War-Crimes Trial : Demjanjuk: Is He Ivan the Terrible?

In the summer of 1942, when the Nazis were systematically exterminating the Jews of Europe, a new and exceptionally sadistic guard appeared at the Treblinka death camp in eastern Poland, where it is estimated that more than 900,000 men, women and children perished in the gas chambers.

Surviving witnesses have described the guard as a tall, husky Ukrainian who seemed to take pleasure in his job as a mechanic who ran the engines that pumped carbon monoxide exhaust into the gas chambers of Treblinka. Like other guards, many of whom were recruited from among Soviet prisoners of war and seemed eager to protect their identities, he adopted a nickname. He called himself “Ivan Grozny”--Ivan the Terrible.

Forty-five years later, a retired auto mechanic from Cleveland, Ohio, named Ivan Demjanjuk is about to go on trial in Israel for the crimes committed by Ivan the Terrible.

Crucial Difference

The trial, scheduled to open on Feb. 16, promises to be the most dramatic war-crimes proceeding since Adolf Eichmann was tried in Israel in 1961 and hanged the next year. A crucial difference between the two trials, however, is that while Eichmann’s identity as the chief executor of Hitler’s policy to exterminate the Jews was never in dispute, Demjanjuk’s identity as Ivan the Terrible is the central issue to be decided in this case.

Demjanjuk, 66, is a Ukrainian war refugee who had emigrated to the United States in 1952 and anglicized his name to “John” when he became a U.S. citizen six years later. He consistently has maintained during seven years of legal proceedings against him in the United States that he is a victim of mistaken identity, fostered in part by allegedly forged evidence that the Soviet government supplied to American prosecutors.

Testimony of Five Survivors

Just as consistently, a series of federal civil courts, relying on the testimony of five Treblinka survivors, a former member of the camp staff and a single, disputed piece of documentary evidence--a photo identity card that the Soviets say they captured from the Germans--rejected Demjanjuk’s claims of innocence.

Each of the five survivors, who identified Demjanjuk from photographs, testified that the man they knew only as “Ivan” not only ran the motors of the gas chambers but took ghoulish pleasure in herding prisoners to their deaths, torturing or beating them with an iron pipe along the way.

Under proceedings begun by the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations in 1979, Demjanjuk (pronounced “dem-YAHN-yuke,”) was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel early last year.

Although the Justice Department rates the Demjanjuk case as one of its most important successes in ferreting out war criminals among the thousands of East European refugees who settled in the United States after World War II, some government officials in Israel have expressed concern recently that evidence may be insufficient to prove Demjanjuk’s identity as Ivan the Terrible.

Moreover, the issue of Ivan’s identity in the forthcoming trial may be complicated by conflicting testimony from Polish witnesses who were never available to American courts during the years that the U.S. Justice Department sought to revoke his citizenship and deport him.

Two Polish witnesses have contended since 1984 that no photographs that they have seen of Demjanjuk resemble the guard Ivan, whom they say they encountered many times in 1942-43 during his drunken forays into their village of Wolka Okraglik, at the edge of the Treblinka camp. Their description of Ivan’s features differs in basic ways from Demjanjuk’s features.

In addition, the two witnesses, Jozef Wujek and Eugenia Samuel, who are cousins, maintain that the man they knew as Ivan the Terrible was 10 to 15 years older than Demjanjuk would have been at the time.

A third Polish witness, Stanislaw Swistek, once a hired laborer on the Wujek family farm, offered similar testimony in a brief, handwritten affidavit before his death in 1985.

However, the Polish government, which has denied a visa to Demjanjuk’s defense attorney to interview the two surviving witnesses, contends that they are lying in return for bribes from supporters of Demjanjuk in the United States, who first located them in 1984. In interviews, Wujek and Samuel strongly denied the accusation.

While disputing their stories, the chief Polish government investigator in the case says that he has found two other, previously unknown witnesses who have positively identified Demjanjuk from photographs as Ivan the Terrible. In an interview, the investigator, Jacek E. Wilczur, said that one of the two witnesses, whom he identified only as a doctor living in southern Poland, learned the guard Ivan’s family name during the war and confirms that it was Demjanjuk.

Wilczur, a historian and longtime investigator with the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland, said he had also unearthed circumstantial documentary evidence that tends to support the charges against Demjanjuk, although without specifically mentioning his name. Wilczur declined to describe the evidence, all of which, he said, has been presented to Israeli prosecutors.

