942. [130], Demjanjuk was deported to Germany, leaving Cleveland, Ohio, on 11 May 2009, to arrive in Munich on 12 May. He died in January and she said she hadnt spoken to him since March. Demjanjuk's lawyer argued that all of the ID cards could be forgeries and that there was no point comparing them. She said she had 10 grandchildren and was very worried about their future. [112][113] The Supreme Court's denial of review meant that the order of removal was final; no other appeal was possible. [71] The card had Demjanjuk's photograph, which he identified as his picture at the time. After the war he married a woman he met in a West German displaced persons camp, and emigrated with her and their daughter to the United States. You have no heartnothing!, After Demjanjuk died in 2012, Vera Demjanjuk was still saying that the Justice Department had done a dirty job, Cleveland.com reported. [69][70] The defense claimed that the card was forged by Soviet authorities to discredit Demjanjuk. Two grainy black-and-white pictures showing a man authorities believe to be convicted Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk working at the Sobibor death camp were published by German historians on. [104], On 20 February 1998, Judge Paul Matia of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio vacated Demjanjuk's denaturalization "without prejudice," meaning that OSI could seek to strip Demjanjuk of citizenship a second time. With five years of careful review into thousands of Trawniki-related documents that had been unavailable before 1991, OSI investigators could track through wartime documents Demjanjuk's entire career as a Trawniki-trained guard and as a concentration camp guard from 1942 to 1945. For the first time in a German case, prosecutors argued that a guard at a facility whose sole purpose was mass murder shared responsibility for the deaths of those killed during his service there. Accordingly, Demjanjuk re-filed his motion to reopen, and for an attendant stay, with the BIA. [129] The German Administrative Court rejected Demjanjuk's claim on 6 May. Privacy Statement [110] On 22 December 2006, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the deportation order. [173] In 2019, German prosecutors charged guards at a concentration camp as opposed to a death camp on the same rationale for the first time: former Stutthof concentration camp guards Johann Rehbogen and Bruno Dey[de]. The Jerusalem Post Customer Service Center can be contacted with any questions or requests: Sign up for The Jerusalem Post Premium Plus for just $5, Upgrade your reading experience with an ad-free environment and exclusive content, Copyright 2023 Jpost Inc. All rights reserved. [18] According to German records, Demjanjuk most likely arrived at Trawniki concentration camp to be trained as a camp guard for the Nazis on 13 June 1942. meaning "Terrible" in Polish and Russian. Since the earlier witnesses were now deceased, the Munich court accepted that survivor testimony be read into the proceeding to facilitate findings of mass murder and determine the identity and citizenship of many of the victims. Until it is, there are always questions and no rest for those who accuse him and his family, who steadfastly defends him. [49] The defense also submitted the statement of Feodor Fedorenko, a Ukrainian guard at Treblinka, which stated that Fedorenko could not recall having seen Demjanjuk at Treblinka. [86], Following closing statements, the defense also submitted the statement of Ignat Danilchenko, information which had been obtained through the US Freedom of Information but had not previously been made available to the defense by OSI. Two of the images probably show Demjanjuk, said historian Martin Cueppers, as quoted by Reuters Madeline Chambers. Born in Ukraine in 1920, Demjanjuk was raised in impoverished conditions, and, along with his family, endured an engineered famine in the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians. But an investigation conducted in the 1990s by the US Office of Special Investigations found this to be a cover story. The motion sought to reopen the matter of the removal order against him; that order of removal had been originally issued by an immigration court in 2005, had been upheld by the BIA on administrative appeal in late 2006,[111] and was further upheld by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals; after these two appeals, the US Supreme Court had, as noted above, denied any review. The BIA denied Demjanjuk's motion to reopen his deportation case. His first child was due in late October, just when this magazine will hit the newstands. After a federal appeals court upheld this decision, OSI filed a deportation proceeding in December 2004. Moreover, after Demjanjuk's extradition to Israel, investigators at the OSI, while