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Demjanjuk saga enters final round
Nov. 26, 2009, 10:30 p.m. | Op-ed — by Andriy J. Semotiuk
John Demjanjuk (above) is transported in an ambulance from the airport in Munich to the Stadelheim prison on May 12. Demjanjuk arrived in Germany from the United States to face charges that he assisted in the murder of over 29,000 Jews.
© AP
Andriy J. Semotiuk writes: With shoddy evidence, a show trial in Germany is not likely to bring justice to this native of Ukraine.
As the curtain rises on the trial of John Demjanjuk on Nov. 30 in Munich, Germany, he is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 29,700 inmates of the Nazi Sobibor concentration camp during World War II.
The efforts to prosecute Demjanjuk over the last 30 years, the charges and the evidence expected to be presented all point to a show trial in the making. The rule of law is not likely to prevail.
Media coverage has, so far, neglected to highlight that – in every criminal trial, including Demjanjuk’s – the basic presumption of innocence applies. The accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Demjanjuk does not have to prove his innocence. The prosecution must prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Calling him a Nazi may garner headlines, but it will not change the fact that Nazi ideology precluded non-Aryans like Demjanjuk, who was Ukrainian and, therefore, an Untermensch or subhuman. This made him ineligible to be part of the Nazi Party. As an Untermensch, it is more likely Demjanjuk was a victim of the Nazi regime than a persecutor.
Background
Demjanjuk was born in Soviet-occupied Ukraine in 1920. As a child, Demjanjuk lived through the 1932-1933 Holodomor inflicted on Ukraine by Josef Stalin, killing millions of Ukrainians by starvation. Having survived such a Soviet atrocity, it is not surprising that – with the outbreak of World War II – Demjanjuk was not exactly eager to join the Soviet Red Army. Nonetheless, he was conscripted.
In 1942, he was captured by the Germans. According to him, he languished during his wartime years as a German prisoner of war until 1945. After the war, Demjanjuk and others like him from Soviet Ukraine became the target of Operation Keelhaul. Arising out of an agreement reached in Yalta among Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, Operation Keelhaul enabled Soviet Red Army officers, initially acting with Allied military support, to comb through displaced persons camps looking for anyone who could reveal the truth about the abhorrent Stalinist past.
Out of those caught and destined for Soviet repatriation, some committed suicide, some were shot trying to escape and still others ended up in the Soviet Gulag. The fate of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn comes to mind in this context. Anyone who refused to return, or who managed to evade Soviet capture, was accused by the Soviets of Nazi collaboration - whether the allegation was true or false.
Forcible repatriation became the terror of most displaced persons from the Soviet Union, including Demjanjuk. It was ironic, since the Soviets actually collaborated with the Nazis. They signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact on the eve of World War II, carving up Poland with the Germans, their allies during the first two years of the war. Nonetheless, such accusations leveled against displaced persons hindered those who were unjustly accused in their efforts to emigrate to the West, at least until the Allies finally caught on to this Soviet intrigue.
In this context, in 1952, Demjanjuk obtained permission to emigrate to the United States with his wife and daughter. He settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where he found work as a mechanic at a Ford auto plant. He then had another daughter and a son. More than 20 years passed.
Accusations arise
According to recent stories, Michael Hanusiak, editor of the New York-based Ukrainian Daily News, in 1975 compiled a list of Ukrainians suspected of collaborating with Germans and presented it to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Demjanjuk was on the list. What Engelhart failed to identify was that the Ukrainian Daily News was nothing more than a Soviet mouthpiece, at least according to Yoram Sheftel, an Israeli attorney who wrote about the incident in his book Defending Ivan the Terrible. The newspaper served as a convenient vehicle for the Soviet KGB to set off Ukrainians against Jews, particularly in the United States.
In 1977, Demjanjuk was accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a gas chamber operator in Tremblinka death camp in Poland. From 1977 to 1993, Demjanjuk faced a long series of court hearings through the American and then Israeli court systems. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Israel.
In the course of those hearings, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. In short, for 15 years, as he sat in U.S. and Israeli jails, those who pursued and prosecuted Demjanjuk were positive that he was not in Sobibor as they claim now, but rather in Tremblinka.
But in 1993, after the defense was able to amass irrefutable evidence to the contrary, the Israeli Supreme Court lifted the sentence, dismissed the charges which, incidentally, included that he was in Sobibor, and allowed him to return to the United States. In the meantime, a U.S. federal appeals court had opened up his case after determining that U.S. prosecutors were guilty of prosecutorial misconduct in failing to earlier reveal to the defense certain exculpatory evidence they had in their files. Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship was reinstated and he was allowed to go free once again.