The Polish government only located its two witnesses early last year, but Wujek and Samuel have been available for testimony and cross-examination for the last three years. In a telephone interview from Tel Aviv, Demjanjuk’s defense attorney, Mark O’Connor, said their testimony was and remains potentially “very important” because they appear to be the only surviving eyewitnesses who can corroborate his client’s claim of innocence.

However, O’Connor said, separate actions by the U.S. and Polish governments since 1984 frustrated his efforts to use their testimony in U.S. court proceedings and, more recently, to interview them in Poland to prepare for Demjanjuk’s trial in Israel.

Visas Revoked

O’Connor said that as soon as he became aware of the existence of the three witnesses in early 1984, during the final stage of Demjanjuk’s deportation hearing before an immigration judge in Cleveland, he sought their testimony. He said the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw granted visas to two of the three--Wujek and Samuel--in March, 1984, then immediately revoked the visas for reasons he was never able to establish.

“It was an incredible obstruction of justice,” O’Connor said in the telephone interview. “We had no one other than these people . . . no living witnesses who could identify Ivan” as someone other than Demjanjuk.

The hearing was the last U.S. court proceeding in which new evidence was admissible before Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in February, 1986, O’Connor said.

He said that at the time, he suspected but could not prove that Justice Department lawyers were able to “pull strings” to bar the witnesses from the United States, after which he failed to persuade the presiding immigration judge, Adolph F. Angelilli, to reopen the proceeding and subpoena them.

The judge did agree to accept brief, handwritten affidavits from the three, O’Connor said, but the sketchy statements, only a few paragraphs long, had no effect on the court’s decision.

“We wanted live testimony, with cross-examination,” O’Connor said, noting that it might have been more persuasive. “I have to wonder why the OSI (Office of Special Investigations) didn’t want it too.”

Past and present officials at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw confirmed that visas were granted to Wujek and Samuel on March 26, 1984, and revoked three days later. James Halmo, who was then consul in Warsaw, said in a telephone interview from his current post in Montreal that he granted the two visas on the strength of subpoenas that the two Poles presented from O’Connor, then advised OSI attorneys of his action. He said he canceled the visas three days later after OSI told the State Department that the subpoenas had not been properly authorized by the immigration court in Cleveland.

Numerous Delays Cited

In Washington, OSI Deputy Director Michael Wolf confirmed this sequence of events. He said the defense lawyer’s efforts came after numerous delays in the deportation case and after a final March 7 deadline had been set for submitting new evidence.

“The defense attorney had no authority to subpoena witnesses. Once you are in a deportation proceeding, the only (person) authorized to sign a subpoena is a judge,” Wolf said.

“There was no other standing for these people to obtain visas. The judge agreed with us, the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed with us,” he said.

The immigration court ordered Demjanjuk deported to the Soviet Union. The order was upheld by federal appeals courts, but an extradition treaty with Israel took precedence, and Demjanjuk was handed over to the Israelis last year for trial on criminal charges.

Last September, as he prepared to defend Demjanjuk in the Israeli trial, O’Connor said that he applied for permission to visit Poland to interview the two surviving witnesses and search for other evidence that might help his client. But Polish authorities, without explanation, refused to give him a visa. He said an official at the Polish Embassy in the Netherlands, where he applied for the visa, told him merely that “the few people who are refused entry to Poland know why.”

“This had a major effect on our ability to construct a defense,” O’Connor said, “because many, if not all of the witnesses are to be found (still living) around the camp itself.”

Poland, Israel Renewing Ties

Wilczur, the chief Polish investigator assigned to the Demjanjuk case, said he had raised no objection to cooperating with the defense attorney and did not know why the government had refused him a visa. Efforts to obtain an explanation from the government spokesman, the Interior Ministry and the Foreign Ministry were unavailing.

The refusal, and the government’s close cooperation with Israeli prosecutors in the case, coincide with efforts by Poland and Israel to renew cultural and diplomatic contacts for the first time since the Soviet Union and most of its allies broke relations with Israel in 1967. Wilczur, however, insisted that the Polish authorities have no interest in obstructing Demjanjuk’s defense.

The scarcity of eyewitnesses in this and similar cases is a reflection of the fact that out of nearly 1 million people transported to the Treblinka death camp during the 14 months of its operation from June, 1942, to August, 1943, only about 50 are known to have survived. The Germans closed the camp and erased nearly all traces of it after an uprising of Jewish prisoners on Aug. 2, 1943, resulted in the escape of some, who took with them firsthand knowledge of its purpose.

