It chose to investigate the names as leads. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court's rulings on the authenticity of the Trawniki card and the falsity of Demjanjuk's alibi but ruled that reasonable doubt existed that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk became a US citizen in 1958. The investigation charged that OSI had ignored evidence indicating that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, uncovered an internal OSI memo that questioned the case against Demjanjuk. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. [32] INS quickly discovered that Demjanjuk had listed his place of domicile from 1937 to 1943 as Sobibor on his US visa application of 1951. Ivan the Terrible John Demjanjuk True Story - The Trial of the On 14 November 1958, Demjanjuk became a naturalized citizen of the United States and legally changed his name from Ivan to John. The authenticity of the Trawniki card was affirmed by US government experts who examined the original document as well as by Wolfgang Scheffler of the Free University of Berlin during the hearing,[42][43] Scheffler also testified to the crimes committed by Trawniki men and that it was possible that Demjanjuk had been moved between Sobibor and Treblinka. CLEVELAND There is a new show on Netlfix that you may have heard of called "Devil Next Door." It is about John Demjanjuk, a local autoworker accused of being a Nazi death camp criminal. In the records of the former Ukrainian KGB in Kiev, the Demjanjuk defense team found dozens of statements of former Treblinka guards whom Soviet authorities had tried in the early 1960s. Washington, DC 20024-2126 What The Devil Next Door on Netflix doesn't tell you - Digital Spy The German case set an important precedent and led to subsequent prosecutions in Germany that are continuing more than 70 years after the Holocaust. Working as a mechanic at a Ford plant, he lived a quiet, suburban lifeat least until 1977, when the Justice Department sued to revoke his citizenship, claiming he had lied on his immigration papers to conceal war crimes committed at another Nazi extermination camp, Treblinka. It is a card Demjanjuk disputed, but one a federal judge ruled was legitimate. On 28 December 2005, an immigration judge ordered Demjanjuk deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. On May 12, 2011, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. This was the first time someone has been convicted by a German court solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of being involved in the death of any specific inmate. [28], Demjanjuk, his wife and daughter arrived in New York City aboard the USSGeneral W. G. Haan on 9 February 1952. [171], Demjanjuk's conviction for accessory to murder solely on the basis of having been a guard at a concentration camp set a new legal precedent in Germany. Cookie Policy In 1979, the newly created Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the DOJ took over prosecution of the case. The photos, said Cueppers, are a quantum leap in the visual record on the Holocaust in occupied Poland.. [20] These documents were found in former Soviet archives in Moscow and in Lithuania, which placed Demjanjuk at Sobibor on 26 March 1943, at Flossenbrg on 1 October 1943, and at Majdanek from November 1942 through early March 1943; administrative documents from Flossenbrg referencing Demjanjuk's name and Trawniki card number were also uncovered. [89], On 29 July 1993, a five-judge panel of the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict on appeal. [146] The prosecution further argued, using Pohl's testimony, that Demjanjuk's choice after being captured by the Germans was guard duty or forced labor, not death, the Trawniki guards were a privileged group that was essential to the Holocaust, and that Demjanjuk's failure to desert, something many Trawniki guards did, showed that he had been at Sobibor voluntarily. [114][115] On 10 November 2008, German federal prosecutor Kurt Schrimm directed prosecutors to file in Munich for extradition, since Demjanjuk once lived there. Demjanjuk was an autoworker in Cleveland who was accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a Nazi concentration camp guard who committed terrible crimes. [101], Demjanjuk was released to return to the United States. Following a lengthy investigation and a 1981 trial, the US District Federal Court in Cleveland stripped Demjanjuk of his US citizenship. [22] His application stated that he had worked as a driver in the town of Sobibr in eastern Poland. The BIA denied Demjanjuk's motion to reopen his deportation case. Demjanjuk appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which on 30 April 2004 ruled that Demjanjuk could be again stripped of his US citizenship because the Justice Department had presented "clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence" of Demjanjuk's service in Nazi death camps. [145], As part of the prosecution's case, historian Dieter Pohl of the University of Klagenfurt testified that Sobibor was a death camp, the sole purpose of which was the killing of Jews, and that all Trawniki men had been generalists involved in guarding the prisoners as well as other duties; therefore, if Demjanjuk was a Trawniki man at Sobibor, he had necessarily been involved in sending the prisoners to their deaths and was an accessory to murder. [50] Demjanjuk's citizenship was revoked in 1981 for having lied about his past,[37] with the judge persuaded especially by the testimony of Otto Horn. He was born in March 1920 in Dobovi Makharyntsi, a village in Vinnitsa Oblast of what was then Soviet Ukraine. [90] The judges agreed that Demjanjuk most likely served as a Nazi Wachmann (guard) in the Trawniki unit[88] and had been posted at Sobibor extermination camp and two other camps. It was the first televised trial in Israeli history. [49] The defense also submitted the statement of Feodor Fedorenko, a Ukrainian guard at Treblinka, which stated that Fedorenko could not recall having seen Demjanjuk at Treblinka. [82], Demjanjuk testified during the trial that he was imprisoned in a camp in Chem until 1944, when he was transferred to another camp in Austria, where he remained until he joined an anti-Soviet Ukrainian army group. He was deported to Germany, where prosecutors presented various pieces of evidence suggesting Demjanjuk was one of the Trawniki MenSoviet prisoners of war who were recruited by the Nazis to work as guards at the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka killing centers.
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