As it turned out, Demjanjuk was definitely not Ivan the Terrible of Tremblinka. But those who had pursued Demjanjuk for 15 years, swearing for certain he was in Tremblinka and not anywhere else, then declared – no, he was not in Tremblinka, but rather he was in Sobibor! The process started all over again in 2002. And this year, Demjanjuk was once again on an airplane headed out of the country, this time to Germany. That brings us to now.
The German case
The question arises: Why has Germany decided to target Demjanjuk? And why now, after 30 years of silence, while the Demjanjuk case made its way through the U.S. and Israeli courts? After all, there was no shortage of Nazis to prosecute – no shortage of party members, Nazi government officials, army officers and camp commandants. Why, for example, didn’t Germany prosecute Reinhard Gehlen, the former Nazi chief of the eastern front intelligence and the other ex-Nazis he gathered in the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) that he headed after the war, according to the Engelhart article?
The answer is that Germany did not have the stomach to prosecute its own transgressors. While modern-day Germany has paid dearly to disassociate itself from its Nazi past, paying out millions of dollars in reparations to Nazi victims, running effective educational, restorative and commemorative programs, it is also true that Germany’s pursuit and conviction of its own Nazi transgressors has been not as impressive. Though German courts investigated more than 100,000 cases, only some 6,500 accused were convicted and, of these, most received light sentences. Not long ago Germany passed legislation that effectively provided amnesty from prosecution for German Nazis, including SS concentration camp commanders and their German subordinates. But the amnesty did not include Untermenschen like Demjanjuk.
That fact alone makes it hard to believe that this case is not a show trial. Consider the charge itself. Demjanjuk is charged not with war crimes or crimes against humanity, nor even of murder, but of being an accessory to murder. Not murder in Germany, but in Sobibor, that is to say, in Poland. Not as a high-level official, but as a low-ranking guard. Not as a German, but as a Ukrainian. Not of one or a few victims - but of 29,700 victims! Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” It seems almost as if this is the approach being used by the prosecutors in Munich and that German descendants appear ready to buy it once again today.
Two key issues
For 30 years, Demjanjuk has maintained his innocence. Yet now, the German prosecutors who say that he was present in Sobibor will use a Travniki identity card to attempt to prove this claim and will argue that he was a volunteer there. While it is impossible in the context of an article like this to thoroughly deal with these charges, nonetheless they deserve at least some comment.
In the book Defending Ivan the Terrible, Yoram Sheftel, the Israeli defense attorney in the successful Demjanjuk appeal, points out that -- from the very beginning -- American authorities with the help of Israeli police prepared “photo spreads” to be presented to Sobibor survivors in which Demjanjuk’s picture was included for identification.
Sheftel indicates that “all 10 Sobibor survivors in Israel, who were shown the photographs, recognized neither Demjanjuk nor Federenko as someone from the Sobibor death camp. Thus, at that early stage, it was clear that the Soviet plot to present Demjanjuk as a former guard at the Sobibor death camp was totally unfounded.”
So far as is known there is no witness who can establish that Demjanjuk even harmed someone, much less murdered anyone. Only one statement taken by the Soviet KGB secret police of a Sobibor guard named Danylchenko indicated that Demjanjuk was also there. Danylchenko later indicated he was tortured by the KGB and has since died without ever being cross-examined. That is the extent of the known German prosecution evidence on presence.
With regard to the Travniki card, Sheftel indicates that on Jan. 23, 1987, the original Travniki document that purports to indicate that Demjanjuk was in Sobibor was provided for examination to the German police force’s main criminal-identification laboratory in Weisbaden, known as BKA. The laboratory analysts indicated that even after a cursory examination, it was evident that the document was a forgery. They pointed out that the face in the photograph which the prosecution in Israel had identified as Demjanjuk’s had been posted on to the uniform using photo-montage techniques. The picture was not originally attached to the card, but had been transferred from another document. There was no match between the seal on the Travniki picture and that on the document itself. Further German analysis was stopped by the Israelis with this initial report.
The Travniki document was also the subject matter of the evidence of Julius Grant, the world’s foremost forensic expert and the man who revealed the forgeries of the “Mussolini diaries” and the “Hitler diaries.”
Having analyzed all the known signatures of Demjanjuk in the years 1947 to 1986, Grant testified that the Demjanjuk signature on the card differed from all the others in the way the Ds and Ms were formed and in the fact that in all other signatures the writing was continuous but on the card it was not. Further, Grant pointed out that there were two holes in the right side of the picture on the card whilst on the paper under the holes in the photograph there were no holes. Judging by the purple ink found inside the holes which was similar to ink used by the KGB and the nature of the spacing of the holes, Grant concluded it was more logical to assume that the photograph was unstapled from some other Soviet documents and attached to the card in the Soviet Union, than that it was attached in Travniki in 1942.
