Israel Unlikely to Execute Demjanjuk : War crimes: As evidence of mistaken identity increases, the case against American unravels.

The case against John Demjanjuk, the American facing a death sentence on charges he was a Nazi gas chamber operator, has all but unraveled, and it is unlikely that he will be executed, sources close to the Israeli Supreme Court say.

The tattered state of the case was highlighted Monday during the final day of prosecution arguments in the long appeal of the retired auto worker from Cleveland. Judges in his trial ruled “without hesitation” in 1988 that he was “Ivan the Terrible,” the sadistic guard who put tens of thousands of Jews to death at the Nazi concentration camp at Treblinka in occupied Poland.

Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak noted that prosecutor Michael Shaked has begun to argue that if Demjanjuk was not Ivan, he should nonetheless be convicted for serving as a guard at another camp, Sobibor. Barak pointedly interrupted, saying, “If you have no proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he was at Treblinka, then there is no point in proceeding.”

“What we are dealing with here is a murderer, and it makes no difference whether he committed the crimes at Treblinka or Sobibor,” Shaked shot back.

Barak persisted.

“Was the trial simply about being a guard? Was that what he was extradited for? Sobibor was mentioned in the trial only as a stage before Treblinka. Can we now try him for Sobibor without hearing his view, without hearing witnesses? Being a guard is not the offense--genocide is.

“What was his job at Sobibor?” Barak continued. “What punishment can we impose on him? We don’t even know what his job was there.”

“The guard is the direct servant of Satan. All he does is kill Jews throughout the time he is there,” Shaked answered heatedly.

Israel’s case against Demjanjuk was weakened by documentary evidence gleaned from recently opened secret police files in what used to be the Soviet Union. The files appeared to affirm that Ivan the Terrible was someone else, a man named Ivan Marchenko, who did not look like Demjanjuk and was a different age.

Documents from German archives listed the name of Demjanjuk separately, with Marchenko serving at Treblinka and Demjanjuk elsewhere.

During the original trial, five survivors of Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as Ivan. They have not been shown Marchenko’s picture.

Last week, in an effort to bridge the contradictions between the witness testimony and the new evidence, Shaked broached an argument that newspapers called the “Two Ivans the Terrible” theory, saying, “The survivors identified the accused as the operator of the gas chambers at least at a certain time, and there may have been another operator of the gas chambers.”

After the hearing, Shaked admitted that the court might conclude that Demjanjuk worked only at Sobibor, not Treblinka, where at least a quarter of a million Jews were killed in 1942 and 1943.

Court sources say that given the uncertainties, Demjanjuk will not face the electric chair. His was the first trial in Israel since the 1962 conviction and execution of Adolf Eichmann, a mastermind of the Holocaust. “The question now,” one source mused, “is what to do with Demjanjuk.”

The issue is further complicated by the intervention of a U.S. appeals court in Ohio, which reopened Demjanjuk’s extradition case last week. Demjanjuk, 72, was extradited to Israel from the United States specifically on the grounds that he was Ivan the Terrible.

Before extradition, the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was stripped of his U.S. citizenship for lying on his immigration application.

Israel’s five-member Supreme Court has a range of options. It can acquit and free Demjanjuk. It can reverse the ruling that he is Ivan the Terrible but convict him on other charges, probably bringing a lesser punishment than death. It can order an entirely new trial on the basis of evidence showing Demjanjuk to have been a guard at concentration camps other than Treblinka. Or it could uphold the original verdict and death sentence, although this has apparently been discarded as an option.

The defense winds up its case today, and the court is expected to rule this summer.

Demjanjuk has claimed he is a victim of mistaken identity and was himself a prisoner of war. Evidence that clears him of the Treblinka charges nonetheless appears to place him at other death camps.

His trial lasted 14 months and riveted Israel’s attention. Schoolchildren attended sessions. So did Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. The hearings were broadcast live on radio and television.

The appeal has received much less attention from the press and public, although Demjanjuk’s fate and its meaning for the memory of the Holocaust have been the subject of occasional commentaries. There have been suggestions that no more such trials should take place in Israel but rather that future prosecutions should be encouraged in the home countries of the accused.