Demjanjuk Was ‘Ivan,’ Israeli Court Decides

An Israeli court Monday night pronounced retired Cleveland auto worker John Demjanjuk guilty of World War II crimes that government prosecutors described as “amongst the most serious and awful in human history.”

In only the second war-crimes trial ever conducted here, a three-judge panel ruled that the 68-year-old defendant is the same man whose cruelty as a guard in the Treblinka death camp in Poland during World War II earned him the nickname “Ivan the Terrible.”

“We have concluded unequivocally, without the slightest doubt, that John Demjanjuk is the Ivan who operated the gas chambers at Treblinka and who perpetrated the gruesome deeds described above,” presiding Judge Dov Levine said.

The crimes for which Demjanjuk was found guilty are among the handful that carry a possible death penalty under Israeli law, but his sentence will be pronounced only after a separate hearing next Monday. The defense will have 45 days from the date of sentencing in which to launch its expected appeal.

Demjanjuk was extradited from the United States to Israel in February, 1986, to face the Jewish state’s first war-crimes trial since Adolf Eichmann was convicted 26 years ago of masterminding the systematic extermination of 6 million European Jews. Eichmann was hanged in 1962.

Monday’s verdict, greeted by applause from the standing-room-only crowd in a converted theater here, came near the end of a marathon, 12-hour session in which the three judges took turns reading excerpts from their 444-page opinion. It was the 107th session of a trial that stretched out, with frequent delays, over 14 months.

The burly, bespectacled, Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who emigrated to the United States and settled in the Cleveland area in 1952, heard the verdict from a holding cell off the courtroom where he spent the day lying on his back on a cot.

Defense attorney John Gill explained as the crucial session began that his client was suffering from back spasms that caused him to “cry out in pain” at the slightest movement and prevented him from taking his normal seat in the dock.

“I am very good--don’t worry,” the handcuffed defendant responded to inquiring reporters as he was led away from the court Monday night, surrounded by guards. “I am an innocent man. I’ll appeal, and I’m sure that I will win.”

Demjanjuk’s attorneys argued that he was the victim of mistaken identity, and their defense concentrated largely on challenging the memory of five Treblinka survivors who identified their client as Ivan during the trial.

Survivors ‘Can Never Forget’

But the court’s opinion made clear that the judges considered the survivor testimony to be persuasive. “Anyone who experienced these shocks, these terrible experiences at the death camp Treblinka, can never forget what they’ve seen,” the judges stated. “We accept fully that which they told us.”

The jurists also accepted as genuine the other key element of the prosecution’s case--an identification card issued in Demjanjuk’s name at a Nazi training facility for death camp guards in wartime Poland. The defense had claimed that the so-called Trawniki card, named for the training facility, was a Soviet forgery intended to discredit Demjanjuk and other Ukrainians considered anti-Communist.

The Soviet Union made the key piece of evidence available to Israel, ostensibly from its archive of Nazi documents captured at the end of the war.

The other pivotal element in the court’s decision, according to the opinion, was the weakness of Demjanjuk’s own testimony about his whereabouts during the crucial 1942-43 period during which an estimated 850,000 individuals, mostly Jews, were put to death at Treblinka.

“There are too many gaps in the alibi,” the judges ruled regarding Demjanjuk’s claim that he had spent the vital months digging peat in another camp for prisoners of war. “Therefore, the version of the accused is untrue,” the judges said. “It is a lie.”

“They ruled against us on every single point, no matter how big or how small,” disappointed defense attorney Gill said.

“It’s disgusting that it was so one-sided,” added the defendant’s 22-year-old son, John Demjanjuk Jr. “This was nothing more or less than a Soviet show trial,” he charged.

The younger Demjanjuk said he and other family members left the courtroom midway through Monday’s session “because it was an emotional and condemning atmosphere. I realized they would completely ignore all the evidence the defense had presented.”

Verdict May Spur Others

The Demjanjuk decision is expected to give a boost to efforts in several countries, including the United States, to bring other accused war criminals to trial. The case was seen as a crucial test of whether the crimes in question had occurred so long ago as to make convictions virtually impossible within judicial standards of certainty.

It was also expected to have an important impact on whether Israel or any other country would be ready in the future to prosecute individuals considered to be cogs, rather than architects, in the Nazi death machine.

Demjanjuk’s tortuous, 12-year path to his judgment in Jerusalem began almost by accident in 1976, when the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into the background of another man suspected of having been a guard at Treblinka.

As part of that U.S. probe, Treblinka survivors were shown photographs of Ukrainians in uniform and asked if they recognized any of them. Two pointed to photos of Demjanjuk and identified him as “Ivan the Terrible.”

The investigators were surprised, since they had believed Demjanjuk had been in another camp, at Sobibor. But with the identifications, the case of “Ivan the Terrible” began.

After a series of investigations and hearings in the United States beginning in 1977, Demjanjuk was finally stripped of his U.S. citizenship for lying on his immigration application and was extradited to Israel.

He was indicted in November, 1986, for “crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes against minorities,” and went on trial Feb. 16, 1987. He was found guilty on all four counts Monday.

‘A Trial of Memory’

“This was a trial of memory, memory of the Holocaust, memory of the witnesses,” commented Harry Wall, director of the Jerusalem office of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Unlike the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, which put the architects of the Holocaust in the dock, this trial demonstrated how much the Nazi death machine depended on individuals like Ivan.

“The trial took us to the depths of hell and back again,” Wall added. “Apart from bringing a Nazi war criminal to justice, its significance lies in reminding and educating. And that is perhaps the only fitting tribute to those murdered at Treblinka.”

“It is revenge for all those who did not make it,” Pinchas Epstein, one of the five Treblinka survivors who had identified Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible,” said after Monday’s verdict. “This was a righteous court.”