Israeli officials refused to allow Grant to detach the photo from the card to make a conclusive finding, but he nonetheless concluded his evidence by saying that “the Travniki document cannot be an authentic document belonging to the defendant Demjanjuk.”
As for the contention that non-German guards in Nazi concentration camps were volunteers, the evidence indicates that basically such Wachmaener were chosen by the Germans based on physical fitness and told they could either become camp guards or remain in prisoner of war camps where they were mistreated or died. Those who tried to escape were shot. What choice is there in these alternatives? This assumes that the prosecution can establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Demjanjuk was in Sobibor in the first place. This is a tall order to fill.
A fair trial
According to the book Letters from Nuremberg, Tom Dodd, one of the key prosecutors who sought to bring leading Nazis to justice, indicates that prosecutors were as concerned about making sure that the trials were fair as they were about convicting the accused.
So far, there is little evidence that this is true in the case of Demjanjuk. In fact, in their zeal to appease his adversaries, prosecutors in Munich appear to be ready to abandon the rule of law and all reason. For this reason, the Demjanjuk trial is not just another Nazi war crime trial, but it is a dangerous moment in German history.
In considering the effects of the Holocaust, we are often reminded of philosopher George Santayana’s admonition that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We are reminded that in 1933, Germany targeted the Jews as scapegoats for the nation’s political and economic problems. World leaders, including those who professed concern for reason and the rule of law, looked on in silence.
Today the German leadership appears to be targeting Demjanjuk, and other untermenschen like him as scapegoats to slough off German guilt for what happened in the concentration camps of World War II. The question is whether the German people, and those who today profess concern for reason and the rule of law, will look on in silence again? In the end, this is not so much a trial of Demjanjuk as it is a trial of modern-day Germany.
Andriy J. Semotiuk is an attorney, with a practice in international law dealing with immigration. He is a member of the bars of California and New York in the United States and Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia in Canada. A former United Nations correspondent in New York, Mr. Semotiuk is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club and resides in Los Angeles. He can be reached at andy@myworkvisa.com.
The efforts to prosecute Demjanjuk over the last 30 years, the charges and the evidence expected to be presented all point to a show trial in the making. The rule of law is not likely to prevail.
Media coverage has, so far, neglected to highlight that – in every criminal trial, including Demjanjuk’s – the basic presumption of innocence applies. The accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Demjanjuk does not have to prove his innocence. The prosecution must prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Calling him a Nazi may garner headlines, but it will not change the fact that Nazi ideology precluded non-Aryans like Demjanjuk, who was Ukrainian and, therefore, an Untermensch or subhuman. This made him ineligible to be part of the Nazi Party. As an Untermensch, it is more likely Demjanjuk was a victim of the Nazi regime than a persecutor.
Background
Demjanjuk was born in Soviet-occupied Ukraine in 1920. As a child, Demjanjuk lived through the 1932-1933 Holodomor inflicted on Ukraine by Josef Stalin, killing millions of Ukrainians by starvation. Having survived such a Soviet atrocity, it is not surprising that – with the outbreak of World War II – Demjanjuk was not exactly eager to join the Soviet Red Army. Nonetheless, he was conscripted.
In 1942, he was captured by the Germans. According to him, he languished during his wartime years as a German prisoner of war until 1945. After the war, Demjanjuk and others like him from Soviet Ukraine became the target of Operation Keelhaul. Arising out of an agreement reached in Yalta among Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, Operation Keelhaul enabled Soviet Red Army officers, initially acting with Allied military support, to comb through displaced persons camps looking for anyone who could reveal the truth about the abhorrent Stalinist past.
Out of those caught and destined for Soviet repatriation, some committed suicide, some were shot trying to escape and still others ended up in the Soviet Gulag. The fate of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn comes to mind in this context. Anyone who refused to return, or who managed to evade Soviet capture, was accused by the Soviets of Nazi collaboration - whether the allegation was true or false.
Forcible repatriation became the terror of most displaced persons from the Soviet Union, including Demjanjuk. It was ironic, since the Soviets actually collaborated with the Nazis. They signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact on the eve of World War II, carving up Poland with the Germans, their allies during the first two years of the war. Nonetheless, such accusations leveled against displaced persons hindered those who were unjustly accused in their efforts to emigrate to the West, at least until the Allies finally caught on to this Soviet intrigue.
In this context, in 1952, Demjanjuk obtained permission to emigrate to the United States with his wife and daughter. He settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where he found work as a mechanic at a Ford auto plant. He then had another daughter and a son. More than 20 years passed.
