Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Judge Levin, for one, was visibly disturbed by what appeared to be Demjanjuk’s evasions. “You have a talent for not answering questions,” he lectured. “You are the accused in this case. You must be believed. You can’t say things that run counter to your testimony in the United States and expect to be believed.”

“My tragic mistake,” Demjanjuk said, “is that I can’t think properly. I can’t answer properly.”

The cross-examination got deadly serious when Blatman began to attack the heart of Demjanjuk’s alibi—the eighteen months he said he had spent in the POW camp in Chelm. Prior to Demjanjuk’s testimony, a historian had argued for the prosecution that the accused could not have been at Chelm in the fall of 1944 when he said he was because authenticated records showed that the camp was evacuated in April 1944 in anticipation of an invasion by the Red Army.

Blatman began simply enough by asking Demjanjuk to describe his work as a peat digger. The attorney then worked his way up to a Clarence Darrow crescendo.

“Every day… our entire barrack set out to dig,” Demjanjuk said. “It wasn’t far from Chelm…. Sometimes they would transport us. Other times we would walk.”

“How long did you work at it?”

“For a long time, maybe nine or ten months. That is all we did.”

Nine or ten months neatly covered an as yet unaccounted for period in Demjanjuk’s alibi.

“Were you fed?”

“Not enough.”

“What was your physical condition?”

“Fairly good, but I was losing weight for lack of food.”

“Were there people in the camp who died of starvation?”

“Many.”

“Did you see this?”

“In our barrack. People died. Especially those who smoked.”

Demjanjuk didn’t smoke.

Blatman demanded to know why it took Demjanjuk five years to remember the name Chelm when he had suffered so much there. How could he not remember?

Demjanjuk turned to the judges. “Have you ever forgotten anything in your lives?” he asked.

“You remembered the [four] hospitals you were in,” Blatman pointed out. “The whole history of it. The only thing you forgot was Chelm, where you underwent the most horrendous experience of the war.”

“That was my country ,” Demjanjuk explained. “I couldn’t forget those places so easily…. Everything that happened in the Soviet Union I could remember.”

Blatman picked up on “that was my country.” Demjanjuk remembered the names of the cities that he had lived in after the war. They were all in Germany and Austria, not in the Soviet Union.

“The city of Landshut, is that in the Soviet Union?”

“In Landshut, I lived for a long time. Almost two years.”

“And the city of Regensburg? Is it in the Soviet Union?”

“I lived in Regensburg for a long time too.”

“And the city of Ulm, is that in the Soviet Union?”

“I lived in Ulm a long time too.”

“How long did you live in Ulm?”

“I can’t say exactly. About six months, maybe more.”

“And how long did you live in Chelm, as you contend?”

“About eighteen months… Why I forgot, I can’t say.”

“Well, maybe all this question of recollection and memory has a different reason. You simply weren’t at Chelm.”

“It is you who are saying that,” Demjanjuk complained.

“You are claiming that you were made to work at hard labor without food, without decent living conditions, with people dying nearby?”

“Yes.”

“And that you came out of this camp skin and bones?”

“Yes. And it was an atrocity.”

“That you cannot forget? Neither the horror of it nor the camp itself?”

“I want to forget. But one never forgets them,” Demjanjuk said. “Just like anyone who survived the Holocaust can’t forget them.”

Shaked took over the cross-examination from Blatman. Relaxed and intimate, he reminded Demjanjuk that he had testified in Cleveland that the Cyrillic signature on the Trawniki card was not his because it lacked apostrophes that he always inserted after the m and n in his name. Shaked then produced several Cyrillic signatures that Demjanjuk had provided to the Israeli police. None of them had the apostrophes.

Shaked moved on to Demjanjuk’s truck driving skills. His claim that he didn’t know how to drive a truck during the war was a critical point in his defense. SS officer Otto Horn had testified at the Cleveland denaturalization trial that Iwan of Treblinka not only drove a truck, which was unusual for a Ukrainian, but spent off hours in the garage tinkering with motors. Because Iwan knew about engines, Horn testified, the SS assigned him to operate the diesel motor that supplied the gas for the Treblinka chambers. Furthermore, Fedorenko had testified in Fort Lauderdale that the Germans were looking for POWs with driving skill for training at Trawniki. Shaked quoted Fedorenko’s testimony: “We were lined up, and the Germans picked out those who could be useful—drivers and technicians.”

Demjanjuk claimed that he did not know how to drive a truck in 1947 when he applied for a truck driving job for the U.S. Army in Landshut. He had to take a monthlong driving course. Yet in a pretrial interrogation about fighting the Germans in a battle at the Dnieper River, he said that when his unit ran out of ammunition, his commanding officer told him to jump in a truck and go get more.

Demjanjuk told the court that he had been mistranslated. To become a driver in the Soviet Union, he testified, one needed several years of education in a technical school. He only completed fourth grade.

Shaked reminded Demjanjuk that he had testified earlier that he would have died for a loaf of bread, suggesting that if he could get better food by volunteering to collaborate with the Nazis, he would have.

“If they were asking about drivers… you could have said, ‘Yes. I am a tractor driver. I can drive a vehicle.’”

“You are mixing up a tractor driver with a car driver,” Demjanjuk said like a good attorney. “All I knew was how to open a cap and fill [the tank] with kerosene. And then of course you had to use the starter. And if that didn’t get the thing moving, you have to call the foreman.”

“You are in a great plight, in a very difficult situation, at Chelm, isn’t that true?”

“Yes.”

“And you were in fact going hungry?”

“Yes.”

“And you are forced to work very, very hard?”

“Yes… Nobody asked whether anyone knew how to drive a tractor. So I couldn’t get out.”

Shaked asked Demjanjuk whether, if the Germans had asked him to collaborate, he would have done so.

“I don’t know whether I would have agreed to work or would have preferred to die,” he said.

Shaked next pointed out a contradiction on Demjanjuk’s visa application, where he claimed he was a “driver” in the town of Sobibor.

“I never said such a thing,” Demjanjuk claimed. “What I said at the time, what I wrote, is that I’d been on a farm. That I’d been working for a farm…. The clerk wrote down ‘a driver in Sobibor.’”

Shaked then probed the strange coincidence that had puzzled every prosecutor and judge involved in Demjanjuk’s circuitous journey through the courts. Of all the Polish towns and villages to select as his wartime residence, why did he select Sobibor?

Demjanjuk had a ready explanation. He told the court that he never intended to write Sobibor on the application. He wanted to put down Sambor , another village in eastern Poland. But the clerk told him to put down Sobibor.

“The person who helped me had a small map,” Demjanjuk explained. “On the atlas, he found this place. He said: ‘This is the best place because that’s where there is the highest concentration of Ukrainians…. Mention it.’ Do you think that if I had been in Sobibor, I would have given that name?”