In the 1970s, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI)—the U.S. government’s Nazi-hunting agency—gathered evidence that a Ukrainian immigrant living in Ohio named John (né Ivan) Demjanjuk was in fact the notorious guard at the Treblinka death camp known to inmates as “Ivan the Terrible.” Ivan was eventually deported to Israel, where, after a dramatic trial, he was sentenced to death—before the Supreme Court reversed the decision. Reviewing a recent documentary miniseries about Demjanjuk, titled The Devil Next Door, Scot Lerner writes:
Questions remain about how and why the Israeli Supreme Court acquitted Demjanjuk in 1993, as well as qualms over potential deceptions by the Office of Special Investigations. The series turns those qualms into full-fledged allegations of misconduct against the OSI for its decision to withhold its doubts about Demjanjuk’s identity from the Israeli prosecutors.
Conspiracy theories swirl about whether the Soviets manufactured evidence, seeking to drive a wedge between two anti-Communist groups in the United States, the Ukrainians and Jews—intriguing but conspiratorial. In 2009, a German court used new evidence to place Demjanjuk at Sobibor, not Treblinka; he was convicted for being an accessory to 27,900 murders. But The Devil Next Door addresses this conviction more as an afterthought than a serious conclusion to the saga.
In a reach for some sort of narrative closure, the documentary’s final moments show Demjanjuk’s grandson using a refrain common in defense of wartime behaviors and actions: his grandfather might have played some role in the Holocaust, but only to survive. Like the final charges against Demjanjuk, which were ultimately vacated because he died during the appeal process, there is no clear answer. It isn’t clear, and perhaps never will be, if Demjanjuk was “Ivan the Terrible” or another terrible Ivan.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/7417/ivan-the-terrible/