Accusations arise
According to recent stories, Michael Hanusiak, editor of the New York-based Ukrainian Daily News, in 1975 compiled a list of Ukrainians suspected of collaborating with Germans and presented it to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Demjanjuk was on the list. What Engelhart failed to identify was that the Ukrainian Daily News was nothing more than a Soviet mouthpiece, at least according to Yoram Sheftel, an Israeli attorney who wrote about the incident in his book Defending Ivan the Terrible. The newspaper served as a convenient vehicle for the Soviet KGB to set off Ukrainians against Jews, particularly in the United States.
In 1977, Demjanjuk was accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a gas chamber operator in Tremblinka death camp in Poland. From 1977 to 1993, Demjanjuk faced a long series of court hearings through the American and then Israeli court systems. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Israel.
In the course of those hearings, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. In short, for 15 years, as he sat in U.S. and Israeli jails, those who pursued and prosecuted Demjanjuk were positive that he was not in Sobibor as they claim now, but rather in Tremblinka.
But in 1993, after the defense was able to amass irrefutable evidence to the contrary, the Israeli Supreme Court lifted the sentence, dismissed the charges which, incidentally, included that he was in Sobibor, and allowed him to return to the United States. In the meantime, a U.S. federal appeals court had opened up his case after determining that U.S. prosecutors were guilty of prosecutorial misconduct in failing to earlier reveal to the defense certain exculpatory evidence they had in their files. Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship was reinstated and he was allowed to go free once again.
As it turned out, Demjanjuk was definitely not Ivan the Terrible of Tremblinka. But those who had pursued Demjanjuk for 15 years, swearing for certain he was in Tremblinka and not anywhere else, then declared – no, he was not in Tremblinka, but rather he was in Sobibor! The process started all over again in 2002. And this year, Demjanjuk was once again on an airplane headed out of the country, this time to Germany. That brings us to now.
The German case
The question arises: Why has Germany decided to target Demjanjuk? And why now, after 30 years of silence, while the Demjanjuk case made its way through the U.S. and Israeli courts? After all, there was no shortage of Nazis to prosecute – no shortage of party members, Nazi government officials, army officers and camp commandants. Why, for example, didn’t Germany prosecute Reinhard Gehlen, the former Nazi chief of the eastern front intelligence and the other ex-Nazis he gathered in the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) that he headed after the war, according to the Engelhart article?
The answer is that Germany did not have the stomach to prosecute its own transgressors. While modern-day Germany has paid dearly to disassociate itself from its Nazi past, paying out millions of dollars in reparations to Nazi victims, running effective educational, restorative and commemorative programs, it is also true that Germany’s pursuit and conviction of its own Nazi transgressors has been not as impressive. Though German courts investigated more than 100,000 cases, only some 6,500 accused were convicted and, of these, most received light sentences. Not long ago Germany passed legislation that effectively provided amnesty from prosecution for German Nazis, including SS concentration camp commanders and their German subordinates. But the amnesty did not include Untermenschen like Demjanjuk.
That fact alone makes it hard to believe that this case is not a show trial. Consider the charge itself. Demjanjuk is charged not with war crimes or crimes against humanity, nor even of murder, but of being an accessory to murder. Not murder in Germany, but in Sobibor, that is to say, in Poland. Not as a high-level official, but as a low-ranking guard. Not as a German, but as a Ukrainian. Not of one or a few victims - but of 29,700 victims! Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” It seems almost as if this is the approach being used by the prosecutors in Munich and that German descendants appear ready to buy it once again today.
Two key issues
For 30 years, Demjanjuk has maintained his innocence. Yet now, the German prosecutors who say that he was present in Sobibor will use a Travniki identity card to attempt to prove this claim and will argue that he was a volunteer there. While it is impossible in the context of an article like this to thoroughly deal with these charges, nonetheless they deserve at least some comment.
In the book Defending Ivan the Terrible, Yoram Sheftel, the Israeli defense attorney in the successful Demjanjuk appeal, points out that -- from the very beginning -- American authorities with the help of Israeli police prepared “photo spreads” to be presented to Sobibor survivors in which Demjanjuk’s picture was included for identification.
Sheftel indicates that “all 10 Sobibor survivors in Israel, who were shown the photographs, recognized neither Demjanjuk nor Federenko as someone from the Sobibor death camp. Thus, at that early stage, it was clear that the Soviet plot to present Demjanjuk as a former guard at the Sobibor death camp was totally unfounded.”
So far as is known there is no witness who can establish that Demjanjuk even harmed someone, much less murdered anyone. Only one statement taken by the Soviet KGB secret police of a Sobibor guard named Danylchenko indicated that Demjanjuk was also there. Danylchenko later indicated he was tortured by the KGB and has since died without ever being cross-examined. That is the extent of the known German prosecution evidence on presence.
