Final Phase of Demjanjuk Trial Begins

With a dramatic recounting of the lives of Jews waiting to die, the Israeli government prosecutor Monday began the final stage of the trial of John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker charged with involvement in the deaths of thousands at a Nazi extermination camp in Poland during World War II.

Chief Prosecutor Michael Shaked stunned the capacity audience in the converted theater where the trial is being heard when he abandoned his normally pedantic courtroom manner and quoted from a poem entitled “The Lament of the Slaughtered Jewish People.”

He read from the work of Yitzhak Katznelson, a Jew who was killed in 1944: “A great horror overtook me. My flesh stood on end from fear.”

For the next two hours, the prosecutor presented a condensed version of the first weeks of the trial, which began 11 months ago, when survivors recounted their experiences in Treblinka and the role they said was performed by Demjanjuk, a native-born Ukrainian whom they said they called “Ivan the Terrible.”

Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 from the United States, where he had lived since 1952, becoming an American citizen and working for the Ford Motor Co. He is alleged to have operated the equipment that pumped gas into the Treblinka gas chambers in 1942 and 1943, and he faces the death penalty if convicted.

Demjanjuk has denied the charges. He insists that he is the victim of mistaken identity and that the evidence against him is false, an attempt by the Soviet Union to frame him because of his Ukrainian nationalistic activities.

After the emotional two hours at the start of Monday’s session, the first since Dec. 29, Shaked’s summation lapsed into his usual dry style as he attempted to deal with Demjanjuk’s claim of mistaken identity. The prosecutor scorned the witnesses Demjanjuk’s lawyers had summoned to cast doubt on a key piece of evidence, a Nazi military identity card bearing a picture and signature said to be Demjanjuk’s. One witness, Shaked said, “came from another planet.”

Shaked began an agonizingly slow analysis of the signature on the identity card. As he progressed, interest seemed to wane, first in the audience, which was reduced by half three hours after the opening of the session, and then on the bench, where one judge clearly had trouble keeping awake.

The seven-member prosecution team is not expected to finish its summation before next week. It has three main points: that the identity card is genuine, that the personal identifications by photos of Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible” are valid even though made 40 years later and that the defendant’s claim to poor memory because of his age is false.

After closing arguments by the government, Demjanjuk’s lawyers will sum up their case: that there is reasonable doubt about the prosecution’s assertions.

But still the trial will not be ended. Some experts think the judges’ verdict and sentence will not come for several more weeks.