It’s Not Over...

By Dr. Myron Kuropas

John Demjanjuk recently died in a German nursing home. He was waiting appeal of his sentence for being an accessory to the death of 27,900 Jews during World War II at a Nazi death camp in Sobibor, Poland. 

After thirty-six years of trials and errors, John Demjanjuk is finally at peace. Will he receive a Christian burial in an Orthodox cemetery in the United States?  Jewish activists are against it.  They fear that his grave will become a “magnet” for neo-Nazis from all over the world.

No persons at the German trial testified that they had actually seen Demjanjuk kill anybody at Sobibor.  Nor were there witnesses who testified that he was actually at Sobibor.  It didn’t matter.  An identity card supplied by the Soviet Union - which experts, including the FBI, dismissed as a fraud - was all the evidence the Munich court needed to convict. 

The verdict was welcomed by those Germans who wanted to demonstrate to the World that not only Germans were guilty of the Holocaust.  Others, especially Ukrainians, often portrayed as more “vicious” than the Germans, were involved as well.

Was this German jurisprudence at work?  According to Donald M. McKale, author of the 2012 book Nazis After Hitler: How Perpetrators of the Holocaust Cheated Justice and Truth, between 1945 and 1992, the Germans investigated 103,823 individuals suspected of Nazi crimes after the War.  “Of this number, courts convicted only 6,487 (of which 5,513 or 85 percent were condemned for ‘non-lethal’ crimes).  Thirteen were sentenced to death (before the Federal Republic abolished the death penalty, 163 to life imprisonment, 6,197 to temporary imprisonment, and 114 to only fines”.  So much for German justice.

According to German law, John Demjanjuk died an innocent man. A person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and since he died before his final appeal could be heard, the verdict of the lower court, according to Demjanjuk defence counsel Ulrich Busch, is void.

Demjanjuk’s lower court ruling in Israel was voided as well. Five Holocaust survivors testified that he was “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka.  That testimony and the fraudulent Treblinka identity card convinced judges that he was guilty and he was sentenced to hang.  The Soviet Union collapsed and the defence team was able to travel to Ukraine for more documents. They discovered that Demjanjuk was not who Israeli witnesses said he was.  The Israeli Supreme Court acquitted him and he returned to the United States.

Was he safe at last? Hardly.  It was discovered that the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the Nazi-hunting unit of the U.S. Department of Justice, had withheld exculpatory evidence during the Demjanjuk trial in Cleveland. (Demjanjuk was never convicted of war crimes, only of lying on his immigration visa application).  A federal court condemned OSI for perpetrating a “fraud upon the court”.  OSI obviously needed redemption, so OSI now “discovered” evidence that Demjanjuk was guilty of war crimes at Sobibor, another Nazi death camp. Ukraine was asked to hold a trial. So was Poland. Both nations said there was not enough evidence.

Germany was OSI’s last hope. There was a problem, however.  The Germans demurred.  Germany had already paid billions dollars in war reparations to Israel, and millions more to Holocaust survivors throughout the World.  Besides, the German Bundestag had already permitted the statue of limitations to expire, meaning that virtually all crimes attributed to concentration camp personnel acting under orders were no longer eligible for trial.  One German judge refused to try the case. A Munich court judge, however, found a new precedent and agreed to a trial.  And so the circus continued until John Demjanjuk was no more.

Is the hunt for Nazi war criminals over?  Hardly. According to Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, some 80 Nazis and their helpers are still alive.  Half of them are still physically active and eligible for trial.  Zuroff and his Center are offering 25,000 Euro for information leading to their capture. 

What does the Demjanjuk demise mean for Ukrainians in North America?

For some, it means it’s time to move on.  I’m not surprised. Many of these same Ukrainians were among those who wanted our community to ignore the Demjanjuk case from the beginning. 

Other Ukrainians will not forget John Demjanjuk.  Whether we knew him or not, he was an innocent Ukrainian, one of ours. I belong to this group. Just last month, my monograph, “The Demjanjuk Debacle: Trials of a ‘Nazi’ Who Wasn’t” was published in Ukraine. It is available in English.  Read it and then tell me that forgetting John Demjanjuk is the honourable thing for us to do.

NP Editor’s Note:  The above monograph is available for $15 (plus $2 S&H) from Ukrainian Educational Associates, 107 Ilehamwood Drive, DeKalb, IL 60115 USA.