With regard to the Travniki card, Sheftel indicates that on Jan. 23, 1987, the original Travniki document that purports to indicate that Demjanjuk was in Sobibor was provided for examination to the German police force’s main criminal-identification laboratory in Weisbaden, known as BKA. The laboratory analysts indicated that even after a cursory examination, it was evident that the document was a forgery. They pointed out that the face in the photograph which the prosecution in Israel had identified as Demjanjuk’s had been posted on to the uniform using photo-montage techniques. The picture was not originally attached to the card, but had been transferred from another document. There was no match between the seal on the Travniki picture and that on the document itself. Further German analysis was stopped by the Israelis with this initial report.
The Travniki document was also the subject matter of the evidence of Julius Grant, the world’s foremost forensic expert and the man who revealed the forgeries of the “Mussolini diaries” and the “Hitler diaries.”
Having analyzed all the known signatures of Demjanjuk in the years 1947 to 1986, Grant testified that the Demjanjuk signature on the card differed from all the others in the way the Ds and Ms were formed and in the fact that in all other signatures the writing was continuous but on the card it was not. Further, Grant pointed out that there were two holes in the right side of the picture on the card whilst on the paper under the holes in the photograph there were no holes. Judging by the purple ink found inside the holes which was similar to ink used by the KGB and the nature of the spacing of the holes, Grant concluded it was more logical to assume that the photograph was unstapled from some other Soviet documents and attached to the card in the Soviet Union, than that it was attached in Travniki in 1942.
Israeli officials refused to allow Grant to detach the photo from the card to make a conclusive finding, but he nonetheless concluded his evidence by saying that “the Travniki document cannot be an authentic document belonging to the defendant Demjanjuk.”
As for the contention that non-German guards in Nazi concentration camps were volunteers, the evidence indicates that basically such Wachmaener were chosen by the Germans based on physical fitness and told they could either become camp guards or remain in prisoner of war camps where they were mistreated or died. Those who tried to escape were shot. What choice is there in these alternatives? This assumes that the prosecution can establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Demjanjuk was in Sobibor in the first place. This is a tall order to fill.
A fair trial
According to the book Letters from Nuremberg, Tom Dodd, one of the key prosecutors who sought to bring leading Nazis to justice, indicates that prosecutors were as concerned about making sure that the trials were fair as they were about convicting the accused.
So far, there is little evidence that this is true in the case of Demjanjuk. In fact, in their zeal to appease his adversaries, prosecutors in Munich appear to be ready to abandon the rule of law and all reason. For this reason, the Demjanjuk trial is not just another Nazi war crime trial, but it is a dangerous moment in German history.
In considering the effects of the Holocaust, we are often reminded of philosopher George Santayana’s admonition that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We are reminded that in 1933, Germany targeted the Jews as scapegoats for the nation’s political and economic problems. World leaders, including those who professed concern for reason and the rule of law, looked on in silence.
Today the German leadership appears to be targeting Demjanjuk, and other untermenschen like him as scapegoats to slough off German guilt for what happened in the concentration camps of World War II. The question is whether the German people, and those who today profess concern for reason and the rule of law, will look on in silence again? In the end, this is not so much a trial of Demjanjuk as it is a trial of modern-day Germany.
Andriy J. Semotiuk is an attorney, with a practice in international law dealing with immigration. He is a member of the bars of California and New York in the United States and Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia in Canada. A former United Nations correspondent in New York, Mr. Semotiuk is a member of the Los Angeles Press Club and resides in Los Angeles. He can be reached at andy@myworkvisa.com.
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Mr.Semotiuk is just flat full of it. Hang him from the tallest tree.
...still suffering from soviet communist nostalgia hangover??? The days of turning in your neighbor from jealousy motives are over ...if you accuse anyone of anything today ...you better have some proof or you merely reveal yourself to be "just flat full of it." Remember your hysteria and hate and vindictive reflect and state more about YOU than your intended victim!
neo-Stalinist speaks again
I live in Cleveland Ohio. Many people from Ukraine, Poland etc. came here after the war. We welcomed them into our community, and they worked hard to make a better life for themselves ansd their families. I cannot say whether Mr. Demjanjuk did or did not do what they say. That is for the courts to decide. However, the people of Ukraine are liked and respected here.
Andriy Semotiuk writes that Germany has paid "millions of dollars" in reparations to Nazi-era survivors. Maybe that's how much the victims received in the end, but Germany paid out many times that figure. The reparations easily went into many billions of dollars, and continue even, today.
