john demjanjuk family

The first, Adolf Eichmann, was found guilty in 1961 and executed in 1962. He is the lowest ranking person ever tried in Germany for Nazi war crimes. "[9][pageneeded] After the conviction, Demjanjuk was released pending appeal. [75] The testimony of one of these witnesses, Pinhas Epstein, had been barred as unreliable in US denaturalization trial of former camp guard Feodor Fedorenko,[74] while another, Gustav Boraks, sometimes appeared confused on the stand. Demjanjuk instead claimed to have been a German prisoner who completed forced labor. Danilchenko was a former guard at Sobibor and had been deposed by the Soviet Union in 1979 at the request of the OSI (US Office of Special Investigations). He died in 2012. He maintained his innocence, claiming that it was a case of mistaken identity. [167] The investigation was closed in November 2012 after no evidence emerged to support the allegations. [157] Prior to Demjanjuk's trial, the requirement that prosecutors find a specific act of murder to charge guards with had resulted in a very low conviction rate for death camp guards. All rights reserved. Demjanjuk was an autoworker in Cleveland who was accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a Nazi concentration camp guard who committed terrible crimes. Demjanjuk was convicted by a Munich court in 2011. "[57], In October 1983, Israel issued an extradition request for Demjanjuk to stand trial on Israeli soil under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950 for crimes allegedly committed at Treblinka. While interviews with Demjanjuk's family portray him as an innocent family man unfairly maligned, the evidence against him is haunting. [88] Demjanjuk said he just wrote a common Ukrainian surname after he forgot his mother's real name (Tabachyk). [158], John Demjanjuk died at a home for the elderly in Bad Feilnbach, Germany on 17 March 2012, aged 91. He and Vera had three children: John Jr., Irene, and Lydia, CBS reported. He died in January and she said she hadnt spoken to him since March. [67], Demjanjuk was at first represented by attorney Mark J. O'Connor of New York State; Demjanjuk fired him in July 1987 just a week before he was scheduled to testify at his trial. [55] Others, particularly American Jews, were outraged by the presence of Demjanjuk in the United States and vocally supported his deportation. Classrooms were set up in the auditorium where the trial was held. Upon his arrival, he was arrested and sent to Munich's Stadelheim prison. [112] On 3 April 2009, US Immigration Judge Wayne Iskra temporarily stayed Demjanjuk's deportation,[120] but reversed himself three days later, on 6 April. Demjanjuk was only the second person to be tried for these charges in Israel. In August 1977, Demjanjuk was accused of having been a Trawniki man. [38], Given that eyewitnesses attested to Demjanjuk having been Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka, decades before, whereas documentary evidence seemed to indicate that he had served at Sobibor with little notoriety, OSI considered dropping the proceeding against Demjanjuk to focus on higher profile cases. It is Ivan from Treblinka, from the gas chambers, the man I am looking at now." [21], After the end of the war, Demjanjuk spent time in several displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany. Life Without Father - Cleveland Magazine GettyPicture taken on May 11, 2009 shows police and media waiting in front of the home of John Demjanjuk before he was carried out on a stretcher in Seven Hills, Ohio. The German case set an important precedent and led to subsequent prosecutions in Germany that are continuing more than 70 years after the Holocaust. [150] He would, however, deliver three written declarations to the court that alleged that his prosecution was caused by a conspiracy between the OSI, the World Jewish Congress, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, while continuing to allege that the KGB had forged the documents used. [49] The defense also submitted the statement of Feodor Fedorenko, a Ukrainian guard at Treblinka, which stated that Fedorenko could not recall having seen Demjanjuk at Treblinka. [134] The indictment made almost no mention of Demjanjuk's service at Majdanek or Flossenbrg, as these were not extermination camps. Holocaust: SS officer's photos reveal Sobibor death camp Shortly before his death, he was tried and convicted in Germany as an accessory to 28,060 murders at Sobibor. . [62], Demjanjuk's trial took place in the Jerusalem District Court between 26 November 1986 and 18 April 1988, before a special tribunal comprising Israeli Supreme Court Judge Dov Levin and Jerusalem District Court Judges Zvi Tal and Dalia Dorner. Based on eyewitness testimony by Holocaust survivors in Israel, he was identified as the notorious Treblinka extermination camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible." [4] Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 