Demjanjuk didn't hang, of course. After five years alone on death row in Israel's Ayalon prison — where Adolf Eichmann, too, had sat, the desk jockey who saw to it that the trains groaning with doomed Jews ran on time, and who was strung up in 1962; Eichmann and Demjanjuk are the only men Israel has ever tried for the Nazi genocidal crimes — Demjanjuk presented evidence on appeal that another man, one Ivan Marchenko, was Ivan the Terrible, and that Israel was about to hang the wrong Ukrainian.
Funny thing: The Israeli Supreme Court decided to let Ivan Demjanjuk walk.
The horribly funny thing — not to the Israelis, many of whom had doubts about prosecuting Demjanjuk from the start — was that some of the evidence that led to his release in 1993 had come to light years before and was withheld from the Israelis by the American government — the Office of Special Investigations of the Department of Justice, the very same cadre of Nazi hunters who had urged Israel to charge him with being Ivan the Terrible.
Why? Because Ivan the Terrible was a trophy fish, and John Demjanjuk was small fry, and whatever doubt the OSI harbored about his true crimes — and the records show that some of its investigators there felt doubts galore — if the agency wanted to burnish its reputation and justify its budget, it needed a villain big and bad enough to convince the cautious Israelis to mount a show trial.
Funny thing: The strongest documentary evidence the OSI did give to Israel, an SS-issued ID card, clearly put Demjanjuk at Sobibor during the same time that Ivan the Terrible was at Treblinka. The three judges and the lawyers on both sides wrestled vainly with this inconvenience, but the Treblinka survivors' eyewitness testimony — sanctified, consecrated, beyond need of proof by virtue of their hideous suffering and lifelong grief — condemned John Demjanjuk to death.
But the kicker, the real punch line, was yet to come. On appeal, the Supreme Court of Israel, faced with dozens of affidavits from Treblinka guards identifying Ivan Marchenko as Ivan the Terrible, unanimously overturned Demjanjuk's death sentence, and also unanimously ruled that Israel could not retry him for crimes he may have committed at Sobibor — because he had not been extradited for Sobibor, because no Sobibor survivors could identify him, and because, as chief judge Meir Shamgar wrote, "The complete truth is not the prerogative of the human judge."
Funny thing, though: The OSI, even after being rebuked by the U. S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals for its "reckless disregard for the truth" in its pursuit of Demjanjuk, continued to hound him for lying on his emigration forms in 1952.
Again the OSI stripped him of his restored citizenship, but prosecuting him for war crimes was beyond American jurisprudence. Doing so required a willing helper — another country with an ax to grind.
Poland, home to Sobibor, passed. Ukraine, his land of birth, said ni. Eretz Yisroel had long since had its fill of Demjanjuk.
Which left the Germans, ja?
...
The beauty of this theory is not only that it permits Germany to prosecute Untermenschen cogs in the death machine of the Final Solution but also that, sixty-five years after Hitler's fall, it will help the Zentrale pursue more investigations — from its peak years, 1967 to 1971, the agency employed 49 investigators and a total of 121 employees; the entire staff today numbers 18, with only 6 investigators — and survive a few years more. Soon enough the clock will run out on all the ancient Amtsträger — puttering in their gardens, petting their grandchildren — but they can't rest easy. Not yet.
Still, it seems peculiarly German, this theory. These Wachmänner were pure products of the most criminally insane nation in human history, Nazi Germany, trained and put to work by the Nazis in places of demonic brutality — places created and run by Germans who largely paid little or no price for their hideous crimes. And now — now: sixty-five years later — a Ukrainian clump of Red Army fodder, a dumb beast the likes of which the Nazis murdered by the millions, has been transmuted into a German official so that Germans may prosecute him for helping to murder Jews at a German death camp.
Worse, Demjanjuk is essentially on trial not for anything he did, but simply for being at Sobibor. No specific criminal acts need be alleged, much less proved. Page through transcripts of previous Nazi trials and you'll find a rigorous focus on particulars, because that is what should be required to convict a defendant. No one in any such trial ever was convicted simply on the basis of being present at the scene.
And the test case for this theory is the nobody who did a seven-year stretch in Israel for crimes he didn't commit at Treblinka?
Funny thing, this German justice.
Read more:
http://www.esquire.com/features/john...#ixzz1MEGdZM2f
