Judges Threaten to Eject Lawyer for Suspected Nazi Guard ‘Ivan’

Judges threatened to eject John Demjanjuk’s Israeli defense attorney Thursday after he said they were conducting a show trial for the retired Ohio auto worker accused of being a brutal Nazi death camp guard.

Yoram Sheftel was objecting to what he said was irrelevant testimony from Helge Grabitz, a West German official who had prosecuted SS officers from a camp where Demjanjuk allegedly trained as a Nazi guard.

Grabitz provided the courtroom’s first details of the Trawniki camp, but she said nothing in five hours of testimony to back up prosecution allegations that Demjanjuk was trained there before being sent to Treblinka.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, 66, is charged with being “Ivan the Terrible,” a guard who tortured victims before sending them to the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. An estimated 850,000 Jews died at the camp in 1942 and 1943.

Demjanjuk claims he is a victim of mistaken identity. He says the Nazis imprisoned him at camps near Treblinka after they captured him while he served in the Russian Red Army.

After the three-judge panel overruled his objection, Sheftel continued to argue with them. He called Grabitz’s testimony “part of the show, like the money paid to rent this hall.”

The trial is being held in a converted movie theater to accommodate more than 500 daily spectators.

After calling Sheftel to order twice, the judges threatened to charge him with contempt of court.

“If you continue this, you will find yourself outside,” said presiding Judge Dov Levine. Sheftel later apologized for the remark.

Grabitz, who spoke in German, testified in great detail about dozens of Trawniki training camp documents. Many of them were signed by two Nazi officers whose signatures appear on an SS identity card from the camp.

The prosecution claims the card belonged to Demjanjuk, but the defense says the document, provided to Israel by the Soviet Union, was forged.

Grabitz prosecuted Karl Streibl, identified as one of the two SS officers, in a 1972-1976 trial in Hamburg, West Germany. Streibl, allegedly the commander of Trawniki, was acquitted. The other alleged officer, Heinrich Ernst Taufel, was never tried and has since died.

Grabitz told the court that 42,000 Jews were killed at Trawniki and another forced labor camp in the Lublin district of Poland.

Grabitz described how 6,000 Jewish laborers at Trawniki were shot to death in one day on Nov. 3, 1943, and buried in pits.