for trial. [3] They settled in Seven Hills, Ohio, where he worked in an auto factory and raised three children. They married and were still living in the camps in the 1950s when she gave birth to Lydia. As US authorities moved to deport Demjanjuk, the Israeli government requested his extradition. [161] On 31 March 2012, it was reported that John Demjanjuk was buried at an undisclosed US location. [69][70] The defense claimed that the card was forged by Soviet authorities to discredit Demjanjuk. When asked to identify Demjanjuk in the courtroom, however, Nagorny was unable to, stating "That's definitely not him no resemblance. Family and friends claim that Demjanjuk himself was the . Ukrainian guard at Nazi death camps (19202012), Loss of US citizenship and extradition to Israel, Verdict and Israeli Supreme Court reversal, Second loss of US citizenship and extradition to Germany, Death and posthumous efforts to restore US citizenship, Subsequent prosecutions of Nazi extermination camp guards in Germany, US Immigration and Naturalization Service, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, United Nations Convention against Torture, Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, List of denaturalized former citizens of the United States, "Seven Hills' John Demjanjuk, convicted Nazi guard, dies in Bavaria at 91", "Israeli judge: Demjanjuk was 'Ivan the Terrible', "Israel recommends that Demjanjuk be released", "John Demjanjuk, 91, dogged by charges of atrocities as Nazi camp guard, dies", "Convicted Nazi Criminal Demjanjuk Deemed Innocent in Germany Over Technicality", "John Demjanjuk: Things we are left to tend to think", "Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk dies aged 91", "Anger simmers in Demjanjuk's home village", " :: ", "Looking Back on the Demjanjuk Trial in Munich", "Sixty years later, alleged Nazi guard may stand trial", "Convicted Nazi criminal John Demjanjuk dies at 91", "Judge Rules Autoworker Must Lose Citizenship for Falsifying Past", "Nazi Deportation Trial Centers on Identity Card", "Defense Rests in Trial of Alleged Nazi Guard", "Ex-Nazi Suspect Loses Immigration Court Case", "Man Accused of Nazi Crimes to be Extradited to Israel", "John Demjanjuk: Prosecution of a Nazi collaborator", "Demjanjuk quoted: Guards only followed orders", "2nd witness calls Demjanjuk 'Ivan the Terrible', "Acquittal in Jerusalem; Israel court sets Demjanjuk free, but he is now without a country", "KGB evidence reopens the case of 'Ivan the Terrible': Holocaust: Recently released files bolster the appeal of the man convicted as a Nazi death camp monster", "Why Nazi trials must end: The story behind the likely acquittal of", "Decision of Israel Supreme Court on petition concerning John (Ivan) Demjanjuk", "Judge orders accused camp guard deported", "Accused Nazi guard Demjanjuk loses court appeal", "Germany seeks extradition of Nazi guard from US", "Court: 'Ivan the Terrible' can be tried in Germany", "Former Nazi camp guard charged 29,000times", "Former Nazi camp guard to be deported to Germany", "John Demjanjuk's trial in Germany to start 30 November", "U.S. judge allows deportation of accused Nazi guard", "Nazi suspect's deportation appeal rejected", "Demjanjuk removed from Ohio home on stretcher", "Nazi war crimes suspect granted emergency stay", "Alleged Nazi guard Demjanjuk hits legal brick wall", "Demjanjuk loses German court bid to block deportation", "Krankenwagen bringt Demjanjuk ins Untersuchungsgefngnis", "Germany files charges against alleged Nazi guard Demjanjuk", "Demjanjuk lawyer calls for case to be closed", "John Demjanjuk war crimes trial begins in Munich", "Man Tied to Death Camp Goes on Trial in Germany", "John Demjanjuk, 91, Dogged by Charges of Atrocities as Nazi Camp Guard, Dies", "Witness in alleged Nazi Demjanjuk trial under investigation for murder", "German court rejects Demjanjuk extradition request", "Demjanjuk convicted of helping Nazis to murder Jews during the Holocaust", "John Demjanjuk zu fnf Jahren Haft verurteilt", "Court finds Nazi camp guard guilty of assisting in Holocaust deaths", "Former US citizen convicted in Nazi camp deaths", "Convicted Nazi criminal Demjanjuk deemed innocent in Germany over technicality", "Demjanjuk family asks to bury Nazi war criminal in US", "Ukrainian political party leader says Demjanjuk was buried in US weeks after his March death", "John Demjanjuk's widow asks for hearing on citizenship of late husband, convicted Nazi war criminal", "US court: No posthumous US citizenship for Demjanjuk, convicted in war crimes probe", "Court rejects appeal for Demjanjuk citizenship", "Demjanjuk attorney files complaint against doctors", "Doctors Did Not Hasten Demjanjuk's Death", "Was John Demjanjuk Really 'Ivan the Terrible'? Vera and her son filed a complaint that their expenses were not reimbursed even though Demjanjuks proceedings were dismissed. Sheftel focused the defense largely