A better question likely is will it ever be put to rest? Learn more about Vera here. Demjanjuk's lawyer argued that all of the ID cards could be forgeries and that there was no point comparing them. None of them identified Demjanjuk as having served at Treblinka. This was the first time someone has been convicted by a German court solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of being involved in the death of any specific inmate. Demjanjuk became a US citizen in 1958. John Demjanjuk, the retired U.S. autoworker convicted on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, died Saturday at the age of 91. . John Demjanjuk, initially convicted as "Ivan the Terrible," was tried for war crimes committed as a collaborator of the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. (The nearby Sobibor extermination camp was named after the village. [31], In 1975, Michael Hanusiak, the American editor of Ukrainian News, presented US Senator Jacob Javits of New York with a list of 70 ethnic Ukrainians living in the United States who were suspected of having collaborated with Germans in World War II; Javits sent the list to US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Demjanjuk was born in Dubovi Makharyntsi,[13] a farming village in the western part of Soviet Ukraine. In November 2009, he again sat in the defendant's dock. A critical piece of evidence was John Demjanjuk's Trawniki camp identification card, located in a Soviet archive. He was. [158], John Demjanjuk died at a home for the elderly in Bad Feilnbach, Germany on 17 March 2012, aged 91. "Ivan", Rosenberg said. [95] One described Ivan the Terrible as having brown hair, hazel eyes and a large scar down to his neck; Demjanjuk was blond with grayish-blue eyes and no such scar. On 19 May 2008, the US Supreme Court denied Demjanjuk's petition for certiorari, declining to hear his case against the deportation order. [25], Demjanjuk found a job as a driver in a displaced persons camp in the Bavarian city of Landshut, and was subsequently transferred to camps in other southern German cities, until ending up in Feldafing near Munich in May 1951. Brigit Katz But the trove of images, which was released by Niemanns descendants and will now join the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, undoubtedly holds significance beyond Demjanjuks case. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine [127] On Thursday 7 May 2009, the United States Supreme Court, via Justice John Paul Stevens, declined to consider Demjanjuk's case for review, thereby denying Demjanjuk any further stay of deportation. 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.. [7][8] On 12 May 2011, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. He was freed pending appeal of the conviction. [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. Demjanjuk appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which on 30 April 2004 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 Nazi death camps. Originally Vera Bulochnik, she and John met in a German camp for displaced persons, The New York Times reported. He was then brought to a German prisoner of war camp in Chem in July 1942. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. [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. However, his family has concerns over how his story is portrayed,they spoke with 3news. [170], In 2019, Netflix released The Devil Next Door, a documentary by Israeli filmmakers Daniel Sivan and Yossi Bloch that focuses on Demjanjuk's trial in Israel. In late September 2019, a Vera Demjanjuk of Ohio passed away. But an investigation conducted in the 1990s by the US Office of Special Investigations found this to be a cover story. [88] The former guards' statements were obtained after World WarII by the Soviets, who prosecuted USSR citizens who had assisted the Nazis as auxiliary forces during the war. [162], On 12 April 2012, Demjanjuk's attorneys filed a suit to posthumously restore his US citizenship. During this trial, the evidence implicating Demjanjuk rested not on survivor testimony, but on wartime documentation of his service at Sobibor. Nevertheless, blood-type tattooing was never consistently implemented. [20] OSI was unable to establish Demjanjuk's whereabouts from December 1944 to the end of the war. [101], Demjanjuk was released to return to the United States. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. Now John Jr. is a father. Based on eyewitness testimony by Holocaust survivors in Israel, he was identified as the notorious Treblinka extermination camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible. Rosenberg approached and peered closely at Demjanjuk's face. Demjanjuk was convicted by a Munich court in 2011. It was the first televised trial in Israeli history. The stranger settled in Cleveland after World War II with his wife and little . After five more years of litigation, the District Court in Cleveland restored Demjanjuk's US citizenship on February 20, 1998, but without prejudice, leaving the option open for OSI to proceed with a new case based on new evidence. He and Vera had three children: John Jr., Irene, and Lydia, CBS reported. Though the card contained some information that was inconsistent with the testimony of the Treblinka survivors, it was the only document available that placed Demjanjuk at Trawniki as a police auxiliary (that is, in the pool of auxiliaries from which Treblinka guards were selected). [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. [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. [116] Some three months later, on 11 March 2009, Demjanjuk was charged with more than 29,000counts of accessory to murder of Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor extermination camp. 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. He and Vera had three children: John Jr., Irene, and Lydia, CBS reported. [151], On 15 January 2011, Spain requested a European arrest warrant be issued for Nazi war crimes against Spaniards; the request was refused for a lack of evidence. 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. [74] Asked by the prosecution if he recognized Demjanjuk, Rosenberg asked that the defendant remove his glasses "so I can see his eyes." Its investigation reduced the list to nine individuals, including Demjanjuk. On 1 May 2009, the Sixth Circuit lifted the stay that it had imposed against Demjanjuk's deportation order. [92], The judge's acquittal of Demjanjuk for being Ivan the Terrible was based on the written statements of 37former guards at Treblinka that identified Ivan the Terrible as "Ivan Marchenko". 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. [55] Others, particularly American Jews, were outraged by the presence of Demjanjuk in the United States and vocally supported his deportation. [161] On 31 March 2012, it was reported that John Demjanjuk was buried at an undisclosed US location. Demjanjuk also said, "Your Honors, if I had really been in that terrible place, would I have been stupid enough to say so? [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. US officials had originally been aware, without informing Demjanjuk's attorneys, of the testimony of two of these German guards. The video, shot in Demjanjuk's living room, showed a smiling John Demjanjuk playing with a grandchild born during the trial . [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. After returning to Trawniki in August 1943, Marchenko transferred to Trieste, Italy, and disappeared towards the end of the war. [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. Prior to the Sobibor Perpetrator Collections unveiling, experts had never found any photographic evidence placing Demjanjuk at Sobibor, creating a gap in knowledge that accounts for the newly released images significance. [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. [24] Historian Hans-Jrgen Bmelburg noted in regard to Demjanjuk that Nazi war criminals sometimes tried to evade prosecution after the war by presenting themselves as victims of Nazi persecution, rather than as the perpetrators. He died in 2012 after legal battles that spanned 35 years. Demjanjuk appealed the deportation order on various grounds, including the argument that, given his age and poor health, deportation would constitute torture against which he was seeking protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. One man appears to resemble Demjanjuk, but researchers at a German museum believe another is Demjanjuk. [67] The complaint relied on evidence compiled by historians Charles W. Sydnor, Jr. and Todd Huebner, who compared Demjanjuk's Trawniki card to 40 other known cards and found that issues on the card that had fueled suspicions of fraud were in fact typical of Trawniki's poor record keeping. [58] The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Demjanjuk's appeal on 25 February 1986, allowing the extradition to move forward. [12] In January 2020, a photograph album by Sobibor guard Johann Niemann was made public; some historians have suggested that a guard who appears in two photos may be Demjanjuk. [131], On 3 July 2009, prosecutors deemed Demjanjuk fit to stand trial. "[9][pageneeded] After the conviction, Demjanjuk was released pending appeal. [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. 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. 19 News is not saying where for fear it could become a lightning rod for protests or vandalism. [37] While the government was preparing for trial, Hanusiak published pictures of an ID card identifying Demjanjuk as having been a Trawniki man and guard at Sobibor in News from Ukraine. [141] Because of the long pauses between trial dates and cancellations caused by the alleged health problems of the defendant and his defense attorney Busch's use of many legal motions, the trial eventually stretched to eighteen months. John Demjanjuk nailed the dark wood paneling in the family basement, glued down the linoleum and even built a second kitchen for his wife, Vera, to cook in during the hot summer months. [87] Demjanjuk was placed in solitary confinement during the appeals process. [28], Demjanjuk, his wife and daughter arrived in New York City aboard the USSGeneral W. G. Haan on 9 February 1952. 