The Persecution of John Demjanjuk

The Persecution of John Demjanjuk


By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
“John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders,” ran the headline on
the BBC. The lead began:

“A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more
than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland.”

Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: “No evidence was produced
that he committed a specific crime.”

That is correct. No evidence was produced, no witness came forward to testify he
ever saw Demjanjuk injure anyone. And the critical evidence that put Demjanjuk
at Sobibor came — from the KGB.

First was a KGB summary of an alleged interview with one Ignat Danilchenko,
who claimed he was a guard at Sobibor and knew Demjanjuk. Second was the
Soviet-supplied ID card from the Trawniki camp that trained guards.

There are major problems with both pieces of “evidence.”

First, Danilchenko has been dead for a quarter of a century, no one in the West
ever interviewed him, and Moscow stonewalled defense requests for access to
the full Danilchenko file. His very existence raises a question.

How could a Red Army soldier who turned collaborator and Nazi camp guard
survive Operation Keelhaul, which sent all Soviet POWs back to Joseph Stalin,
where they were either murdered or sent to the Gulag?

As for the ID card from Trawniki, just last month there was unearthed at the
National Archives in College Park, Md., a 1985 report from the Cleveland office
of the FBI, which, after studying the card, concluded it was “quite likely” a
KGB forgery.

“Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which
is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and
allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB.”

This FBI report, never made public, was done just as Demjanjuk was being
deported to Israel to stand trial as “Ivan the Terrible,” the murderer of Treblinka.
In a sensational trial covered by the world’s press, Demjanjuk was convicted
and sentenced to hang.

But after five years on death row, new evidence turned up when the Soviet Union
collapsed and Russia opened up. That evidence wholly validated the claims of
Demjanjuk’s defenders.

Not only had Demjanjuk never even been at Treblinka, the Soviet files contained
a photograph of the real “Ivan” — a larger and older man.

To its eternal credit, the Israeli Supreme Court reversed the conviction, rejected
a request to retry Demjanjuk as a camp guard elsewhere in Poland, freed him
and sent him home to America.

Exposed as a laughing stock, and denounced for fraud by Ohio district and
appellate courts, the Office of Special Investigations began crafting a new case,
John Demjanjuk of Sobibor, to deport and try again the old man whose defense
attorneys had made fools of them.

Thus the Sobibor story and Demjanjuk’s supposed complicity in the murder
of 28,000 Jews — though, as the BBC notes, no one testified at the trial that they
ever saw John Demjanjuk injure anyone.

Consider the life this tormented American has lived.

Born in Ukraine in 1920, as a boy he endured the Holodomor — the famine
imposed on his people in 1932 and 1933 by Stalin and his hated henchman
Lazar Kaganovich, which resulted in the starvation and death of somewhere
between 5 million and 9 million Ukrainians.

It has been called by historians the “forgotten Holocaust.”

Conscripted into the Red Army, Demjanjuk was captured in the German
blitzkrieg. Not only did Demjanjuk survive, he managed to evade the Allied order,
under Keelhaul, for all Red Army POWs to be repatriated to Stalin, which was the
Soviet dictator’s demand before he would return the U.S. and British POWs his
troops liberated in the march to Berlin.

In the war’s aftermath, Demjanjuk married his wife Vera, who had been
conscripted in the Ukraine and brought forcibly west to work in the German
economy.

Thence he moved to Cleveland, became an autoworker, raised a family and
practiced his Christian faith. But he made a mistake.

He sent his wife to Ukraine to tell his aged mother that he had survived the war
and was living in the great United States of America.

Word got around the village. The KGB came calling. Swiftly, the payments his
mother had been receiving for her war hero son were halted, and suddenly, there
turned up an ID card that said John Demjanjuk had been trained at Trawniki
to be a Nazi camp guard.

The KGB began feeding OSI from its “files,” as OSI began a manic persecution
of Demjanjuk that has lasted 30 years.

Stalin died in bed in 1953. Kaganovich died with his family around him in
Moscow in 1991. And John Demjanjuk, 91, after spending five years on death row
for a crime he did not commit in a place he never was, is stateless and homeless in
a Germany where veterans of the SS walk free.

That is justice — in our world.

May 13, 2011

http://buchanan.org/blog/the-persecution-of-john-demjanjuk-4743