Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The work order report issued on October 4, 1944, a year after Demjanjuk arrived at Flossenbürg, noted that he had been assigned to guard a prison detail constructing a bunker in the main camp.

The new documents bolstered the credibility of Danilchenko’s 1979 sworn statement. In it, he said he served at Sobibor. The Trawniki transfer roster listed him as a transferee to Sobibor. In it, he said Iwan Demjanjuk was already at Sobibor when he arrived. The transfer roster indicated that not all of the transferees left Trawniki for Sobibor on the same day. In it, he said that he and Iwan Demjanjuk were transferred to Flossenbürg. The Trawniki transfer roster listed him as a transferee to that camp along with Iwan Demjanjuk.

The new documents also solved a problem. Danilchenko said in his sworn statement that he had met Iwan Demjanjuk at Sobibor in March 1942, a year earlier than the transfer roster claimed. Given the accuracy of the rest of Danilchenko’s sworn testimony, Judge Matia accepted the incorrect year as a simple memory lapse.

Judge Matia ruled that the six supporting documents were “authentic German wartime documents.” Realizing that his decision would be highly scrutinized around the world, Matia explained his reasoning. He argued: “The randomness and relative rarity of the documents actually supports their authenticity. If the Soviets had set out to create false documents, they would not have allowed the omissions and minor inaccuracies that occur in the trail of documents in this case.

“The location of these documents in the archives of several different countries also buttresses their authenticity, as their dispersal at the chaotic end of World War II does not seem at all unusual.

“The various spellings of the defendant’s last name in the documents actually lends further credence to them, since the conversion from the Cyrillic alphabet to the western alphabet produces such variations, and a counterfeiter would have used one spelling consistently. ”

Besides the new documents listed above, prosecution historians introduced new evidence that Iwan Demjanjuk could not have been in the Chelm camp in the fall of 1944 because the last 444 prisoners held there had been transferred to Skierniewice, a city in central Poland, in the spring of 1944. The Soviets found a ghost camp when they entered Chelm in July.

Prosecution historians also produced German army troop movement charts showing that Iwan Demjanjuk could not have been a soldier in Vlasov’s army where and when he said he was, because either Vlasov’s army did not exist at the time or its divisions were deployed elsewhere.

The Demjanjuk defense team added a new argument to its old arsenal of KGB forgery and mistaken identity. The photo of Iwan Demjanjuk on the Trawniki card, the defense argued, was not the photo of John Demjanjuk but that of his cousin with the same name. This was no rabbit in the hat. John Demjanjuk actually had a cousin named Iwan Andreevich Demjanjuk, born on February 22, 1921, in the same village where Iwan Nikolai Demjanjuk had lived. Like the government’s case against Demjanjuk, the cousin argument was not based on eyewitness testimony, but on two archival documents found in the Soviet Union.

The first document was an undated index card containing a series of unconnected notes: “Iwan Dem’yanyuk…Andreevich… 1920 [sic] born… resident of the village of Dubovye Makharintsky [sic] … Trawniki, Lyublin, L’vov.” The entry stated that the source of the information was Vasilij Litvinenko, a former Trawniki man whom the Soviets had tried and convicted of war crimes along with Danilchenko.

The second archival document was a copy of Litvinenko’s statement given to Soviet interrogators in June 1949. Litvinenko swore in the statement that he knew a Trawniki man named Iwan Andreevich Dem’janjuk who had two false white metal teeth in his upper jaw. Litvinenko said he trained with Iwan Andreevich at Trawniki and later served with him at a concentration camp in Lublin.

As supportive evidence, the defense offered the court the sworn statement of Mariya Demjanjuk, another cousin. “As far as I know,” Mariya said, “I. A. [Iwan Andreevich] Demjanjuk was called up for military service before the war, in about 1940.”

Judge Matia didn’t buy any of it.

Before the trial opened, the prosecution had asked Ukraine to provide the military service record of Iwan Andreevich Demjanjuk. The Ukraine government replied that, after “extensive searches,” it was unable to find any official record that Iwan Andreevich Demjanjuk had ever entered, served in, or was demobilized from the Soviet army during World War II.

Furthermore, Matia pointed out, the defense did not produce a picture of Iwan Andreevich to compare with the photo on the Trawniki card. Nor did the defense produce any evidence that this Iwan Andreevich had an identifying scar on his back. All it had was a statement from John Demjanjuk saying that the photo on the Trawniki card looked like his cousin.

That left the sworn statement of Litvinenko. Was he credible?

Judge Matia didn’t think so. He pointed out that nine of the twenty-three Trawniki men Litvinenko named during his Soviet interrogation had false white metal teeth, a highly “curious” observation. “If such false teeth were that common, how would he be able to remember which trainees had them?” Matia asked. “And why would he know who had metal teeth in their upper jaw unless they were all in the front?”

Furthermore, Litvinenko claimed that he had served with Demjanjuk at a Lublin camp. The defense failed to provide any documentary evidence that a Trawniki man named Demjanjuk had ever served in a Lublin detachment, while the prosecution presented documentary evidence that he could not have.

Even Litvinenko’s Soviet interrogators didn’t think he was a reliable witness. They noted that he said he suffered from such an alcohol problem that he once sold his pants for a bottle of vodka. Is memory seen through an alcoholic haze a memory to be trusted?

Finally, Judge Matia asked a cogent question. If John Demjanjuk believed that the Trawniki card photo was that of his cousin Iwan Andreevich, why did he wait twenty years to bring it up?

The defense also presented a series of statements from former Trawniki men who did not recall being trained at Trawniki with a guard named Demjanjuk. And those who saw a photo of him did not recognize him. If so many Trawniki men could not identify Iwan Demjanjuk as a fellow trainee and SS guard, the defense argued, as it had in Jerusalem, it was reasonable to doubt that he had ever been a Trawniki graduate and a Sobibor guard.

Just as Judge Levin’s court had done, Judge Matia dismissed the argument as specious. There were more than five thousand Trawniki men. It is reasonable to assume that not every one of them had trained with, worked with, or even met Iwan Demjanjuk.

During the trial, the defense offered three more Soviet documents as evidence. The first was a top-secret most-wanted list containing approximately one hundred names. Labeled “Announced as a Subject of an All-Union Search,” the all-points bulletin was issued by the 4th Directorate of the MGB, Ministry of State Security (a forerunner of the KGB), and was dated August 31, 1948. Entry number twenty on the most-wanted list was Iwan Nikolai Demjanjuk.

The second Soviet document was an updated MGB most-wanted list issued four years later, on July 29, 1952. Also on that list was Iwan Nikolai Demjanjuk. This time, however, the MGB added 1393 to his name and provided a copy of his Trawniki card photo. The new additions to the Soviet most-wanted list indicated that sometime between August 1948 and July 1952, the Soviets had either located the original Demjanjuk Trawniki card (the prosecution’s claim) or had forged it (the defense’s claim) in an attempt to build a war crimes case against Iwan Demjanjuk.