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I once met John Demjanjuk. We did not speak but the memory will haunt me for ever. It was July 1993, five years after the Ukrainian peasant-turned-SS trooper was sentenced to death in Israel for being “Ivan the Terrible”, a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp, where 870,000 Jews were gassed.
As I walked past the heavy-set thug on my way to the press benches on that hot Jerusalem summer's day my blood ran cold. I was there on holiday and thought I'd look in briefly on the trial. I stayed, frozen to my seat.
Demjanjuk had been sentenced to death in 1988. At his first trial a handful of witnesses who had survived Treblinka identified the man they believed they had last seen 40 years earlier.
Their pain was palpable but the judges were more impressed by the “Trevniki document”. It came from an SS training camp in Ukraine, showing that Demjanjuk had thrown his lot in with the Nazi invaders in 1942.
After the war Demjanjuk made a fraudulent visa application that got him into the US. He settled in Ohio, became a car worker, married and had a family. But in 1981 Israeli war crime investigators supplied US immigration with evidence of his deception and he was stripped of his US citizenship, extradited to Israel in 1986, and tried and convicted two years later. Then, as Demjanjuk's lawyer appealed, the prosecution took advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the opening of Soviet archives. They went to Russia expecting to find the smoking gun that would finally put an end to Ivan the Terrible.
The wartime papers confirmed that Demjanjuk had indeed gone over to the dark side but there was nothing about Treblinka. The prosecutor felt duty bound to hand the exculpatory evidence to the defence; at the 1993 trial, the judges set Demjanjuk free. Respect for the law and due process prevailed: the man was not guilty of the charges brought against him in 1988 and could not now be convicted of other offences, however appalling.
The prosecutor, Michael Shaked, an old schoolfriend, recognised me and we spoke when the hearing ended. He told me it was he who had gone to Russia and discovered the crucial papers.
Seeing his quarry go free clearly upset him but he knew it had to be. Another colleague, journalist and holocaust historian Tom Segev, said: “There is no reason for rejoicing, because Demjanjuk is a war criminal who got away on a technicality. But there is every reason to be proud of our justice system's integrity, independence and maturity.''
Now Demjanjuk is facing justice once again. The Germans have found evidence that in 1943 he was involved in the deaths of 29,000 Jews, many of them women and children, at Sobibor, in Nazi-occupied south-eastern Poland. At least 1,900 were German: German law allows the prosecution of those accused of killing Germans, even if the crime was committed elsewhere. His trial in Munich begins today.
Demjanjuk is now 89 and has evaded justice for most of his life but he will never sleep peacefully in his bed again. As someone who lost dozens of close relatives in the death camps, I feel that the thousands whose lives he ended so cruelly may, with this knowledge, sleep more peacefully in their graves.
Reader views (3)
I don't understand the effort being put into hunting Nazis when the countless of millions of victims of Communists have been forgotten.
I understand that those that commit such crimes must be punished, but there seems to be a very clear double standard.
I am not aware of any Communists punished for murdering 20,000,000 Christian Russians or 3,000,000 Catholic Poles, (not counting all the other victims in Eastern Europe) even though many of those that served in the security structures or functionaries of the Communist regime emigrated to places such as the US, Israel, Sweden or the UK. In fact looking at the British War Crimes Act 1991, this probably does not count as one.
Helena Wolinska-Brus, a former Stalanist prosecutor in Communist Poland was wanted by the Poles for 10 years to stand trial on charges of faking evidence against Polish resistance members, resulting in the execution of a leading resistance officer. The British goverment ignored all arrest warrants.
- Cromwell, London
It is absurd, an Ukrainian Prisoner of War being brought back to Germany to face charges for being a guard in a system they themselves created and designed and instructed...but on the same time giving their own countrymen amnesty from being convicted of such charges (1969*)... I mean there must be thousands and thousands of former guards who are Germans and potentially in his position, aiding and abetting the killings of thousands and thousands....hmmmm..where would it end...? When will this ever end. this man was freed once by the highest court in Israel. Quite frankly it smacks of a genuine witchhunt.
- Frey, Guildford
We, the Jewish people, will never forget and nor should we. The expression 'forgive and forget', may apply to a family upset, or a loan that went unpaid, but in respect to the Holocaust and the deaths of millions of Jews, all who were innocent, there can be no forgiveness for those that aided and abetted such vile crimes!
- Keith Sanford, London, UK
