Evidence suggests otherwise. According to prosecutors, Demjanjuk was sent to an SS training camp in Trawniki, Poland, after volunteering to work as a guard for the Nazis, who were then well on their way to killing most of Poland’s three million Jews. Later, he served at three German-run camps on Polish soil. One of them was the Sobibor death camp, described by the U.S Office for Special Investigations as “as close an approximation of hell as has ever been created on this planet.”
Did he have a choice? Crowe, for one, cautions those who defend Demjanjuk’s alleged defection to the Nazis on the basis that he may have been coerced. POWs suffered extreme brutality in German hands, Crowe concedes, but Demjanjuk “had a choice. There were an awful lot of Russian and Ukrainian POWs who did not volunteer. You had to make a substantial moral decision to be a turncoat against your own side.” Crowe says that Demjanjuk willingly underwent aggressive Nazi training, and continued working at Sobibor—rather than escaping, as others did. “He was both victim and participant in German war crimes,” the Berliner Zeitung has written. “But that doesn’t excuse him.”
After the war, Demjanjuk registered as a “displaced person” in Germany. In 1952, he immigrated with his wife and young daughter to the U.S. Soon, the new Americans settled into a quiet suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, and Demjanjuk found work as a mechanic at a Ford auto plant. He had another daughter and a son. Twenty-five years passed before the tide turned—and what followed was messy. “This is one of the most bizarre cases in legal history,” insists Scharf. “It’s a textbook case that I teach in my criminal law class of everything that can possibly go wrong in a trial.”
In 1975, Michael Hanusiak, editor of the New York-based Ukrainian Daily News, compiled a list of Ukrainians suspected of collaborating with Germans and presented it to what was then the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Demjanjuk was on that list. According to Crowe, the INS then turned to Israel for help. Israelis, in turn, made contact with Sobibor survivors, a number of whom identified Demjanjuk from an old photograph as Ivan the Terrible, a gas chamber operator at Treblinka death camp in Poland. Two years later, the INS filed the first charges against Demjanjuk, stripping him of his citizenship in 1981 and ordering him deported. In 1986, his last appeal was rejected and he was extradited to Israel to stand trial. In 1988, “Ivan the Terrible” was sentenced to death.
As it turned out, Ivan Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible. And it was a thawing Cold War that granted him a short-lived break, when the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in the release of files previously hidden by the KGB. New evidence proved that someone else was the more infamous Ivan. In 1993, Demjanjuk’s death sentence was lifted and he returned to the U.S. But only one year later, the Justice Department filed a new complaint. In 2002, Demjanjuk was denaturalized again, after a U.S. court accepted evidence he had served as a concentration camp guard. In 2008, his final appeal was rejected. And after German prosecutors decided they had enough evidence, including an SS identity card with a photo of a young, round-faced John Demjanjuk establishing him as a Sobibor guard—it was Germany who filed formal charges, issuing an arrest warrant in March 2009.
As well as bringing an alleged war criminal to justice, supporters of the trial also hope that it will “throw a spotlight on Hitler’s foreign helpers,” as the newsmagazine Der Spiegel has said. While the Germans, says David Crowe, were the principal authors of the Final Solution, they were not its exclusive agents: “There’s no way the Nazis could have formed [their] mass system without using [foreigners] who volunteered.” The subject of Red Army POWs becoming Nazi guards, he says, is “one of the non-topics in Holocaust studies that has not been dealt with adequately.”
Others hope the trial will bring attention to the Operation Reinhard concentration camps—Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—where Demjanjuk served and of which no physical evidence remains. These were set up in Poland by SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, after he was “found with his hand in the till,” explains Robert Jan Van Pelt, a historian at the University of Waterloo, and sent to Lublin to “redeem himself—basically, creating his own empire.” Hence the Reinhard camps “were outside of the general concentration camp system,” relying heavily on Ukrainian guards. Although Auschwitz has become the collective symbol for Nazi barbarity, more Jews were murdered in the Reinhard camps—about two million—than anywhere else.
Whether or not Demjanjuk’s case will cast light on lesser-explored annals of Holocaust history, it is clear that the upcoming trial will be legally fraught. For one thing, as Christopher Browning explains, German law makes a distinction between the charge of murder, with no statute of limitations, and killing, which has an expiry date. The lesser charge of killing requires only evidence that someone killed. But the German requirement for a murder-related charge, the only option open to prosecutors in this case, “is that it was committed with a certain mindset. It has to be committed out of a very base motive of hatred,” Browning says. Demjanuk has been charged with what Browning describes as “extreme accessory to murder,” but lawyers will have to prove that he acted with heightened cruelty. “How they are going to prove something like that for Demjanjuk,” Browning ponders, “I just don’t know.”
“Charges like crimes against humanity or genocide would be better suited,” offers Christoph Burchard. But such a category did not exist during the Second World War, so under German law it cannot be retroactively applied. In fact, the very grounds for trying Demjanjuk in Germany are tenuous. He was a Ukrainian who committed crimes in Poland, and Burchard stresses that while Germany has universal jurisdiction in cases of crimes against humanity, that does not apply to murder charges. To reinforce their jurisdiction over the case, Burchard speculates that prosecutors will try to portray Demjanjuk as a kind of “German public official.” That may be a tricky designation for an ex-POW working outside the mainstream Nazi machinery.