reviewing original personnel and administrative records from Flossenbrg, found references to Demjanjuk's name linked to his Trawniki military identification number (1393), thus independently corroborating Danil'chenko's testimony that Demjanjuk served at Flossenbrg. They used modern investigation tools such as biometrics to conclude this is the same person as Demjanjuk., This revelation marks the latest chapter in the long, convoluted story surrounding Demjanjuks wartime actions, a saga most recently depicted in the Netflix documentary series The Devil Next Door.. [21], After the end of the war, Demjanjuk spent time in several displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany. [108] The United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in November 2004.[109]. Security guards rushed them out, the Los Angeles Times reported. [125] The Government argued that the Court of Appeals has no jurisdiction to review the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which denied the stay. Demjanjuks citizenship was ultimately rescinded, and in 1986, he was extradited to Israel to stand trial. [43] During the trial, Demjanjuk admitted to having lied on his US visa application but claimed that it was out of fear of being returned to the Soviet Union and denied having been a concentration camp guard. [162], On 12 April 2012, Demjanjuk's attorneys filed a suit to posthumously restore his US citizenship. [121] As the Government noted, a motion to reopen, such as Demjanjuk's, could only properly be filed with the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) in Washington, D.C., and not an immigration trial court. John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demjanjuk; Ukrainian: '; 3 April 1920 17 March 2012) was a Ukrainian-American who served as a Trawniki man and Nazi camp guard at Sobibor extermination camp, Majdanek, and Flossenbrg[2] Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, when he was tried and convicted in Israel after being misidentified as Ivan the Terrible, a notoriously cruel watchman at Treblinka extermination camp. [114][115] On 10 November 2008, German federal prosecutor Kurt Schrimm directed prosecutors to file in Munich for extradition, since Demjanjuk once lived there. "Ivan", Rosenberg said. [158], John Demjanjuk died at a home for the elderly in Bad Feilnbach, Germany on 17 March 2012, aged 91. Demjanjuk was an autoworker in Cleveland who was accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a Nazi concentration camp guard who committed terrible crimes. But the search for this Ivan the Terrible has never moved far from Demjanjuk. [144] Demjanjuk's defense team argued that these documents were Soviet forgeries. Even the Makers of 'The Devil Next Door' Can't Agree", "Historians: Sobibor death camp photos may feature Demjanjuk", "Sobibor perpetrator collection Collections Search United States Holocaust Memorial Museum", "John Demjanjuk: NS-Verbrecher auf Fotos nicht eindeutig identifizierbar", " : ", "United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Acquires Sobibor Perpetrator Collection", List of Sobibor extermination camp personnel, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Demjanjuk&oldid=1151393809, Soviet military personnel of World War II from Ukraine, Prisoners and detainees of the United States federal government, Loss of United States citizenship by prior Nazi affiliation, Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi Germany, People convicted of crimes against humanity, World War II prisoners of war held by Germany, Pages using cite court with unknown parameters, Articles with dead external links from December 2017, Articles with permanently dead external links, Short description is different from Wikidata, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Wikipedia extended-confirmed-protected pages, Pages using infobox military person with embed, Articles containing Ukrainian-language text, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from January 2023, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. new charges would be unreasonable given the seriousness of those of which he had been acquitted, conviction on the new charges would be unlikely, and. Brigit Katz As US authorities moved to deport Demjanjuk, the Israeli government requested his extradition. In 1952 they emigrated to the United States. The evidence placing him at Sobibor was consistent with the information on Demjanjuk's Trawniki identification card and with Danil'chenko's testimony. In 1993 the verdict was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court, based on new evidence that cast reasonable doubt over his identity as "Ivan the Terrible. In January 2019, the European Court of Human Rights held that this didnt violate Article 6 or the presumption of