U.S. Court to Review Handling of Demjanjuk Extradition Case

A federal appeals court said Friday it wants to reconsider whether the United States should have extradited to Israel a retired Cleveland auto worker who now faces a death sentence because of his conviction there of Nazi war crimes.

The decision to reopen the case by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati comes after the Israeli state prosecutor in the case acknowledged that new evidence casts doubt on the identification of John Demjanjuk as the Treblinka death-camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.” The court, which seven years ago refused to stop Demjanjuk’s extradition, said it wanted to find out if its decision was based on “erroneous information.”

The court ordered the Justice Department to produce any evidence that it has that Demjanjuk is not “Ivan the Terrible,” and when the department received it.

Demjanjuk’s defenders claim that he is the victim of one of the worst cases of mistaken identity in legal history and that the Justice Department has concealed evidence showing that it had the wrong man. Demjanjuk, 72, remains in an Israeli prison while Israel’s Supreme Court considers his appeal of his conviction.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which tracks Nazi war criminals, said the 6th Circuit decision means that courts in the United States and Israel will now be considering exactly the same questions: Is Demjanjuk the sadist remembered for whipping and driving women and children to the gas chamber at the notorious Polish camp of Treblinka? Or was Ivan the Terrible another Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko, a Treblinka guard last reported to be living in Italy 47 years ago?

Demjanjuk was convicted in 1988 after an emotional, highly publicized 14-month trial. Five Treblinka camp survivors identified him as Ivan the Terrible, and a German identity card showed that he had spent time at a training camp for SS guards and the Sobibor Nazi death camp in Poland. Demjanjuk’s claim that he spent most of the war as a Russian prisoner of war was judged false.

More than two years later, his attorney Yoram Sheftel submitted new evidence from the former Soviet Union, including statements from 37 Treblinka guards and laborers who identified Ivan the Terrible as Marchenko--a man of very different appearance and history.

The guards gave their statements to the KGB between 1944 and 1961 and all of them died in prison or were executed long before the Justice Department targeted Demjanjuk as a potential Nazi war criminal in 1977.

Sheftel alleges that the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations knew of the testimony about Marchenko when it asked U.S. courts to strip Demjanjuk of his citizenship and deport him to Israel. The department has been conducting its own investigation of how it handled the case “for many months,” said St. Dennis.