Demjanjuk Caught in Apparent Inconsistencies in His ‘Ivan’ Testimony

Retired Cleveland auto worker John Demjanjuk was caught in several apparent inconsistencies Tuesday during three tense hours of cross-examination at his war crimes trial, including testimony that he was enlisted into a military unit of anti-Soviet Ukrainians months before historians say it actually existed.

However, none of prosecutor Yona Blattman’s questions dealt with the crucial period in 1942 and 1943 when the state contends that Demjanjuk earned the nickname “Ivan the Terrible” as a Nazi collaborator who operated the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp in Poland in which 850,000 men, women and children, most of them Jewish, were murdered.

The 67-year-old defendant, who says that he is a victim of mistaken identity and that he was never at Treblinka, was visibly angered on at least two occasions after his cross-examination began midway through Tuesday’s 51st session of his trial for crimes against humanity and against the Jewish people.

Later, he requested that the session be recessed about half an hour earlier than normal, complaining of a pain in his side. Chief Judge Dov Levin complied, and as the court rose for Levin and his two co-jurists to leave, Demjanjuk appeared to lose his balance. A police guard stationed next to him in the dock caught the defendant, who then walked unassisted from the stage of the converted theater being used as his courtroom.

Israel radio quoted sources close to the trial as saying that Demjanjuk was simply tired and that he will be back on the stand for further cross-examination today..

Concluding a day and a half of direct testimony earlier Tuesday, Demjanjuk told the three-judge panel that he had never killed anybody.

“I couldn’t even kill a chicken,” he said. “My wife had to do it.”

He did admit to lying on documents connected with his postwar emigration to the United States, however, explaining to the court that he was afraid that if he did not try to conceal his background, he would be returned to his native Soviet Union and face death as a Red Army deserter.

A native Ukrainian, Demjanjuk was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941 and was later captured by the Germans. The prosecution contends that he then volunteered for special training at Trawniki, Poland, to become a death camp guard and that he later served at both the Sobibor and Treblinka concentration camps.

Demjanjuk says he spent the rest of the war as a German prisoner-of-war. He emigrated to the United States in 1952 and became a naturalized American citizen. He was stripped of U.S. citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel early in 1986 to face a possible death penalty if convicted of war crimes.

The defendant said it was only a coincidence that he had listed Sobibor on his immigration application as one of the Nazi camps in which he spent the war. Actually, he said, he selected the names of several camps at random in order to conceal his earlier service in the Soviet army. He testified that he had been urged to do so by a U.N. refugee official.

A key piece of prosecution evidence is a Nazi identification card in Demjanjuk’s name indicating that he was trained at Trawniki and served in Sobibor. The card was turned over to Israeli authorities by the Soviet Union, which contends that it was among documents captured as Soviet forces pushed westward through Poland and Germany at the end of the war.

Demjanjuk contends that the card is a Soviet forgery, and when pressed by Levin about the appearance of Sobibor on both the immigration papers and the Trawniki card, the defendant turned visibly red in the face and responded heatedly:

“I was never at Sobibor or Treblinka. Why it’s written there I don’t know.”

He appeared flustered again a few hours later when prosecutor Blattman pointed out a contradiction in his testimony about the number of prisoners allegedly transferred with him from Chelm, Poland, to Graz, Austria.

“I look at this hall now and I can’t say how many people are here,” Demjanjuk shot back at the prosecutor. “And you’re crucifying me” because of differing figures about something that happened more than 40 years ago?

Demjanjuk appeared to have the most difficulty Tuesday when testifying about his involvement with “Vlasov’s Army,” a force of anti-Communist Ukrainian prisoners who fought on the German side near the end of the war.

He testified that he was transferred to Graz in late winter or early spring of 1944 to join the Ukrainian unit. He was transferred again about three weeks later to Heuberg, Germany, where he was trained to guard the unit’s officers, he said.

Demjanjuk at first said he had been in Heuberg for “some weeks or some months.” Confronted with discrepancies between his testimony and statements he had made earlier, during legal proceedings in the United States, the defendant finally contended that he had been in Heuberg for a year. He blamed the contradictions on misunderstanding or confusion on his part, or possibly on translation errors.

Asked about expert prosecution witnesses who had testified previously that Vlasov’s Army was not established until November, 1944, at least six months after Demjanjuk insists he was enlisted in the Ukrainian unit, he replied: “I don’t know when it was established. I know when I was brought there (to Graz).”

Prosecutor Blattman also elicited responses from Demjanjuk about the timing of the removal of a tattoo from his arm and about his relation to a Ukrainian general that appeared to contradict testimony that he had given earlier in U.S. court proceedings.