John Demjanjuk background: He lived a lie, but now must face up to the awful truth

Published on Thursday 12 May 2011 16:27

IVAN Mykolaiovych Demjanjuk shuffled forward with his wife Wira who clutched their daughter Lydia tightly in her arms.They had just been disgorged from the ship USS General WG Haan. The date: 9 February, 1952. The place: Ellis Island, New York.

Behind them lay the broken continent of Europe. The Ukrainian-born couple, were seeking to remake themselves thousands of miles from the battlefields and killing grounds.

Both had to lie. Only if they had left Soviet territory before 1 September, 1939, the start of the Second World War, could they be considered eligible to enter the US. So Demjanjuk claimed they were displaced persons and he had spent the war farming in Poland.

"Where?" asked the official. "Sobibor," replied Demjanjuk. With one word, he lit the fuse for the future implosion of his life.

Sobibor existed on no maps during wartime. But there was, once, something there - one of four clandestine killing centres that operated at the onset of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, built to murder on an industrial scale.

By the time the camp was dismantled in 1943, 250,000 people had been gassed and burned in an area the size of three football pitches. And Ivan Demjanjuk, a former Red Army soldier who went over to the other side to stay alive, worked there.

His deception of the US authorities worked on that day in 1952. Demjanjuk and his wife and child were admitted to the US to begin their pursuit of liberty and happiness. After a brief stint in agriculture they moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Ivan became John, Wira became Vera and both became American citizens on 14 November, 1958.

THEY embraced the American dream. Demjanjuk got a job at the local Ford factory, Vera worked as a clerk for General Electric, and life was good.

Two more children, John jnr and Irene, followed and they saved enough money to move to the more affluent suburb of Seven Hills where, every Sunday morning, the family filed into St Vladimir's Orthodox Church for mass.For nearly 25 years they lived in peace. Then, in 1975, their ordered world began to crumble because Demjanjuk finally wrote a letter to the ageing mother he had left behind in Ukraine. "I am alive, mama!" he wrote. The conscientous Soviet citizen that she was, his mother went straight to the authorities to say she no longer qualified for her pension as the mother of a dead soldier. The letter prompted someone, somewhere, to look in the files - and they found two things.

One was the testimony of a man called Ignat Danilchenko, a Ukrainian tried in Kiev in 1949 for his role as a guard at Sobibor. Part of his testimony revealed his friendship at the camp with a fellow guard called Ivan Demjanjuk.

The second thing they found was an identity card of a man called Ivan Demjanjuk, with a photograph and the number 1393, showing the bearer to have been at the SS training camp of Trawniki near Lublin, Poland.Trawniki was a school for 3,500 auxiliaries like Demjanjuk who went there to learn their trade in mass murder.

It is not hard to understand why Demjanjuk should have volunteered to work for the Nazis. He was conscripted into the Red Army following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and captured the following year in the Crimea.

Russians, to the Nazis, were subhumans and treated as such. Statistics show that for every 100 Russian prisoners-of-war captured by the Germans, 97 would die in captivity.

But a few, a very few, were given an option to internment; rations, a uniform, pay, security and extra food for families back home if they worked for the SS on a secret, special project.

Given such a stark choice, it is not hard to imagine why Demjanjuk should have decided to join them. Only inside Trawniki would he have been told just what was required of him.

In August 1975, a journalist from Ukraine arrived in New York with a list which he said named 70 Nazi war criminals living safely in America. The list was passed to the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS).

One of the names on the list was Ivan Demjanjuk. The INS sent Demjanjuk's photograph at the time of his entry to the US to Israel along with those of 15 other suspects. At the same time the justice department submitted a request to an Ohio court that Demjanjuk's citizenship be revoked on the basis that he had "concealed his involvement with Nazi death camps on his immigration application a quarter of a century previously."

The following year the INS made up a spread of photos of visa applications, including Demjanjuk's, from the 1950s and showed them to Holocaust survivors. None recognised him.

At the request of Israel, the photo spread was shown there to survivors of the death camp of Treblinka which accounted for over 900,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Three picked out Demjanjuk as being "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka; a sadistic guard who hacked off the breasts of female prisoners.

This was enough to cause Demjanjuk to be extradited to Israel; where he was put on trial, sentenced to death and languished for five years in a condemned cell.

But he was not "Ivan the Terrible." The survivors of Treblinka had confused him with another brute, Ivan Marchenko, a man who disappeared in an uprising in 1943.It is to Israel's credit that, during Demjanjujk's appeal, it despatched investigators across the world to try to clear up the discrepancies between his Trawniki card - which put Sobibor down as his assigned workplace - and the evidence of eyewitnesses who put him in Treblinka.

The all-important Sobibor ID card, which Demjanjuk said at the Israeli trial - and as his lawyers claimed at the Munich process - was a fake, was found to be genuine when checked against Trawniki guard rosters held at the German Federal Archive in Koblenz.

Israel was sure that he had been in Sobibor but, as his was a capital offence and a trial based essentially on whether he was Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, his conviction was declared unsound in June 1992.

So it was that it fell to Germany, trying to atone for decades of lethargy when it came to handing down justice to the servants of Nazism, to put him on trial.

Stateless in America, Demjanjuk was finally transported to Germany in 2009 for a trial in which no witnesses remaining alive could place him in Sobibor.

Demjanjuk was convicted due to his new masters' love of paperwork - and his own confused storytelling.

Meticulously written SS records revealed that the words of Danilchenko in 1949 held true; that they had both worked in Sobibor and, after it was destroyed to mask what had taken place there, he had travelled with Demjanjuk to the camp of Flossenburg in Germany. But claims of spending 18 months in a PoW camp, and of signing up to fight the Communists proved false.

After everything else is said and done in stripping away the lie that was the life of John Demjanjuk, there is that curious mention of Sobibor.

"Someone mentioned it to me on the boat on the way over and the name just stuck," he said at his trial in Israel.

He could have chosen Warsaw, Poznan, Krakow or a thousand other places. Yet he chose that one name where only ash and bone was produced from the Jews of Europe.