This evidence has been contorted to have this man reported and deported. In Israel the evidence proved to be totally fabricated. This is rediculou, preposterous, and outrageous. It does not fit. If it does not fit, you must acquit!
The Stashynsky precedent
http://kyivscoop.blogspot.com/2009/10/stashynsky-precedent.html
Even if Demjanjuk did commit a Nazi war crime, it was ultimately Hitler who ordered it
Assume for a moment that the Germans actually do have a Nazi camp guard from the former Soviet Union awaiting trial for war crimes. The Germans are therefore prosecuting a Prisoner of War they caught and incarcerated. The German are prosecuting a non-German for crimes ordered from up top by Adolf Hitler and “German Nazi persons.”
Was this theoretical person merely an accessory to murder? (A German court found that Stashynsky was on the lowest rung of the responsibility ladder.) Or did he/she commit over 29,000 acts of murder of his/her own volition?
Why don't we see trials for the Jews that were involved in the far greater holocaust in the Soviet Union undr communism?
Could it be that those victims were primarily Christian?
I think so.
There's that Ukrainian anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head again.
Oh that's right because Jews are not guilty of any war crimes. The Jews are the biggest war criminals out there. The only difference between them and the Nazis is that fact that they keep getting away with it. Too bad that those days are slowly coming in an end. The world has had enough of the Kosher BS.
I feel sorry for you!
Guest,
Many think that the biggest mass murderers in modern history were Jewish.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html
What do you mean think? THEY ARE!!!!
because they are all dead now.
Those Ukrainians who remember the 1932 Famine may have reason for a little anti semitism. The Chekka weren't exactly staffed by Eskimos, or didn't you know that?.
From reading some of these posts it seems many of you think it is OK to be a little anti-Semitic, and a little racist. It's not OK and it's holding us back as a nation.
You are an anti-Semite. Your parents must be so proud of you.
Stalin's main henchmen were of Jewish heritage and they targeted millions of Ukrainians for death and if fact killed over 10 million.
How does pointing this out make one antisemitic?
Look, it is preposterous to present the Holodomor as being perpetratrd by
Jews on Ukrainians. Were there Jewish Chekists? Yes - but there were Russians, and even Ukrainians carrying out Stalin's terror.
Anti-Semitism if defined as "hatred of Jews simply because they are Jews and for no other reason" is a disease that needs psychotherapy to cure. However this disease has a low true incidence despite its political and polemic misuse. Very few people are actually anti-Semites (including Arabs who are also "Semites" despite "politically correct" attempts to legislate "hate laws" so as to bring criminal charges of "anti-Semitism" against ANYONE {including "Semites"} who dare to question or criticize the misdeeds of Zionists or other Jews).
It truly is as Joe Sobran states : anti-Semites used to be people who hated Jews; Today anti-Semites are those who ARE hated by the Jews! Valid criticism of some Jews for their actions or inactions is NOT anti-Semitism. Malcolm Muggeridge, a journalist who witnessed the Holodomor, documents that there were three censors of the Holodomor, all Jews: Podolski,Nehman and Ehrens.see page 223 of his autobiography "Chronicles of Wasted Time:The Green Stick". He rightly concludes that the fact that they were all Jews "had no particular significance" as they all perished in the subsequent "Great Terror"as did their non-Jewish Communists colleagues.
Trials for the Jews? Did Mother have any children that lived?
A friend of mine has pointed out that the ears in the side by side photos in this article do not match.
...and what about the "staple holes" but no staple? ...implies this photo was unstapled from one document and glued to another without re-stapling ! Now who would tamper with evidence this way?
What disgusts me almost as much as these phony charges is the lack of support for Demjanjuk amongst the Ukrainian-Canadian community in Canada. My member of Parliament received numerous telephone calls from me about the matter but she is apparently too busy having her photo taken with all kinds of non-white immigrants to respond. Telephone calls to offices of both the Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox churches were met with silence.And we wondered why we could not have freedom in our own country for 400 years?
So were you raised a racist or did you become one on your own?
Guest,
Will you be offering anything besides Ad Hominems today?
Hey b woronchak, you're dragging your family name through the mud by affixing it to racist rants like this. So you've got a problem with non-whites, huh? Shame on you! As a Ukrainian, I am embarrassed that there are people like you that make us look bad to the rest of the world.
Guest,
Do you really believe anyone thinks you are Ukrainian?
The leftist press and govt does not want things Ukrainian to be known as it suffered the biggest Holocaust in Europe.
Ukrainians are constantly being ignored - just look at the Ukrainian Heavy Weight Champs of the World. They should be on the front page after every fight but they are ignored.