While the Demjanjuk case was in the U.S. courts, however, neither the prosecution nor the defense drew on a potentially valuable secondary source of witnesses, the several small towns and villages surrounding the Treblinka camp, where many wartime residents still live.

Villagers remember the period of the camp’s operation as a time of unremitting horror. Jews in the surrounding towns were herded brutally into the camp, where they vanished in a continuous pall of smoke that blanketed the countryside.

Drunken Rampages by Guards

Whole families of non-Jewish Poles were shot or taken away for forced labor on suspicion of hiding Jews. Evening brought drunken rampages through the villages by off-duty guards, many of them Ukrainian prisoners of war, in search of vodka and women.

Marian Jakubyk, who spent the war in the nearby town of Kosow gathering intelligence for assassination squads run by Poland’s resistance forces, and who still lives there, said the Germans recruited guards from among Soviet prisoners by offering this as the only alternative to starvation.

“Some who volunteered used the chance to escape and join the partisans. Others did as they were told,” Jakubyk said in a recent conversation in his apartment in Kosow.

The appalling stench from piles of burning corpses, he said, drove off-duty guards to seek relief in the surrounding villages.

“The smell was sweet and nauseating. You could smell it for 30 kilometers (18 miles). When the wind blew toward Kosow, people would pass out in the streets. The guards, whenever they could, would leave the camp in whatever direction the wind was not blowing. Often they would steal bicycles and pedal over here.

“These Ukrainians were wild, savage people. They committed terrible crimes (in the villages). There was no discipline. They would go to any door and demand vodka and girls, and if they felt like it, they would kill. They would stand in the streets at night and scream, ‘I will die because I know too much, but before I die you will all die too.’ ”

Jakubyk said the husky Ukrainian guard known only as Ivan the Terrible appeared in Kosow from time to time.

“It was a well-known name. People would say, ‘Look, Ivan the Terrible just passed by.’ But he was not the only one, and others were not much better than he was.”

Newspaper Photo

Asked whether he might recognize Ivan from a photograph, Jakubyk said a relative in Cleveland had sent him a newspaper clipping about the Demjanjuk case. Photographs of Demjanjuk in the newspaper clipping match his memory of the guard Ivan, he said.

However, American and Israeli courts have generally considered photo identifications as valid testimony only if a witness is able to pick the accused from a lineup of uncaptioned photographs.

Jozef Wujek, a retired butcher and cafe operator who now lives in Warsaw, offered a radically different description of Ivan.

Wujek spent the war years in the village of Wolka Okraglik, located at the edge of the Treblinka camp--its barbed wire perimeter ran through his family’s potato field--and about five miles from Jakubyk’s town of Kosow.

In an interview, Wujek said he saw a camp guard later known to him as Ivan the Terrible many times beginning early in the summer of 1942 and had two memorable encounters with Ivan.

In August, 1942, he said, a drunk Ivan tried to steal his bicycle but stalked away after a brief scuffle with the much smaller Wujek. A month later, Wujek said, he and his brother were arrested and held for nine days in the death camp, where they were beaten and interrogated on suspicion of hiding Jews.

He saw Ivan once, in uniform, during this time, he said, and added that he and his brother survived only because “they found it was another Jozef who was hiding Jews. They let us go and burned him alive.”

Description Differs

He described Ivan as about six feet tall and muscular, with thick, dark, curly hair. Wujek recalls a distinctively long curl or lock of hair on the right side of the guard’s head and dark eyes framed by thick eyebrows that met over the bridge of the nose. Wujek, who was 27 in 1942, said Ivan appeared to be about 10 years older, in his mid-30s. Demjanjuk, on the other hand, was 22 then.

The physical description given by Wujek differs in several ways from a photograph said to be of Demjanjuk that appears on a disputed identity card. Soviet authorities had supplied a copy of the card to the Justice Department in 1980 in response to OSI’s request for information about Demjanjuk.

(The U.S. request had been prompted by a list of 73 names of alleged war criminals, among them Demjanjuk, that the Soviets had supplied five years earlier through a sympathetic Ukrainian emigre living in the United States.) Although this card carried less weight in U.S. courts than the eyewitness testimony against Demjanjuk, his supporters contend that it contains a number of errors indicating that Soviet authorities forged it as part of a larger effort to stigmatize traditionally anti-Communist emigre communities as hotbeds of Nazi war criminals.