on the claim that Demjanjuk's Trawniki card was a KGB forgery. "I say it unhesitatingly, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. He was freed pending appeal of the conviction. [105] OSI continued to investigate Demjanjuk, relying solely on documentary evidence rather than eye-witnesses. The existence of scars from an SS tattoo, particularly given confusion in popular culture between the blood-type tattoo (mandatory) and the SS-rune tattoo (voluntary), misled prosecutors both in the United States and Israel as to its significance. It was the first televised trial in Israeli history. Demjanjuk's denial related both to the supposed operation of a truck's diesel engine by "Ivan the Terrible" for the gas chamber at Treblinka and to the SS's singling out of Ukrainians with experience driving trucks as Trawniki men. [89], On 29 July 1993, a five-judge panel of the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict on appeal. [58] In April 1985, he was detained and held at United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. About 1.7 million Jews were murdered at Sobibor and two other camps in 1941-43. (Other reports say they have seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.). [123], On 14 April 2009, immigration agents removed Demjanjuk from his home in preparation for deportation. Learn more about Vera here. For the first time in a German case, prosecutors argued that a guard at a facility whose sole purpose was mass murder shared responsibility for the deaths of those killed during his service there. The issuance of the stay by the immigration trial court was therefore improper, as that court had no jurisdiction over the matter. They also gained an additional identification of the visa photo as Demjanjuk by Otto Horn, a former SS guard at Treblinka. She wasnt able to go to Germany because of her heart problems. Explore a timeline of events that occurred before, during, and after the Holocaust. Demjanjuks citizenship was ultimately rescinded, and in 1986, he was extradited to Israel to stand trial. After his original extradition to Israel, Demjanjuk's family had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Department of Justice to obtain access to all investigative files at the OSI that related to Demjanjuk, Trawniki, and Treblinka. Born in Ukraine in 1920, Demjanjuk emigrated to the United States in 1952 and settled with his family in Cleveland. [162], On 12 April 2012, Demjanjuk's attorneys filed a suit to posthumously restore his US citizenship. [11] Having died before a final judgment on his appeal could be issued, under German law, Demjanjuk remains technically innocent. Hundreds of thousands of pages of previously unknown documents became available to both the prosecution and the defense. [3] In 2009, Germany requested his extradition for over 27,900 counts of acting as an accessory to murder: one for each person killed at Sobibor during the time when he was alleged to have served there as a guard. [144] Demjanjuk's defense team argued that these documents were Soviet forgeries. | READ MORE. Based on eyewitness testimony by Holocaust survivors in Israel, he was identified as the notorious Treblinka extermination camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible. It is a card Demjanjuk disputed, but one a federal judge ruled was legitimate. [54] Demjanjuk also attracted the support of conservative political figures such as Pat Buchanan and Ohio congressman James Traficant. The US extradited him to Israel, where his conviction as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka killing center was reversed on appeal. After a federal appeals court upheld this decision, OSI filed a deportation proceeding in December 2004. No wartime documentary evidence that definitively placed Demjanjuk at Treblinka has ever surfaced. Federal investigators never forgot, and after Demjanjuk returned to the U.S. after the Supreme Court decision, they investigated his claim that he was too ill to go to Germany where he had been newly indicted. "[47] Additionally, OSI submitted the testimony of former SS guard Horn identifying Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka. The prosecution called expert witnesses to testify on the authenticity of the card including its signatures by various Nazi officers, paper, and ink. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. Two grainy black-and-white pictures showing a man authorities believe to be convicted Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk working at the Sobibor death camp were published by German historians on. The principal allegation was that three former prisoners identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, who operated the petrol engines sending gas to the death chamber. Shame on you! You have no heartnothing!, After Demjanjuk died in 2012, Vera Demjanjuk was still saying that the Justice Department had done a dirty job, Cleveland.com reported. [82], Demjanjuk testified during the trial that he was imprisoned in a camp in Chem until 1944, when he was transferred to another camp in Austria, where he remained until he joined an anti-Soviet Ukrainian army group. Danil'chenko had stated that he knew Demjanjuk from their service together in Sobibor and at the Flossenbrg concentration camp until 1945. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Although Demjanjuk died before a German appeals court could review his conviction, German prosecutors successfully prosecuted subsequent cases against killing center and concentration camp guards using the same theory tested in the Demjanjuk case. The file on Demjanjuk was compiled by the German Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. [173] In 2019, German prosecutors charged guards at a concentration camp as opposed to a death camp on the same rationale for the first time: former Stutthof concentration camp guards Johann Rehbogen and Bruno Dey[de]. meaning "Terrible" in Polish and Russian. That same year, German authorities expressed interest in prosecuting Demjanjuk on charges of accessory to murder during his service at Sobibor. [72], Other controversial evidence included Demjanjuk's tattoo. David van Huiden, whose parents and sister were murdered in Sobibor while Demjanjuk was there, said the verdict meant. Originally Vera Bulochnik, she and John met in a German camp for displaced persons, The New York Times reported. [90] The judges agreed that Demjanjuk most likely served as a Nazi Wachmann (guard) in the Trawniki unit[88] and had been posted at Sobibor extermination camp and two other camps. Vera lived at the same home in Ohio since 1975. A critical piece of evidence was John Demjanjuk's Trawniki camp identification card, located in a Soviet archive. Vera was 86 when John died at the age of 91. In January 2019, the European Court of Human Rights held that this didnt violate Article 6 or the presumption of innocence. In the summer of 1991, an OSI investigator searching in the Lithuanian National Archives in Vilnius for documentation related to a Lithuanian police battalion found by chance a document that placed Demjanjuk as a member of a Trawniki-trained guard detachment stationed at the Majdanek concentration camp between November 1942 and early March 1943. Main telephone: 202.488.0400 US officials had originally been aware, without informing Demjanjuk's attorneys, of the testimony of two of these German guards. Moreover, after Demjanjuk's extradition to Israel, investigators at the OSI, while reviewing original personnel and administrative records from Flossenbrg, found references to Demjanjuk's name linked to his Trawniki military identification number (1393), thus independently corroborating Danil'chenko's testimony that Demjanjuk served at Flossenbrg. [30] Matia ruled that Demjanjuk had not produced any credible evidence of his whereabouts during the war and that the Justice Department had proved its case against him. [45][46] Five Holocaust survivors from Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka and having been "Ivan the Terrible. [35], INS sent photographs to the Israeli government of the nine persons alleged by Hanusiak to have been involved in crimes against Jews: the government's agents asked survivors of Sobibor and Treblinka if they could identify Demjanjuk based on his visa application picture. [32][33], Hanusiak claimed that Soviet newspapers and archives had provided the names during his visit to Kyiv in 1974; however, INS suspected that Hanusiak, a member of the Communist Party USA, had received the list from the KGB. [172] Following Demjanjuk's conviction, however, Germany began aggressively prosecuting former death camp guards. [44] Additionally, the former paymaster at Trawniki, Heinrich Schaefer, stated in a deposition that such cards were standard issue at Trawniki. Born in Ukraine, John (Iwan) Demjanjuk was the defendant in four different court proceedings relating to crimes that he committed while serving as a collaborator of the Nazi regime. [41] Advertising Notice John Demjanjuk's Family & Children: 5 Fast Facts | Heavy.com According to legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, in spite of serious missteps along the way, the German verdict brought the case "to a worthy and just conclusion. Demjanjuk's family had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Department of Justice to obtain access to all investigative files at the OSI that related to Demjanjuk . Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. Privacy Statement They did, however, consistently refer to an Ivan Marchenko, who had served as a gas motor operator at Treblinka from the summer of 1942 until the prisoner uprising in 1943, and who had stood out as a particularly cruel police auxiliary, perpetrating acts that were consistent with the memory of the Jewish Treblinka survivors.

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