innocence. Demjanjuk became a US citizen in 1958. Shame on you! John Demjanjuk's defense claimed that the card was a Soviet-inspired forgery, despite several forensic tests that verified it as authentic. Following a lengthy investigation and a 1981 trial, the US District Federal Court in Cleveland stripped Demjanjuk of his US citizenship. Some members of SS Death's Head Units in the German concentration camp system also received such tattoos, as they were considered linked to the Waffen SS administratively after 1941. These documents placed Demjanjuk at the Sobibor killing center as of March 26, 1943, and at the Flossenbrg concentration camp as of October 1, 1943. Vera Demjanjuk, John Demjanjuk's wife, never believed her husband was Ivan the Terrible. "[47] Additionally, OSI submitted the testimony of former SS guard Horn identifying Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka. On 9 December 2008, a German federal court declared that Demjanjuk could be tried for his role in the Holocaust. In the summer of 1991, an OSI investigator searching in the Lithuanian National Archives in Vilnius for documentation related to a Lithuanian police battalion found by chance a document that placed Demjanjuk as a member of a Trawniki-trained guard detachment stationed at the Majdanek concentration camp between November 1942 and early March 1943. Newly released picture may prove John Demjanjuk, who lived in Seven Hills, was a Nazi death camp guard, US Marshals find 14-year-old Cleveland girl missing since July in Columbus with 41-year-old man, 3 men shot at Hookah Lounge in Summit County, US Marshals: 31-year-old Cleveland man wanted for raping child over 2-year span, Netflix has docu-series on John Demjanjuk, the accused Nazi guard who lived in Northeast Ohio, Closed Captioning/Audio Description Problems. [146] The prosecution further argued, using Pohl's testimony, that Demjanjuk's choice after being captured by the Germans was guard duty or forced labor, not death, the Trawniki guards were a privileged group that was essential to the Holocaust, and that Demjanjuk's failure to desert, something many Trawniki guards did, showed that he had been at Sobibor voluntarily. Vera lived at the same home in Ohio since 1975. [16], In 1940, he was drafted into the Red Army. A better question likely is will it ever be put to rest? The defense argued that Demjanjuk had never been a guard, but that if he had been that he had had no choice in the matter. Demjanjuk was convicted by a Munich court in 2011. While living in the United States, he was married to Vera Demjanjuk and they had three children. She wasnt able to go to Germany because of her heart problems. The existence of these statements alone, however, created sufficient reasonable doubt that Demjanjuk ever served at Treblinka, moving the Israeli Supreme Court to overturn Demjanjuk's conviction on July 29, 1993, without prejudice, signifying that the Israeli prosecution could choose to try Demjanjuk on charges related to other crimes. [160], Following his death, his relatives requested that he be buried in the United States, where he once lived. John Demjanjuk, 91, Dogged by Charges of Atrocities as Nazi Camp Guard, Dies. CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) - John Demjanjuk is at rest in a cemetery near Cleveland. The photos, said Cueppers, are a quantum leap in the visual record on the Holocaust in occupied Poland.. Federal investigators never forgot, and after Demjanjuk returned to the U.S. after the Supreme Court decision, they investigated his claim that he was too ill to go to Germany where he had been newly indicted. Such a proceeding became possible upon the discovery of internal Trawniki training camp personnel correspondence in the Archives of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation in Moscow. [67] The prosecution alleged that Demjanjuk had listed Sobibor on his US immigration application in an attempt to cover up his presence at Treblinka. On May 19, 2008, the US Supreme Court declined to review his appeal. Cookie Settings, Five Places Where You Can Still Find Gold in the United States, Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Otherand the Birds Loved It, Balto's DNA Provides a New Look at the Intrepid Sled Dog, The Science of California's 'Super Bloom,' Visible From Space, What We're Still Learning About Rosalind Franklins Unheralded Brilliance. [161] On 31 March 2012, it was reported that John Demjanjuk was buried at an undisclosed US location. [88] Demjanjuk said he just wrote a common Ukrainian surname after he forgot his mother's real name (Tabachyk). In 1988, during one of his trials, Irene, John Jr., and his wife Vera walked onto the stage and yelled at the prosecutors, telling them that they were all liars. Because the Soviet Union generally refused to cooperate