Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

A third KGB document dated March 17, 1969, stated that “the following persons have not been located after searches were done to their former places of residence.” On the list was Iwan Nikolai Demjanjuk 1393. His cousin Iwan Andreevich, however, was living in the village when the KGB made its search. If the real Iwan Demjanjuk was Iwan Andreevich—not Iwan Nikolai—wouldn’t the KGB have arrested him?

During the course of the trial, the defense had inadvertently created a new definition of the terms forged document and authentic document. A forged document was a Soviet document provided to the prosecution. An authentic document was a Soviet document provided to the defense.

In May 2002, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s Fedorenko decision that involuntary persecution of civilians is not a mitigating circumstance, Judge Matia ruled:

“The Government has proven by clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence that the defendant assisted in the persecution of civilian populations during World War II…. His entry to the United States in 1952 was therefore unlawful and his naturalization as a United States citizen was illegally procured and must be revoked….

“Defendant shall surrender and deliver to the Attorney General of the United States (or his designee) within ten days of the date of this order, his Certificate of Naturalization, No. 7997497, and any United States passport or other documentary evidence of the U.S. citizenship he may have.

“Defendant is forever restrained and enjoined from claiming any rights, privileges or advantages under any document evidencing U.S. citizenship.”

For the second time in twenty years, John Demjanjuk was a man without a country. But before the United States could deport him to a country of his choice, Germany requested his extradition to stand trial in Munich as Iwan of Sobibor. After all appeals were exhausted, John Demjanjuk left for Munich in May 2009 on a stretcher.

If Israel had greeted its trial of Ivan the Terrible with indifference and addiction, fascination and pain, Germany greeted its trial of Sobibor guard John Demjanjuk with stoic resignation, seasoned with a dash of skepticism. If Germany was responsible for the Holocaust, Germany must face it. Let’s get it over with and move on.

But why John Demjanjuk?

That Israel chose to try Ivan the Terrible as a major Nazi collaborator was understandable. He was a monster who tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. But John Demjanjuk? Why would Germany want to try an alleged SS guard who sat on the bottom rung of the Nazi ladder? Besides, Demjanjuk wasn’t even German. He was born in Ukraine and committed his alleged crimes in Poland. Let Ukraine or Poland suffer the trauma.

And why now?

Some would argue that the decision of the United States to pursue John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible was political. Score a big one for OSI and save it from extinction.

Some would argue that the decision of Israel to try John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible was also political. Use the trial to educate young Israelis about the reality of Treblinka and the painful details of the Holocaust upon which the Jewish state was founded.

Wasn’t Germany’s decision to try ninety-year-old John Demjanjuk as Iwan of Sobibor political as well?

In 1958, Germany had created and funded a special office for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Although the office had conducted hundreds of recent investigations, it hadn’t tried a single Nazi or Nazi collaborator for nearly twenty years. Between 1979, when OSI was created, and 2009, when the German trial opened, OSI had stripped more than three hundred Nazi collaborators of their U.S. citizenship and deported or extradited most of them before they died. During that same time period, Germany had tried just a handful of Nazi criminals. The German Nazi war crimes office appeared to be doing nothing but spending money and blowing smoke. It needed to justify its existence.

The United States came to the rescue.

OSI gave Germany John Demjanjuk, gift-wrapped and tied with a bow. If his trial was meant to be a German Nazi-era coda, it was far from a dramatic Beethovenesque flourish. It was more burp than bang.

Furthermore, hadn’t Germany done enough?

At least the country had the courage to face the war crimes of its leaders. What about the rest of the world, especially the United States and Great Britain, which were so eager to try and to convict Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg? How many public war crimes trials had the United States and Great Britain initiated to prosecute and sentence their own World War II war criminals?

What about the American and British soldiers who had brutally rounded up Soviet civilians and POWs, herded them into cattle cars at bayonet point, and shipped them east to face execution, slow death in a labor camp, or virtual slavery in a factory?

If it was a crime for the SS, Gestapo, and Trawniki men to round up Jews for the camps, why wasn’t it a crime for American and British soldiers to round up Soviet citizens for the gulags? And what about the political and military architects of the forced-repatriation reign of terror? Weren’t they guilty of the crimes against humanity that they had ordered their foot soldiers to commit?

Unlike the United States, Germany had held Treblinka trials in Düsseldorf, Sobibor trials in Hagen, Belzec trials in Munich, Trawniki trials in Hamburg, Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, and Dora trials in Essen. It had conducted more than 100,000 investigations and its courts had convicted more than 6,000 Nazis. What more did the rest of the smug, hypocritical world expect of Germany?

The picture wasn’t really that rosy. The German Nazi trials of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were riddled with acquittals and short sentences that amounted to a rap on the knuckles with a feather. It was true that approximately 180 Nazis got the maximum sentence allowable under German law. For example, Treblinka commandant Kurt Franz and Sobibor commandant Franz Stangl got life.

On the other hand, several thousand SS men working at concentration, labor, and death camps and serving as Einsatzkommandos and T-4 euthanasia workers were sentenced to only one to three years in prison. And hundreds more like Otto Horn, who had supervised the burying of corpses at Treblinka, and Karl Streibel and his top five Trawniki training camp commanders were all acquitted in a liberal—some would say scandalous—interpretation of the German criminal code.

Critics of German war crimes trials are quick to point out that most of the judges and attorneys involved in the early German trials had served the Third Reich during the war. Most had actively participated in the Reich’s criminal justice system. Most had been members of the Nazi Party. By 1949, when the responsibility of trying Nazis had shifted from the Allies to the West German judiciary:

• Ninety-three percent of court officials in the German state of Westphalia had been Nazis.

• One hundred percent of the court officers in the city of Schweinfurt had been Nazis.

• Eighty-one percent of the court officers in the large state of Bavaria had been Nazis.

• Only two Nazi lawyers or judges had been convicted of war crimes and they both received light sentences.

It was these former Nazis who provided the legal rationale for the post-Nuremberg war crimes trials, sat on the benches, pronounced judgment, determined sentences, and provided criminal defenses.

Unlike Israel and France, which had included “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in their revised penal codes in order to deal with the unique legal problems inherent in trying defendants for war crimes, Germany stood firm on its 1871 criminal code, which did not have statutes covering war crimes or crimes against humanity.