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 on Commonweal: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/right-wrong-man