These charges have fueled criticism by conservatives--among them Patrick J. Buchanan, the White House director of communications--that the Justice Department has failed to exercise due caution in accepting evidence from Moscow. At the intercession of industrialist Armand Hammer, the Soviets recently delivered the original identity card to Israeli authorities for authentication.

The card, bearing Demjanjuk’s name, place and date of birth and other personal data, was purportedly issued by the German SS, which ran the Nazi system of death and forced-labor camps.

Describes Detention

It indicates that Demjanjuk was held first at Okzow, Poland, a camp for Soviet prisoners of war, then was transferred to Trawniki, an SS camp, also in Poland, used for training prisoners of war as camp guards.

Notations on the card say that on March 27, 1943, Demjanjuk was assigned to Sobibor, a death camp about 80 miles from Treblinka. Nothing on the card, however, links him to the Treblinka camp itself, where he allegedly served from the summer of 1942 until August, 1943.

The photograph on the Trawniki identity card shows a man with short, straight hair, a receding hairline and light eyebrows. The card gives his hair color as “dark blond” and the color of his eyes as gray. It also gives his height as 5 feet, 9 inches, although Demjanjuk stands 6 feet, 1 inch.

Demjanjuk has testified in U.S. courts that the photograph could be of him but that if it is, it may have been taken from his Red Army records and applied to a forged card.

Wujek’s cousin, Eugenia Samuel, gave a nearly identical description of Ivan the Terrible, equally at odds with the photograph on the Trawniki identity card, differing only in saying that Ivan’s distinctive lock of hair was on the left side of his head, not the right.

During an interview in the two-room cottage next to the railroad tracks in Wolka Okraglik, where she lives with her husband, a short walk from the now-obliterated camp, Samuel told a similar although less coherent story of encounters with Ivan the guard. She spoke in anguished shouts, punctuated by moments of weeping and fits of coughing from the raw Polish cigarettes that she chain-smokes.

A girl of 16 in the summer of 1942, Samuel said she lived in Warsaw and traveled weekly to Wolka Okraglik to pick up loads of sausage from the Wujek family farm to be smuggled to Warsaw.

“I ought to know what this Ivan looked like,” she said. “He kicked me on the back; I have the scars to prove it.”

Seized for Questioning

Ivan, she said, often passed her uncle’s house in the village to visit a woman, who is now dead, down the road. In the fall of 1942, she said, the same guard and a senior camp officer seized her while she was digging potatoes in the field by the camp fence and took her inside for questioning. “A Ukrainian (guard) had escaped. . . . They thought I was one of their mistresses, and they wanted the addresses of the others. They believed me that I was not, and they let me go,” she said.

In her account, Samuel asserted that, on the day of the Treblinka uprising in August, 1943, she was dragged into the burning camp by SS troops who took her for an escapee from the camp. There, amid the confusion of the uprising, she saw prisoners stab and kill Ivan.

When asked to describe the scene in precise detail, however, Samuel broke down in tears and coughing and refused to continue. Over the last 20 years, there have been a number of unconfirmed reports that Ivan the Terrible was among seven to 10 SS men and guards killed by prisoners during the uprising, but no eyewitness previously is known to have survived.

Both Samuel and Wujek showed a reporter a photograph, copied from a local Holocaust memorial, of a man who they insist resembles Ivan more closely than any other they were shown by the Polish investigator, Jacek Wilczur. It shows a Germanic face with dark eyes, heavy eyebrows (that do not meet) and thick, dark, curly hair.

Photo of Camp Commander

Polish authorities say this was actually the camp’s German commandant, Franz Stangl, who was convicted in West Germany in 1971 of war crimes and died soon afterward of a heart attack.

Like Wujek, however, Samuel said she would have to see Demjanjuk in person to be absolutely certain that he was not Ivan the Terrible.

“If he is not the same man, I will defend him. If he is, let the court try him,” she said.

Wilczur, the Polish investigator, contended that Samuel “is a false witness--deceiving. How do I know? That picture was . . . of the commander of the camp, Franz Stangl. I know very well it is not Ivan the Terrible, it is not Demjanjuk, and we know that she knows it is not true.”

In interviews with the official Polish press, Wilczur has accused Wujek and Samuel, identified in print by their first names and last initials, of accepting bribes and promises of trips to Las Vegas from American supporters of Demjanjuk in exchange for false testimony.

