Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The German prosecutors’ task was made more difficult because there still was no credible living eyewitness who could place Demjanjuk at Sobibor and testify to seeing him commit a war crime there. Once again, it appeared that the Munich trial, like the one in Cleveland, would be a trial by archives.

For the fourth time, the Trawniki card was on trial, and for the fourth time technical experts debated its authenticity. Most had testified at other Demjanjuk trials in Cleveland and in Jerusalem. None offered compelling new evidence or fresh arguments. The validity of the signature of Iwan Demjanjuk on the ID card was still the main bone of contention. As in Jerusalem, the trial in Munich boiled down to whose expert witnesses—prosecution or defense—appeared more expert.

As U.S. prosecutors had done in the 2001 denaturalization trial, German prosecutors offered into evidence the six documents supporting the authenticity of the Trawniki card, from the Majdanek disciplinary report to the Flossenbürg roster. Once again, the defense argued forgery without offering proof of forgery.

As U.S. prosecutors had done in the 2001 denaturalization trial, German prosecutors entered the Danilchenko Protocol into evidence. The former Sobibor guard had sworn in his statement that he served with Iwan Demjanjuk at Sobibor. His description of Demjanjuk was accurate, and he had positively identified the Trawniki card photo as that of Iwan Demjanjuk. Unfortunately, Danilchenko had died before OSI or anyone else could cross-examine him.

Once again, the defense in Germany argued that Danilchenko’s statement was suspect because the KGB had extracted it under torture. German historian Dieter Pohl supported that argument from the stand. He urged the court to treat Danilchenko’s statement with “highest caution” since the former Trawniki man appeared to be telling the KGB what it wanted to hear.

In an attempt to rebut Danilchenko, the defense offered into evidence a statement made by Iwan Ivchenko, who had served as an SS guard at Sobibor at the same time Demjanjuk allegedly served there. Ivchenko said he didn’t recall a fellow guard named Iwan Demjanjuk.

Whom should the court believe? The Trawniki man who said he saw Demjanjuk at Sobibor or the Trawniki man who said he did not?

The prosecution was not without potential live witnesses. But they were a mixed blessing. Two former SS guards and a Sobibor survivor had volunteered to testify for the prosecution. Each proved to be a jack-in-the-box—unpredictable and unexpected.

Alex Nagorny, a ninety-three-year-old former Ukrainian Trawniki man, testified that he had worked with and shared a barrack with Iwan Demjanjuk at Flossenbürg. The court asked Nagorny if the man lying on the stretcher in front of him was the Iwan Demjanjuk he had known. Nagorny stepped away from the witness stand, walked over to the gurney, and studied Demjanjuk’s face.

“That’s definitely not him,” he said. “No resemblance.”

Nagorny went on to help the defense even more. He testified that when the war was over, the Trawniki men destroyed their ID cards (incriminating evidence) so that the Allies would not deliver them to the Soviets as Nazi collaborators. Wouldn’t Iwan Demjanjuk have done the same? If so, where did the Demjanjuk ID card on trial in Munich come from?

Eighty-nine-year-old Samuel Kunz, another Trawniki man, volunteered to testify that all SS guards knew what happened to the Jews who entered a death camp even if they didn’t work near the gas chambers. They all understood they were part of a killing machine.

Prosecutors had known for several years that Kunz had been a guard at Belzec, but they declined to prosecute him because they had no evidence that he had committed a specific murder as defined by the 1871 German penal code. However, during their background check for the Demjanjuk trial, prosecutors learned that Kunz, an ethnic national who had been living in Germany for sixty years, had personally shot at least a dozen Jews at Belzec.

Germany charged Kunz with assisting in the murder of 430,000 Jews at Belzec, but he never faced a panel of judges. Someone was one step ahead of the court. On a cold night in April 2011, assassins entered Kunz’s home in Bonn, snatched him from his bed, and left him outside to die of hypothermia.

Not long after the Demjanjuk trial opened in Munich, a Moscow correspondent for a Czech radio station happened to see a brief item in a Russian newspaper about a former POW from Sobibor named Alexei Vaitsen. The news item led her to a cramped apartment in Ryazan, Russia, a picturesque city two hundred miles southeast of Moscow.

Vaitsen was an eighty-seven-year-old former Jewish Red Army officer who had been imprisoned at Sobibor. Assigned an important role in the October 1943 uprising, he escaped during the revolt and fled into the forest. Like the military commander of the uprising, Soviet Army Lieutenant Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, Vaitsen rejoined the Red Army and survived the war, only to suffer severe discrimination as a Russian Jew in the Soviet Union.

Vaitsen told the correspondent that he had seen Iwan Demjanjuk at Sobibor leading a Waldkommando (Forest Kommando) out of the camp into the forest to cut wood. Vaitsen said that he later recognized Iwan Demjanjuk from an old photo published in a Soviet newspaper. The photo Vaitsen was referring to was probably the Trawniki card picture that the KGB released to the Soviet press in 1976.

“It’s him,” Vaitsen said. “I know him. I’m one hundred percent certain.”

German prosecutors did not find Vaitsen credible. Why did he wait thirty years to come forward, they asked.

But Vaitsen hadn’t come forward. He had been found and interviewed.

Why didn’t he say something during the Israeli trial, they asked.

Assuming he even knew about the Ivan the Terrible trial, Vaitsen suffered from wartime nightmares and never talked about what he had seen and endured during the war, according to family members.

Vaitsen had testified at the Soviet trials of Trawniki men in the 1960s during which he identified several Sobibor guards by name. Why didn’t he mention Iwan Demjanjuk, the German prosecutors asked.

Vaitsen knew Demjanjuk’s face, but not his name. And no one showed him a picture of Iwan Demjanjuk in the 1960s.

German prosecutors decided not to call Vaitsen to the stand, but they did call two other Sobibor survivors to testify. Neither one recognized Iwan Demjanjuk’s name as a Sobibor guard. Neither one could identify his photo or recognize him in court as an SS guard they had seen at Sobibor. Neither one had ever entered camp three, where the Jews were gassed. All they could do from the witness stand was describe the killing process at Sobibor from personal observation and which roles the SS guards played in it.

Thomas “Toivi” Blatt, whose father, mother, and sister were murdered at Sobibor on the day the family arrived there, made an important statement during the trial. Commenting on his failure to identify John Demjanjuk as a Sobibor SS guard, Blatt said: “I can’t say I remember Demjanjuk’s face. But frankly, I can’t even recall [the faces] of my father or mother after so many decades.” Blatt testified that he saw SS guards enter camp three through the camouflaged gate. He heard gunshots. He heard the motor start up and rumble. He heard screams. But he couldn’t say precisely what the SS guards did once they entered camp three. Did they beat prisoners? Whip them? Force them into the gas chamber? Did they torture them like Ivan the Terrible did at Treblinka? Should the court assume that if the Treblinka SS guards drove Jews into the gas chambers, Sobibor guards must have done the same thing? Furthermore, Blatt could not testify that every single SS guard at Sobibor had actually worked in camp three at one time or another.