with the Israeli prosecutions, this IDcard was obtained from the USSR and provided to Israel by American industrialist Armand Hammer, a close associate of several Kremlin leaders, whose help had been requested by the personal appeal of Israeli president Shimon Peres. No wartime documentary evidence that definitively placed Demjanjuk at Treblinka has ever surfaced. Investigations of Demjanjuk's Holocaust-era past began in 1975. [98] In Ukraine, Demjanjuk was viewed as a national hero and received a personal invitation to return to Ukraine by then-president Leonid Kravchuk. Its investigation reduced the list to nine individuals, including Demjanjuk. His application for asylum was denied on 31 May 1984. During this trial, the evidence implicating Demjanjuk rested not on survivor testimony, but on wartime documentation of his service at Sobibor. [22] His application stated that he had worked as a driver in the town of Sobibr in eastern Poland. [173], In January 2020, the Topography of Terror Foundation in Berlin announced that they were about to exhibit and publish a collection of 361 photographs taken by Johann Niemann, deputy commandant of Sobibor, which had been made newly available by his descendants. [149], Demjanjuk declined to testify or make a final statement during the trial. Brigit Katz is a freelance writer based in Toronto. [45][46] Five Holocaust survivors from Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka and having been "Ivan the Terrible. Family and friends claim that Demjanjuk himself was the . [39] In 1979, three guards from Sobibor gave sworn depositions that they knew Demjanjuk to have been a guard there, and two identified his photograph. Advertising Notice We had a suspicion it was him and we were able to enlist the support of the state police, explained Cueppers, as reported by Erik Kirschbaum of the Los Angeles Times. I couldnt walk across the street or I had to step on a body, she recalled. He maintained his innocence, claiming that it was a case of mistaken identity. Evidence to assist this claim included an identification card from Trawniki bearing Demjanjuk's picture and personal information[88] found in the Soviet archives in addition to German documents that mentioned "Wachmann" Demjanjuk with his date and place of birth. In the records of the former Ukrainian KGB in Kiev, the Demjanjuk defense team found dozens of statements of former Treblinka guards whom Soviet authorities had tried in the early 1960s. With this new evidence, the OSI team had also developed a more thoroughly documented understanding of the importance of the Trawniki camp during the Holocaust as well as the process of how camp authorities made personnel assignments. [68], Prosecutors based part of these allegations on an IDcard referred to as the "Trawniki card". In 1979, the newly created Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the DOJ took over prosecution of the case. Upon receiving these files, and after years of litigation, Demjanjuk's American defense team filed a suit against the US government to set aside the judgment stripping him of his citizenship, and accused the OSI of prosecutorial misconduct. Initially, Demjanjuk hoped to emigrate to Argentina or Canada; however, under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, he applied to move to the United States. His return was met by protests and counter-protests, with supporters including members of the Ku Klux Klan. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. He was assigned to a manorial estate called Okzow on 22 September 1942, but returned to Trawniki on 14 October. )[23] Demjanjuk later claimed this was a coincidence, and said that he picked the name "Sobibor" from an atlas owned by a fellow applicant because it had a large Soviet population. [84] Demjanjuk also changed his testimony as to why he had listed Sobibor as his place of domicile from his earlier trials: he now claimed to have been advised to do so by an official of the United Nations Relief Administration to list a place in Poland or Czechoslovakia in order to avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union, after which another Soviet refugee waiting with him suggested Demjanjuk list Sobibor. The principal allegation was that three former prisoners identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, who operated the petrol engines sending gas to the death chamber. "[148] As Nagorny had previously identified Demjanjuk from his US visa application photo, his inability to recognize Demjanjuk in the courtroom was seen as unimportant. " It's all been lies from beginning to end," his daughter, Irene Nishnic, said through tears during his trial in Jerusalem in. [128] Demjanjuk sued Germany on 30 April 2009, to try to block the German government's agreement to accept Demjanjuk from the US.