How Justice Caught Up with Ivan Demjanjuk

Aug. 10 2016

In 1984, a U.S. court, having concluded that John (né Ivan) Demjanjuk had served as a guard at the Sobibor and Treblinka death camps, stripped him of his citizenship and extradited him to Israel. There he was tried and convicted of being the notoriously sadistic guard known to Treblinka’s prisoners as “Ivan the Terrible.” But when new evidence came to light that Ivan the Terrible was someone else, Demjanjuk was returned to the U.S. and given back his citizenship—until a new case was built against him and he was sent to stand trial in Germany. Reviewing Lawrence Douglas’s book about Demjanjuk, titled The Right Wrong Man, Kevin P. Spicer explains what made the second trial different:

[The German prosecutors] centered their case on Demjanjuk’s time in Sobibor, a death camp that existed solely to exterminate Jews. Here the work of professional historians proved crucial, showing that as a [guard] stationed in Sobibor, Demjanjuk would have inevitably participated in the killing process. . . . Nor were [ex-Soviet POWs like Demjanjuk] punished for refusing to take part in the murder of Jewish prisoners—another important and damning point established by historians’ testimony.

Though a few of the remaining survivors of Sobibor did testify, Douglas believes that the crucial evidence rested upon the testimony of historians—and when that evidence was weighed by the panel of judges, Demjanjuk was convicted. Before his appeal could be heard, Demjanjuk—the only person in U.S. history to lose his citizenship twice—died in a Bavarian nursing home. To the bitter end he stoutly refused to express remorse.

Though Douglas is troubled by Demjanjuk’s refusal to face his murderous past, he portrays the conviction as a crucial paradigm shift in German law, one that enabled prosecutors to charge collaborators with murder for simply having worked in death camps. The verdict means that the remaining “faceless facilitator[s] of genocide”—at this point, it must be said, a handful of nonagenarians—may have to stand in court to face their complicity in one of history’s worst narratives of horror.

Read more at Commonweal

More about: History & Ideas, Holocaust, Holocaust trials, Sobibor

Fake International Law Prolongs Gaza’s Suffering

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.

Read more at Jewish Chronicle

More about: Gaza War 2023, International Law