First Case Since Eichmann Stirs National Debate : New War Crimes Trial Worries Israelis

When the conversation at a weekend dinner party here turned to the subject of accused Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk, one of the guests, an American Jew who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, said what troubles him about Demjanjuk’s extradition to face trial in Israel is that he lived unpunished in the United States for so long.

That may be, an Israeli writer responded, but what is of more concern is that the retired auto worker’s trial, expected to last many months, will only feed a sense of isolation and persecution that already afflicts Israel.

Labeled ‘Ivan the Terrible’

As that exchange suggested, the national mood was more complex than might be expected as Israel began legal proceedings Sunday against the man accused of being a sadistic Treblinka death-camp guard dubbed “Ivan the Terrible.”

Israelis are virtually unanimous in believing that those responsible for the slaughter of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany must be punished, even though more than 40 years have passed since the crimes were committed.

But while many also see Demjanjuk’s trial as a chance to remind young Israelis of a period that, more than any other, shaped the contemporary Jewish people, others are reluctant to open old wounds and wish mightily that he had been prosecuted outside Israel.

Demjanjuk, who arrived Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against his final attempt to avoid extradition, was arraigned at a 37-minute hearing Sunday in the Jerusalem District Police Station.

He was charged, under Israel’s Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Law, with having operated the gas chambers at the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland during 1942 and 1943, participating “in the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians--men, women, and children.” He faces a possible death penalty if convicted.

The 65-year-old native of the Ukraine, who entered the United States in 1952 and lived in Cleveland, showed little emotion during his hearing until Judge Aharon Simha asked if he had any statement.

“I just want to tell that I am completely the wrong person,” Demjanjuk responded in thickly accented, broken English. “I never was in that place what everybody tell me--Treblinka. I was myself in prisoner camp of war.”

5 Years of Proceedings

The retired auto worker insisted throughout more than five years of U.S. legal proceedings that he was the victim of falsified information supplied by the Soviet KGB secret police because of his anti-Communist activities.

Demjanjuk was the first accused Nazi war criminal extradited to Israel by the United States and only the second ever charged here for such crimes.

The first was Adolf Eichmann, whom Israeli intelligence agents abducted in Argentina in 1960 and who was hanged here two years later after being convicted as an architect of what the Nazis termed “the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.”

Demjanjuk is being held in the same prison where Eichmann was jailed. And once interrogations are over, a process that could last three months, he is expected to face his judges from the same bulletproof glass enclosure that Eichmann occupied during his trial 25 years ago.

‘Lifted to Prominence’

The inevitable comparisons with the Eichmann trial are one of the things bothering some Israeli observers. The English-language Jerusalem Post said in an editorial Sunday that, in comparison with Eichmann, Demjanjuk “is but small fry. And if he was worth extraditing to Israel, it is puzzling that no action was taken to bring him to justice here until after the Americans lifted him to prominence. . . . “

Hana Zemer, editor in chief of Davar, a trade union newspaper, said he finds it hard to be enthusiastic “over a trial in which the boundary between the educational component and the spectacle component is unavoidably blurred.”

The left-wing newspaper Al Hamishmar said: “In our opinion, (the Demjanjuk trial) must not be transformed into a second edition of the Eichmann trial. That trial was unique. . . . It was a historic trial that unfolded the entire guilt of the Nazis and their henchmen in the annihilation of millions of Jews. The Eichmann trial opened old wounds and returned us all, for many days, to the appalling period in the annals of our people and to the darkest era in human history.

‘The Holocaust Truma’

“No second trial of this kind should be held,” the newspaper added, “because it will unnecessarily thrust the nation into the full intensity of the Holocaust trauma, and this will also be exploited to fan unhealthy instincts.”

“This type of public trial of war criminals isn’t, in my view, something that will help stabilize Israeli society,” said Yehoshua Arieli, a Hebrew University historian. “I would have preferred that he had died of cholera.”

One “philosopher and veteran intellectual gadfly” interviewed by the Jerusalem Post even suggested that the Demjanjuk trial is an effort by Israeli politicians to make people forget problems facing the country today.

However, even most of those Israelis with reservations about the side effects of the trial reject any suggestion that war criminals should be free to live out their lives unpunished.

No Limit on Prosecution

“These crimes do not come under the statute of limitations,” said Yitzhak Arad, author of a book on Treblinka and director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Authority in Jerusalem.

“Even though over 40 years have passed since the end of World War II and the Holocaust, forgiveness and atonement for the terrible crimes committed then are inconceivable,” Davar said in an editorial. “Human and Jewish justice obligates that the murderers not be allowed to rest and that accounts be settled with them.”

Few countries punish war criminals. Germany prosecutes German nationals but has refused to try Nazi collaborators of other nationalities. Many former Nazis are believed to be living in the United States, but that country has no applicable war crimes laws. And the United States generally refuses to hand war criminals over to the Soviet Union, which does prosecute them.

Given the track record of the rest of the world, Israel has failed by not being more aggressive in punishing war crimes, said Paul Korda, former deputy Israeli state attorney.

Responsible for Punishment

“The Jewish state must bear a major responsibility for punishing the perpetrators of the Holocaust, because they waged a genocidal war against the Jewish people, slaughtering one-third of its members, at a time when there was no Jewish state to defend Jews,” Korda added.

Some Israeli officials also see educational benefits in bringing war criminals to trial.

“Twenty-five years have passed since the Eichmann trial,” noted Gideon Hausner, who served as chief prosecutor of the Nazi arch-criminal. “A new generation has arisen. It is important that the young generation in Israel and in the world be able to get a grasp of the atrocities of the Holocaust.”

“One cannot understand our reality, our present, without the backdrop of the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem’s director Arad said. “In my opinion, with all the difficulties the Israeli people and state have today, when we look back at that period, 40-45 years ago, only from that perspective can we see our tremendous achievements . . . so that the issue of the Holocaust and awareness of it is of importance for our reality and for the young generation today as well.”

The Jerusalem Post questioned the educational value of the Demjanjuk trial. It also took issue with another frequent argument in favor of the proceeding, saying that those who still deny the Holocaust will continue to do so whatever the Demjanjuk verdict.

“What then is the point of the coming trial?” the paper asked rhetorically. “The point, very simply, is that Israel has had no other choice.”