Israel High Court to Reopen Demjanjuk Case

Israel’s Supreme Court will hear new evidence in the case of John Demjanjuk, sentenced to hang for killing hundreds of thousands of Jews in Nazi gas chambers during World War II, his lawyer said Thursday.

Yoram Sheftel said he had found a witness who would prove that the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, 69, was not the brutal guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, but a victim of mistaken identity.

Demjanjuk was deported to the Jewish state in 1985 from the United States, where he had settled after the war. An Israeli court sentenced him in 1988 to hang for torturing and gassing Jews and other prisoners at Treblinka in 1942 and 1943.

Sheftel said the Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to hear Demjanjuk’s mandatory appeal on May 14 but that the date could be put off while lawyers collect testimony from the witness, a woman in West Germany.

If hanged, Demjanjuk would be the first Nazi war criminal executed in Israel since mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

Sheftel said that the West German woman will bolster Demjanjuk’s insistence that he was never in Treblinka but was himself held prisoner elsewhere by the Nazis and forced into collaborating against the Russians.

The trial court largely rejected Demjanjuk’s alibi, ruling there were no such collaborators at a German military base in Heuberg in 1944 when he claimed to have been there, Sheftel said.

The Jerusalem Post newspaper Thursday identified the witness as Josefine Dolle, aged about 70. Sheftel said she now lives in the town of Stetten near the Heuberg camp, and worked as a clerk at the camp from 1938 to 1945.

“She confirms there were soldiers who were Soviet prisoners from the summer of 1944 and on, which is exactly when the defendant said he was at Heuberg,” Sheftel, an Israeli, told Israeli Army Radio.

“Since the alibi argument is the most important thing in the trial, the whole verdict can change,” he said.

Demjanjuk has contended that a Nazi photo-identity card introduced at his 15-month-long trial was forged by the Soviet Union in a plot to frame him for his anti-Russian activities.