Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Then Demjanjuk got lucky. The Germans gave him a bare bunk inside a barracks during the 1942–43 winter. The unlucky slept in the cold and snow. Most did not make it through the winter. Beginning in the spring of 1943—when the Trawniki card indicated he was serving at Sobibor—Demjanjuk testified that he began digging and cutting peat outside the Chelm camp with about seventy other POWs until winter, when the ground froze.

The SS built a Trawniki subcamp outside the tiny village of Dorohucza, not far from Chelm, Trawniki, and Sobibor. A mixture of Dutch and Polish Jews worked in the peat fields along the Wieprz River together with Soviet POWs from the Chelm camp. Trawniki men guarded them.

Either the following fall or early winter of 1944, Demjanjuk told the court, the Germans gave him and three to four hundred other Ukrainian POWs Italian uniforms and loaded them onto trains destined for Graz, Austria. They were told they were going to join a German army all-Ukrainian division that was about to be formed. They would fight the Soviets, not the Americans, French, or British.

“We were put into stables,” Demjanjuk testified. “We didn’t have anything to do. We sat around and played cards. Then doctors called us in.”

A doctor drew blood from Demjanjuk’s finger and typed the blood. A machine stamped a blood-type tattoo on his arm. He began removing the tattoo, he testified, when he learned that the Waffen SS divisions were also tattooed. Not wanting to be associated with the SS, he used a sharp stone to scrape the mark off his arm. It took a long time. Scrape, heal… scrape, heal… until all that remained was a scar.

Demjanjuk said that after the war he took a driver training course offered by the U.S. Army at the POW camp in Landshut, Germany. After he passed his driver’s test and received a license, he worked for the Americans as a truck driver for two and a half to three years. He wore a black uniform and was paid a carton of cigarettes a week.

Have you ever been enlisted in the SS? Gill asked at the end of his direct examination of Demjanjuk. Have you ever served in a death camp?

“Honorable Judges, I am not the hangman or henchman you are after,” Demjanjuk pleaded. “I was never at Trawniki, Sobibor, or Treblinka…. My heart aches, and I grieve deeply for what was done to your people by the Nazis… because you were Jews. I wish to be believed. Please do not put the noose around my neck for the things that were done by others.”

State attorney Yonah Blatman began the cross-examination of John Demjanjuk. Like Michael Shaked, whom he had hired to lead the prosecution team, Blatman was meticulously prepared. How could he not be? He had three young attorneys trained in American law schools to do the team’s nonlegal research. (A second team handled the legal research.) As a group, they were fluent in Hebrew, English, German, Yiddish, and Russian.

Like Shaked, Blatman was systematic. For weeks before his cross-examination, he had studied and analyzed every sworn statement Demjanjuk had made, from his pretrial deposition and interrogatories in Cleveland in 1977 to his pretrial interviews with the Israeli police in Jerusalem. Besides finding inconsistencies and contradictions in the statements, Blatman discovered what he believed was a revealing pattern: John Demjanjuk’s alibi kept growing more specific over the years, with more and more detail added to make his story sound real and credible.

Blatman believed that Demjanjuk, like a spider, had spun a web of lies to explain why he could not have been at the Trawniki training school in 1942 and later at Treblinka. Blatman’s cross-examination plan was to expose the tissue of lies and destroy the web. He took five days to do it.

The cross-examination quickly turned into a game of courtroom dodgeball. Whenever Blatman pointed out a contradiction, Demjanjuk would say “bad translation” or “what do you expect, it happened forty years ago?” or “I was under pressure and got confused” or “you’re just trying to trick me.”

Blatman began with a string of small contradictions—here you say in the fall, there you say in the winter; here you say 200, there you say 300. Then he moved on to larger issues.

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk testified that Vlasov army soldiers did not have a blood-type tattoo. He removed his because he wanted “to be like the other boys.” In Jerusalem, he testified that he removed the tattoo when he learned that Waffen SS soldiers had them because he didn’t want to be associated with the SS.

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk testified that he had guarded a Russian general as a member of Vlasov’s army. In Jerusalem, he testified that he was supposed to guard the general but never did because he did not have a proper uniform and was too weak and emaciated for guard duty.

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk testified that as a soldier in Vlasov’s army, he was going to be sent to the front. In Jerusalem, he testified that he was skin and bones. If he was too weak and emaciated to simply guard an unarmed Soviet general, how could he fight at the front?

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk swore that he had been captured in Kerch by the German army in late 1942 or early 1943, the exact time when the U.S. government argued during the denaturalization trial that he was being trained at Trawniki and posted to Treblinka. Several historians had testified that the battle of Kerch took place in May 1942.

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk testified that when he arrived at Chelm, there were a few barracks. In Jerusalem, he said that were no barracks when he arrived at the camp.

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk testified that he built and cleaned barracks at Chelm. He added no more details. In Jerusalem, he said that besides assembling the barracks, which took a few months, he unloaded food and supplies from trains and he dug peat for nine or ten months with about seventy fellow Ukrainian POWs. “I can still see them before my eyes,” he said. But he couldn’t remember a single name.

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk testified that there were only Russian POWs at Chelm. In Jerusalem, he said there were also some Italians.

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk testified that he had written to his niece in Ukraine for copies of his birth certificate and military records, and that his wife Vera had visited his and her own mother in Ukraine. If he was so afraid of the Soviets, why did he endanger the lives of his niece and his wife?

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk testified that the KGB frame-up began in the mid-1950s when he wrote to his mother and Vera sent her packages. Later he said the frame-up began when Vera visited Ukraine in 1964 and 1966.

In both Cleveland and Jerusalem, Demjanjuk testified that he had completed only four years of school. If so, how could he have been admitted into the Komsomol, a communist leadership incubator, when he was so uneducated?

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk testified that he worked as a driver for an international relief organization right after the war, in 1945. In Jerusalem, he said he first drove a truck for the U.S. Army in 1947, after he got a driver’s license. If he drove a truck in 1945 immediately after the war, he must have known how to drive one during the war, like Ivan the Terrible.

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk claimed his eyes were blue. On his visa application, he wrote that his eyes were gray—the same color mentioned on the Trawniki card.

In Cleveland, Demjanjuk testified that he went to school for four years. In Jerusalem, he said he attended school for eight years, and that the only grade he did not repeat was third.

Under the pressure of Blatman’s relentless cross-examination, Demjanjuk appeared calm most of the time. On occasion his face turned red, either in anger or embarrassment at being caught in a contradiction he couldn’t talk his way out of.