Soviets Offer Different Demjanjuk Accusation : Newspaper Places Reputed Nazi War Criminal at Two Camps in Poland but Not at Treblinka

As Israel prepares to open its first war crimes trial in a quarter-century, a Soviet newspaper, apparently by accident, has cast doubt on the authenticity of an important piece of evidence that the Soviets themselves have given to prosecutors in the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk.

In a trial scheduled to begin Monday, Demjanjuk--a 67-year-old retired auto worker from Cleveland who was stripped of his American citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel last year--will face charges that he was a sadistic Nazi guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.

Demjanjuk, who anglicized his first name to John when he became an American citizen in 1958, is accused of helping to operate the gas chambers at Treblinka, where more than 900,000 men, women and children died in 1942-43. The trial is Israel’s first war-crimes proceeding since Adolf Eichmann was tried in 1961 on charges of organizing Adolf Hitler’s program to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Eichmann was hanged in 1962.

Conflicting Accusations

However, an article published almost a year ago in an official Soviet newspaper, which has only recently come to light in the West, outlines a different and conflicting set of accusations against Demjanjuk. The article in the Ukrainian-language Molod Ukrainy (Youth of the Ukraine) is attributed jointly to a lawyer and a journalist and appears to reflect authoritative Soviet views. It places Demjanjuk at two other camps but not at Treblinka.

More important, in the view of Demjanjuk’s defense lawyer, the same issue of the newspaper carries a different version of a controversial photo-identity card used by the U.S. Justice Department to link Demjanjuk to the Nazi system of death camps during seven years of civil proceedings against him.

The Soviet newspaper’s version of the card appears identical to one the Soviets have made available to American and Israeli prosecutors--except that the one shown in the newspaper bears another man’s photograph, superimposed on the reverse side of the card in an area that was previously blank and a handwritten notation is different.

The motive for the alteration is unclear, but its effect is to undermine the credibility of evidence submitted by the Soviets.

Mistaken Identity Claimed

Demjanjuk and his attorney have long maintained that he is a victim of mistaken identity and that the captured German card bearing his name is a Soviet fabrication. In rejecting his claims of innocence, U.S. courts relied largely on the testimony of a former German guard and five of the approximately 50 known survivors of the Treblinka camp, who identified Demjanjuk from photographs--primarily one on the original version of the identity card.

This document, which the Soviets say they captured among German records of a training camp for SS guards near the Polish village of Trawniki, bears Demjanjuk’s full name and correct birth date but indicates that he was assigned to the Sobibor death camp, with no mention of Treblinka. Under an agreement with the Justice Department, the Soviets gave U.S. authorities a photocopy of the original document in 1980. Last year, at the intercession of American industrialist Armand Hammer, Moscow lent the original card to Israel for use in Demjanjuk’s trial.

However, Demjanjuk’s attorney, Mark O’Connor, said in an interview that Israeli authorities, apparently acting on Soviet demands, have refused to allow samples of paper and ink to be removed from the card to test its authenticity.

‘Cannot Allow Testing’

“They have told us that for ‘quasi-political reasons’ they cannot allow testing because this would violate the integrity of the document,” O’Connor said.

Demjanjuk and his supporters among East European ethnic communities argue that the card contains a number of errors--including a height measurement that is four inches short--indicating that it was fabricated by Soviet authorities.

His supporters suggest a number of possible motivations for a forgery, including a longstanding effort to denigrate the traditionally anti-Communist Ukrainian-American community as a haven for war criminals.

The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, whose mission is to ferret out and deport suspected Nazi collaborators, contends that it has never had reason to believe that the Soviets have fabricated or tampered with evidence supplied to Western war-crimes investigators.

The article in Molod Ukrainy, a Communist Party paper that circulates throughout the Soviet Ukraine, was published last April 30 under the headline “The Vampire Lived in Cleveland.” Reflecting access to investigative files normally held by the KGB security police, it accused Demjanjuk of murdering civilians and Soviet prisoners of war at the Sobibor death camp in Poland and the Flossenburg-Regensburg concentration camp in southern Germany but makes no reference to Treblinka. Nor do the authors try to explain the discrepancies with Western charges against Demjanjuk.