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. [145], As part of the prosecution's case, historian Dieter Pohl of the University of Klagenfurt testified that Sobibor was a death camp, the sole purpose of which was the killing of Jews, and that all Trawniki men had been generalists involved in guarding the prisoners as well as other duties; therefore, if Demjanjuk was a Trawniki man at Sobibor, he had necessarily been involved in sending the prisoners to their deaths and was an accessory to murder. He grew up during the Holodomor famine,[14][15] and later worked as a tractor driver in a Soviet collective farm. [79] Most significantly, Sheftel called Dr. Julius Grant, who had proven that the Hitler diaries were forged. John Demjanjuk, 91, Dogged by Charges of Atrocities as Nazi Camp Guard, Dies. 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. Getty Demjanjuks citizenship was ultimately rescinded, and in 1986, he was extradited to Israel to stand trial. Security guards rushed them out, the Los Angeles Times reported. "[5] Although the judges agreed that there was sufficient evidence to show that Demjanjuk had served at Sobibor, Israel declined to prosecute. The BIA denied Demjanjuk's motion to reopen his deportation case. Investigations of Demjanjuk's Holocaust-era past began in 1975. )[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. The prosecution charged that he was the Treblinka killing center guard known to prisoners as Ivan the Terrible, and that he had operated and maintained the diesel engine used to pump carbon monoxide fumes into the Treblinka gas chambers. [108] The United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in November 2004.[109]. [21], After the end of the war, Demjanjuk spent time in several displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court's rulings on the authenticity of the Trawniki card and the falsity of Demjanjuk's alibi but ruled that reasonable doubt existed that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. [89], On 29 July 1993, a five-judge panel of the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict on appeal. [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. "[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. On Demjanjuk's return to Seven Hills after the acquittal, the family gave Mike Conway, then a reporter for WJW-TV in Cleveland, the exclusive right to broadcast images of Demjanjuk back in the bosom of his loving family. [169] Author Philip Roth, who briefly attended the Demjanjuk trial in Israel, portrays a fictionalized version of Demjanjuk and his trial in the 1993 novel Operation Shylock. Danilchenko was a former guard at Sobibor and had been deposed by the Soviet Union in 1979 at the request of the OSI (US Office of Special Investigations). [11] Having died before a final judgment on his appeal could be issued, under German law, Demjanjuk remains technically innocent. GettyPicture taken on May 11, 2009 shows police and media waiting in front of the home of John Demjanjuk before he was carried out on a stretcher in Seven Hills, Ohio. [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. On 13 July 2009, prosecutors charged him with 27,900counts of accessory to murder for his time as a guard at Sobibor. As Demjanjuk's appeal made its way to the Israeli Supreme Court, the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. [82], Demjanjuk testified during the trial that he was imprisoned in a camp in Chem until 1944, when he was transferred to another camp in Austria, where he remained until he joined an anti-Soviet Ukrainian army group. 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. The theme was never forget.. While interviews with Demjanjuk's family portray him as an innocent family man unfairly maligned, the evidence against him is haunting. There is no evidence that POWs trained as police auxiliaries at Trawniki received such tattoos. Because his appeal was still pending when he died, he is now legally presumed innocent. Vera was 86 when John died at the age of 91. Here is what you need to know about Vera. [143] The prosecution also produced orders to a man identified as Demjanjuk to go to Sobibor and other records to show that Demjanjuk had served as a guard there. In July 2009, German prosecutors indicted Demjanjuk on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder at Sobibor. [98] In Ukraine, Demjanjuk was viewed as a national hero and received a personal invitation to return to Ukraine by then-president Leonid Kravchuk.
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