Mozhe ty povirysh yak napyshu vidpovid' po Ukrainskomu? Do rechi, ya duzhe povazhayu braty Klychko. Vony ne tilky dobri boksery ale takozh osvicheni i na vidmino vid dejakych Ukraintsiv povazhayut' vsikh ne dyvlyachys' na natsionalnist chy kolir skiry.
Man, I was at MSG for the Klitschko - Ibragimov fight and although our man Wlad won, the fight was boring as hell. So stuff like that may have disenchanted the American fans a bit. Maybe you would have a point if these guys were American born. Look at David Haye, he's English and he got pretty minor press coverage for taking one of the alphabet titles from Russian giant Valuev. I say the Klitscho brothers can still make headway with the American media if they manage to unify all the titles and go on an American tour with appearances like Wlad's on Late Night with Conan O'Brien which was very entertaining and presented Wlad in a very positive light.
Maybe our problem is that we spend too much energy complaining about all of these injustices and not enough accomplishing great things.
I have a problem with governments, politicians and bureaucrats that pander to "special interest groups" for votes while taxing the rest of us "second class citizens" to death to pay for their favors. If I was a racist, it would be my business - not yours, a government's or anyone else's. I lived through decades of being called a "bohunk". I don't give a damn what some spoiled, guilt ridden upper class brat with a B.A. in Psychology calls me.
You don't have to be upper class to be a good person. My family background is blue collar. My parents were immigrants too. Maybe that is ok with you because they are white?
One more thing, b woronchak, you being a racist stopped being only your business when you started posting complaints about non-white immigrants on a public forum.
Agreed with bw. All westerns powers are care about jews, jews, jews.... so on.
At his Israeli show trial the Judge asked for a photograph of the alleged Treblinka camp, where the nasty Germans supposedly terminated 870,000 Jews and buried their remains in giant mass graves. When it arrived in court he was puzzled and asked. 'What is this?' He was told it was a photo of a MODEL of the alleged death camp made from the MEMORY of a survivor who was er..........DEAD.
A true comic opera, as this was going on John Demanjuck is in the court, standing behind a bullet proof glass laughing. The Judge then said, 'Okay, so who made the model?'
The Israeli Police made the model, was the reply.
After reading some of these post I can't believe people hate Jews in the Ukraine, what are there 10 Jews left in the whole country? It just shows what sick animals leave in the Ukraine.
...poor billionare oligarchs having to live in a nation whose people and language they hate...
One is too many!!!!
Yeah, well they're only rich because they got help from outside countries. If Ukraine got real help from outside countries and if those nasty RUSSIAN animals left Ukraine alone then Ukraine would flourish. Nothing is going to happen with those dirty Russians hanging around.
Ukrainians are Russians, stupid you are! Artificial division by Jewish Bolsheviks, "divide and conquer". I am sure you are one of them
Ukrainians=Russians???? maybe Russians=Ukrainians
why is it that Russian imbeciles and there seem to be too many of them are incapable of learning Ukrainian?
they are animals. that is why they fail to develop and remain so dirt poor.
Ukraine is poor because the Russians and Germans destroyed their country twice in the 30's and 40's while they killed nearly 20 million Ukrainians.
Germany was totally destroyed and they're rich now.
Germany got the Marshal Plan, while Ukraine got the five year plan. Idiot.
I live in Ukraine, and I am not "sick animal"! Maybe you speak about yourself?????
Looks like the same guy to me. Again, the best I can is hang him from the tallest tree.
why would you want to hang an innocent man?
Germany is still an occupied country...and must do as the occupiers say....This trial is the dirty work of the USA "justice department" based on satanic revenge.
The man who wrote this article is a lawyer, is there anyone in the world that believes anything a lawyer would say? People trust lawyers on the same level as used car salesman. Hundreds of years ago in China they hung all the lawyers. Sounds like a plan to me.
I am for that! Hang all the laywers and the world will be a better place to live!
What about presumption of innocence?
Or people are alike as used cars?
And Ukrainian is guilty because Ukrainian???
And Germans are appointed to judge anybody? For being captured by them in war started by them?
Totally stupid.
The ears don't match in those photos
the ears don't have to match -faces are not equally symmetrical but you are missing the point -there are all sort of problems with the ID photo -near the Left ear you will notice two staple holes but NO staple -which proves that this photo was unstapled from one document and glued onto another created document -this is proof of tampering with the original since there are NO staple holes in the document that this photo is glued on...further more the shadows are all wrong for this to be a flash to your face ID photo because you must notice the shadows under the eyebrows and under the nose and under the lower lip indicative of an outdoor photo or at least a light source above the head instead of flash to face! This was probably originally an outdoor group picture photo that later underwent cutting and pasting & stapling & then more pasting.
