To some, John Demjanjuk is a convicted accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews in the German Nazi death camp of Sobibor, Poland, where a German court concluded he served as a prison guard during World War II.
People who have reached this conclusion condemn any defense of the Ukrainian native or questioning of the evidence against him as tantamount to sympathizing with a killer of Jews.
To others, Demjanjuk was one of the ultimate scapegoats for Nazi war crimes that Germans themselves were unwilling to punish among their own people for decades.
He saw himself as a victim of Soviet and Nazi crimes, one of the millions of helpless Ukrainians trapped between Hitler and Stalin, two of history’s greatest mass murderers.
Demjanjuk’s death on March 17 at age 91 will not end the debate over his guilt, innocence or the lingering mystery over his actions after Nazis captured the Soviet Red Army soldier in Crimea in 1942 as the Germans rapidly advanced.
He didn’t emigrate to America from Germany until 1952.
One of the most persuasive accounts placing Demjanjuk as a prison guard in Sobibor was written by Stephen Paskey, who was the lead attorney on the U. S. government’s deportation case against Demjanjuk.
In an opinion article published by the Buffalo News on April 24, 2011, he wrote: “In February 2002, a federal judge found by clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence that the [German] service pass and the other documents are authentic … The forensic evidence alone is conclusive, but there is more to the story. After the Soviet Union collapsed, U. S. investigators located six more Nazi documents that identify Demjanjuk by name, all using the ID number listed on the service pass. Two documents were found in Russia, one in Lithuania and three in Germany. These documents display the distinctive characteristics of wartime Nazi documents, and in every respect they appear genuine. Together, they establish that Demjanjuk served as a guard at Sobibor and two concentration camps.”
Not everyone agrees.
Many doubt the authenticity of the documents, citing evidence of Soviet forgery.
Others claim Demjanjuk was a victim of mistaken identity – a theory that is alive in his Vinnytsia Oblast home village of Dubovye Makharintsy, where he was one of two Ivan Demjanjuks who served in World War II.
The other one hanged himself in 1971, after he learned that Soviet KGB agents had come to question him as the Kyiv Post chronicled in the June 2, 2011 article “Case of Mistaken Identity?”
The case for injustice and mistaken identity is strengthened further by Demjanjuk’s 1988 conviction in Israel as “Ivan the Terrible,” a sadistic guard in the Treblinka death camp.
In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction, citing compelling evidence that someone else was, in fact, “Ivan the Terrible.”
The zeal with which the legal systems of the U.S. and Germany pursued him for 36 years stands in stark contrast to the dismal record of both countries in prosecuting Nazi war criminals who had far greater complicity in the Holocaust than a single Ukrainian prisoner-of-war who was first wrongly convicted then found guilty on evidence that still leaves reasonable doubt.