In addition, the article said Demjanjuk was known by the nickname “Ivan the Bloody,” although witnesses in U.S. court proceedings identified him as the man they knew only as “Ivan the Terrible” at Treblinka. Guards at Nazi death camps often adopted such nicknames to protect their identities, but the words for “Terrible” and “Bloody” are as different in Ukrainian and Russian as they are in English, and thus seemingly are not subject to confusion.

The Molod Ukrainy article is illustrated with a photograph of the reverse side of the disputed Trawniki identity card. That side previously contained no picture. In addition, some handwritten notes visible on the original version have been blanked out.

The picture is one of six used by Soviet investigators in a photographic lineup shown to potential witnesses in the Ukraine in 1980, in an effort to find people who could identify Demjanjuk from photos.

In 1981, the Soviets supplied a summary report of this investigation to the Justice Department that included the six photographs, along with three the Soviets said were of Demjanjuk. The summary states that these six men--including the one whose picture now appears superimposed on the altered version of the identity card--”have no relation to the case.”

‘Important’ Blunder

O’Connor, Demjanjuk’s attorney, said in an interview that the publication of a conflicting version of the identity card was almost certainly a blunder, but one that was potentially “extremely important” to the case because it appeared to support his contention that the Soviets tamper with such evidence for political or propaganda purposes.

In view of the political sensitivity of the case and censorship controls over Soviet newspapers, O’Connor said, it is hard to believe that the alteration was the result of a simple mistake in a newspaper office.

“It requires cutting out another picture, pasting it over the original card, taking a picture of that. This is a lot of work,” he said, speculating that “there is some kind of political message to the Israelis here, but what it would be, I don’t know.”

Revealed in December

The April 30 issue of Molod Ukrainy came to light only in December, when an associate of Taras Hunczak, a professor of history at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., brought it to his attention.

“One of my colleagues asked me if I’d seen the picture,” Hunczak said in an interview. “He said: ‘It’s not same man’ ” who appeared on earlier versions of the card.

Hunczak, who is director of the privately funded Ukrainian Research and Documentation Center, said he believed at first that it was a trivial mistake by someone whose only purpose was to create a credible newspaper illustration from a limited supply of official materials.

“The newspaper wanted an illustration, and whoever has these materials--the KGB (secret police), who else?--probably thought that was a nice picture, cut it out, pasted it on a copy of the ID card and sent it off, not knowing what has been published in the West,” Hunczak said.

“But it was clearly purposeful. The fabrication is so obvious, the only question is: Why? Can they really be that sloppy? It’s absolutely a mystery, unless they want to have a little fun with our system of justice.”

Issue Never Arrived

Roma Hadzewycz, editor of The Ukrainian Weekly, a newspaper published in Jersey City, N.J., said the Soviets may have tried to withhold some copies destined for foreigners, indicating that they knew the illustration would prove embarrassing. She said that her newspaper subscribes to Molod Ukrainy but that this issue never arrived in the mail.

“We get the paper all the time,” she said in a telephone conversation. “If we had gotten that issue last spring, we would have noticed the difference right away.”

Other copies, however, were received by Ukrainian Research and Documentation Center and the Library of Congress.

In another development, East European groups in the United States have circulated an internal memorandum from the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations that argues against releasing documents in the Demjanjuk case under the Freedom of Information Act.

Dated June 3, 1986, the memo, addressed by a staff lawyer, Martin H. Sachs, to OSI Director Neal M. Sher, raises the possibility that the files will be needed if Israel fails to find Demjanjuk guilty of war crimes. If he is then returned to the United States, the memo notes, the Justice Department will have to consider the “possibility” of deporting him to the Soviet Union.

Times researcher Aleta Embrey contributed to this story.