Only models have relatively symmetrical faces. What CJStrong is referring to is biometrics. I've seen Ukrainians do odd stuff with documents. If this guy was in a camp with a Soviet ID and was offered an "out" to be a guard, where would he get a photo? They didn't have Polaroid kiosks in the death camps. He would have unattached his photo from his useless Soviet ID and had it attached to his camp ID card.
Photos can be re-used, but certain ratios and features of the human body never change without surgery, injury, or elective body modification. Distance between the eyes, finger prints, and THE SHAPE OF YOUR EARS.
The first thing I looked at was the photos. The lips look the same, but the ears do not. Also, how does the guy get old an gain weight, but his jawline gets thinner? That doesn't make any sense. I'd say it's not the same guy.
I don't believe that there's any question that the face in the photo belongs to Demianjuk. Neither he nor his legal team have raised that as a point of contention. The issue is whether the photograph was taken from a different source, and subsequently pasted to the Trawniki document as an act of forgery.
There's a lot of misplaced anger out there and some of you simply don't get it: Lets get to the real point of this debate, and that is JD's upcoming trial in Germany and Mr. Semotuik's presentation of the facts. The bottom line of his thesis as I understand it, is that the evidence against JD as presented simply can't hold water and that this upcoming trial is nothing but a show. This is not about who did what to whom (past history) be he/she German, Ukrainian, Russian or Jew, American,Communist, Socialist or Democrat. Throw your spitballs at each other somewhere else. Nothing like bringing in the entire slimy kitchen sink into this debate.
Agreed, the evidence is shoddy at best. So what happens if the result is the same as the Ivan the Terrible trial in Israel and he is set free? Does the US DOJ say mea culpa and reinstate his citizenship? Surely he would be entitled to some compensation, right?
We shall see. At this point however just to be left alone would be compensation enough. Shame on the Germans for trying to do America's DOJ dirty work.
I am getting more and more the feeling that Ukraine is a country full of stupid Nazis. I think it is because of very poor education. Germany is rich because Germans are working hard. Ukrainians invented to party - but not to work! And mybe this Ukrainian Nazis drunk too much cheap Vodka!
response of a typical agent of Russification
Ukrainians were never NAZIS, you had to be of Arian blood (German,Austrian etc) to be a NAZI. Get your facts and history straight. Furthermore to generalize about any nation (Germans work hard, Ukrainians party) is not clever at all. I know a lot of Germans who are lazy and a lot of Ukrainians that work hard. And that goes for every other nation in the world.
You are totally stupid. And you are likely more Nazi than fascist in 2 WW were. How can you tell that Ukrainians don'r work hard? I know how we work, and I know how (much) people work in Germany, UK, Netherlands, France.. TIMES and times less!
Germans killed about 7-8 millions of people in Ukraine. Never paid any compensation except one-time 300 eur very recently to part of whose who survived. Stalin refused compensation - he killed more!
Were you in Ukraine ever? Outside Kyiv?
VODKA is Russian wr(and product). We have even another name for this alcohol. And Ukrainians are not drinkers in spite with very hard transformation last 20 years.
anyone who looks in a mirror can see himself under the circumstances of WWII doing exactly the same thing... A poor young man living in Ukraine and being taken up into a world war in which he had NO control.. and now to persecute him for the sins of those who started that horrible war is a disgrace... Humans can forgive and make amends.. the war is a historical relic.. putting him on trial is a mis carriage of justice..
Anyone who has served in the military especially a low ranking enlisted man knows the conscript has to obey orders and not question authority.
Of course the Nazi hunters are still angry of the decisions of the high command of Hitler and his henchmen. Trying to take out this revenge on this man is ridiculous and serves no purpose other than a show trial to vindicate the hatred these people still hold in their minds.. Its time to forget this horrible part of history and let this man go.
the insanity that led to WWII cannot be borne on the shoulders of the foot soldier.. what choice does he have against the powers who put him in uniform?..
Again, let us go to facts. They are:
1) In village where Demianiuk was born, there were mapeople with last name Demianiuk. Many men had name 'Ivan', among them. There was another Ivan Demianiuk, born there, who was captured and had work as guard in camp for Nazi. He was back to village in 1947, very nervours and out of balance. After KGB asked him for an interview, he made suicide next day... All data related to this story was eliminated by KGB from Ukrainian archives. Nothing remain. This story is investigated in Ukr. TV today (6 of Dec.) 20.30, ICTV.
2) There was Committee defending Demianiuk created in Ukraine in past. Its Head, Volodymyr Kotelnytsky, was killed with his mother in his flat in 90th. ALL DOCUMENTS related to Demianuk, disappeared...