Samuel angrily denied this charge. She noted that in the 1960s, when she traveled to the Soviet Union as a prosecution witness in the war-crimes trial of a Treblinka guard, she was greeted with a bouquet of roses and a small sum of rubles for her trouble. Now, she said, by accusing her of accepting bribes, Wilczur not only defamed but endangered her.

“I am being accused of defending a criminal, and this makes me a criminal myself,” Samuel shouted angrily. “The whole village is talking about how I have dollars. . . . I’m afraid someone is going to kill me looking for the dollars people say I have. None of it is true.”

Family Killed by Nazis

Wilczur acknowledged that his own interest in the Demjanjuk case is far from impersonal. A small, wiry man who emphasizes his point by snapping his fingers and smacking his fist into the palm of his hand, Wilczur has devoted his life to documenting Nazi crimes in Poland, including the murders of his four brothers and sisters and his parents, for aiding Jews during the war.

As a member of an underground assassination squad, Wilczur said, he killed 16 men--”one or two” Polish collaborators and the rest Austrians and Germans. But he believes that the man who murdered his parents, a Ukrainian, is still alive and unpunished in the Soviet Union.

This history, he said, makes it all the more imperative to him that justice be done correctly in the Demjanjuk case.

“The blood of an innocent man,” he said, “is more important to me than the blood of my murdered parents.”

The U.S. Justice Department first asked Wilczur’s office, the Main Commission for Investigating Nazi War Crimes in Poland, for information in the case in 1979. Poland reported back that it had no information. It was not until early last year, amid preparations in Israel for Demjanjuk’s criminal trial, that Wilczur was assigned to look for evidence.

By last April, he said, he had found two new witnesses who identified Demjanjuk from a selection of photographs of camp guards that included the one on the disputed Trawniki identity card. Wilczur said one witness is a peasant living in Samuel’s village of Wolka Okraglik and the other is a doctor who, as a young man, survived the forced-labor camp that abutted the Treblinka death camp.

Significantly, Wilczur said, the doctor contends that he saw Ivan the Terrible alive after the prisoners’ revolt of 1943 and learned then that his family name was Demjanjuk.

Asked whether the doctor might not have heard the name from recent Polish news reports or from foreign radio, which millions of Poles listen to despite government jamming, Wilczur said the doctor does not listen to foreign radio and that no domestic news reports had mentioned Demjanjuk or carried his picture when he first interviewed the doctor last spring.

Despite the seeming certainty of these and earlier witnesses who have identified Demjanjuk’s picture, instances of mistaken identity have occurred in war-crimes cases that depended heavily on the memories of survivors. The most celebrated case is that of a naturalized Polish-American, Frank Walus, whose citizenship the Justice Department sought to revoke in 1977 on charges that he had beaten and killed Jews in Poland as a member of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.

Eyewitness Identification

A series of eyewitnesses, in all apparent sincerity, identified Walus in federal court in Chicago as the perpetrator of gruesome atrocities. Although Walus was able to find other witnesses to support his claim that he had spent the war as a forced laborer in Germany and argued that in any case, as a Pole, he was the wrong nationality to work for the Gestapo, it was not until 1980 that the Justice Department acknowledged its error and dropped the charges.

Walus, in the meantime, has been one of several volunteers working for Demjanjuk’s defense, helping to maintain contact with Wujek and Samuel, the potential defense witnesses in Poland.

Seemingly mindful of the risks involved in using eyewitness testimony to decide guilt or innocence in crimes of such high emotion as genocide, some Israeli officials have expressed concern recently that evidence may not be sufficient to prove Demjanjuk’s identity as Ivan the Terrible.

In a published interview last November, Chaim Cohn, a former Israeli supreme court justice and attorney general, said the passage of more than 40 years makes it almost impossible to obtain reliable testimony to support the charges against Demjanjuk. In remarks that provoked controversy in Israel, Cohn said that if he were still attorney general he would not--in view of the “emotional atmosphere” surrounding the case--have taken responsibility for bringing Demjanjuk to trial.

More recently, Israel’s minister of education, Yitzhak Navon, acknowledged at a forum attended by Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel that, “with regard to Demjanjuk, there seem to be doubts about whether it is him. I hope there won’t be any slip-up.

“It would be a tragedy if it’s not him. I hope that it is him and there will be some point to this trial.”

Times staff writer Dan Fisher, in Jerusalem, contributed to this article.