Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Grant concluded:

• It was highly probable that Streibel’s signature was authentic. He added, however, that it was possible the signature had been written by a very sophisticated forger.

• Teufel’s signature was convincing but only possibly authentic because he (Grant) had not examined the original signatures.

• The Demjanjuk signature was forged.

• The ink in the perforations on the card photo was identical to the ink the Russian translator had used for his writing on the card. The ink got into the holes after they were made, leading him to doubt the authenticity of the photograph.

• Based on his chemical analysis of the age of the glue used to fix the photo to the card, the photo was replaced in the Soviet Union, not at Trawniki.

• It was unlikely that the paper was made during World War II because of the heavy rag content of the card. Rags were so precious during the war, they were “hoarded like gold.”

Putting all the pieces together, Grant concluded: “Indications are that the identification card is not authentic. In this evaluation, I am greatly influenced by the accused’s signature on it, which I find not to be his.”

The redeemer had done what Sheftel hoped he would. The internationally famous and highly respected Julius Grant had declared the Trawniki card a fake. All Shaked could do during his cross-examination was to rub some of the luster off Grant’s clear and reasoned conclusions.

In effect, Grant had cast a gray shadow of doubt over the whole Trawniki card. His testimony was so authoritative that the court could neither dismiss it nor treat it lightly. The question was: What weight would the judges give his opinions in their deliberations?

Convinced that Grant had changed the whole course of the trial, the defense presented its next witness with less panic and more confidence. His task was huge—convince the court that he was never trained at Trawniki and that he was not Ivan the Terrible. Rather, he was a Russian POW imprisoned in a camp in Poland and a newly inducted soldier in General Vlasov’s army.

If it please the court,” the accused said to a packed Hall of the People. “I am John Demjanjuk.”

Thus began the swan-song defense of “Ivan the Terrible.” More than three hundred spectators had gathered in the courtroom to hear him lie and, if they were lucky, to be treated to another emotional drama. To those who had been following the trial, Demjanjuk was already half-guilty even before he answered the first question. To the survivors and their families, his testimony was a waste of time. On to the gallows!

John Gill conducted the direct examination. As seasoned defense attorneys, both he and Sheftel knew it was always risky to place a defendant on the stand. But what choice did they have? If Demjanjuk did not testify, it would be interpreted as an admission of guilt.

Gill’s job was to show that Demjanjuk was a simple, honest man with nothing to hide, change Demjanjuk’s image from perpetrator to victim, and make his wartime alibi sound believable. Gill began with Demjanjuk’s childhood. The court was both patient and indulgent.

Demjanjuk testified that it had taken him eight years to complete four grades of school, and not because he was slow. “My parents were very poor, and we had nothing to wear. No shoes to put on,” he explained. “If my father had any job whatsoever, I had to stay home…. Except for the third grade, I spent two years in each grade. When I was in fifth grade, and asked to repeat it for a third time, they would not let me do it. I received what was called a disqualification report card.”

After being expelled from school, Demjanjuk joined a Komsomol, a communist youth organization, and plowed fields on a collective farm ( kolkhoz). A dependable worker, he was eventually promoted to labor team organizer.

Like everyone in their village, the Demjanjuk family suffered terribly during Stalin’s forced famine (the Holodomor) of 1932–33. “It was so horrible it goes beyond anything that humanity had known up to then,” Demjanjuk testified. “Our entire family—my mother, my sister, myself—were swollen from hunger…. We ate rats, our cat, and our bird. People were lying dead in their homes, in their yards, on the roads, exposed to sunlight. No one buried them.”

As soon as it became clear that they would starve to death like their neighbors, the family sold all their belongings for food. When they had nothing left, they sold their home for eight loaves of bread and headed east for another kolkhoz , where a relative lived and worked. She had food.

The Demjanjuk family returned to their village the following year when the famine was officially over. “We didn’t find anyone alive,” he testified. The family moved into the abandoned house of a relative, and Iwan returned to his old job on the kolkhoz.

Russia’s war with Finland in the winter of 1939–40 changed his life. All the kolkhoz tractor drivers were drafted into the army, and young Iwan was given their job. When none returned after the war, Iwan’s temporary job became permanent, until late 1940, when he received a draft notice ordering him to report to an induction center with a plate, spoon, and two pairs of underwear.

When Iwan showed up without the underwear because he couldn’t afford any, the army sent him back home. But when Germany invaded the Soviet Union the following summer, the army quickly recalled him—it didn’t much care whether he brought extra underwear or not—and sent him to artillery training school. From there, he joined the front line at the Dnieper River, where he was seriously wounded.

“I couldn’t move. I couldn’t budge. I couldn’t walk,” Demjanjuk testified. “I shouted. I was screaming with pain.”

Comrades took Demjanjuk to a house where there were other wounded soldiers. The next day, the army sent him to the first of four hospitals in four different cities. After doctors finished patching him up, leaving a piece of shrapnel in his back close to his spine, the Red Army sent him to defend Kerch, on the Crimean peninsula. The German army captured him there.

“The Germans had bombed us,” he recalled for the court. “And there was no place to hide. We were sitting in our trenches, and the Germans just came up and took us prisoner.”

The Germans put Demjanjuk and seventy other Soviet POWs to work widening the railroad tracks to accommodate German railcars and repairing the sections of track damaged by bombs. They got bread and coffee three times a day and slept in a railroad car. Six to eight weeks later, Demjanjuk was sent to a transit POW camp in Rovno, Ukraine.

“It was very small,” Demjanjuk testified. “We could barely stand…. So during the day we were taken outside the camp into a clearing in the forest where we could either lie down or sit down. We were fed once a day. A pot of some kind of porridge. Just water… At night we could only stand.”

After a week or two at Rovno, the Germans sent Demjanjuk to Chelm, Poland.

Up to this point in his direct examination, John Gill had shown John Demjanjuk to be an ordinary victim of Joseph Stalin and the German army. But as soon as Demjanjuk told the court that the SS had sent him to the POW camp in Chelm, his defense alibi began.

When he arrived at Chelm, Demjanjuk testified, there were no barracks. Prisoners slept on the ground. His first job was to help assemble prefab barracks on railroad tie foundations. He also helped unload coal, potatoes, and turnips at the nearby railroad station.

“Conditions were atrocious,” he said. “All we thought about was food… I would have given my life for a loaf of bread.”