Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Sobibor Jews did not resent or hate their Kapos, who, like them, were merely trying to survive. But they did distinguish between good and bad Kapos. A good Kapo whipped a fellow Jew as lightly as he could get away with. He shared his extra food. He helped tend the bloody welts of those whom he had been forced to beat. He tried to cover for the sick.

Sobibor Jews trusted their good Kapos so much that they invited one to play a critical role in the October 1943 escape.

A bad Kapo was a Nazi sycophant who curried favor in the hope that he would be spared in the end. He whipped fellow Jews with enthusiasm. He reported stolen food. He sought out the sick for execution. He was a stoolie and a snitch. Sobibor prisoners distrusted their bad Kapos so much that they assassinated one—a German Jew whom they called “Berliner”—because he was a snitch and endangered their escape plan.

The Kapo and the Trawniki man had several things in common. They were both prisoners of war. Neither had necessarily volunteered for their death camp job. If they had refused to work with the Nazis, they would have been punished. Both were rewarded with privileges for their collaboration. As part of the killing process, both were ordered to commit acts of brutality. Under the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Fedorenko case, neither the guard nor the Kapo was eligible for a U.S. visa because involuntary collaboration was not an extenuating circumstance under the 1948 Displaced Persons Act.

The major difference between the Trawniki man and the Kapo was that the SS planned to kill their Kapos in the end. They had no plans to kill their Trawniki men. Other differences were a matter of degree.

If a prisoner refused to be a Kapo, he most probably would be killed. If a Trawniki man requested not to be posted to camp three or asked for a transfer from a death camp because he could not stomach killing Jews, he probably would not be punished or court-martialed and executed.

The rewards granted to a Sobibor SS guard went far beyond those given to a Kapo. The Trawniki man was paid. He got days off away from the camp. Once he was out of the camp, he was free to move around. He got regular leave, decent food, and clean, warm clothes. And he could earn promotions with better pay.

According to Sobibor survivor accounts, the SS guards at Sobibor did their jobs with sadistic enthusiasm. The good Kapo did his job with a degree of personal pain and compassion.

Survivors were quick to point out that the SS guards at Sobibor could easily desert. Were they applying a double standard? If the SS guard had the moral obligation to take a risk and flee, didn’t the Jews at Sobibor also have a moral obligation to take a risk and escape?

There is a huge difference between escaping and deserting. To try to escape from Sobibor was, for the most part, an act of suicide. Philip Bialowitz testified about why he didn’t try it until the uprising. “I often thought about escape,” he said. “But Sobibor was surrounded by barbed wire, guard towers, a mine field, and a deep forest. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, a wild animal would trigger one of the mines and we were marched out of our beds and counted like diamonds.”

The SS guards didn’t have to escape. All they had to do was disappear into the forest on their day off and join a partisan group. Many did, as Holocaust historian Peter Black points out. There were 388 known Trawniki men who served at Sobibor over the life of the camp. At least twenty-nine (7.5 percent) either deserted or tried to desert.

There is no record that Iwan Demjanjuk ever tried to desert from Sobibor, assuming he was at Sobibor. Trawniki man Ignat Danilchenko said in his sworn statement that when the SS closed Flossenbürg and reassigned him and Iwan Demjanjuk to another camp safe from the advancing Red Army, he decided to desert. He asked Demjanjuk to join him. Demjanjuk declined.

The SS guards at Sobibor had a second realistic option. There were between 150 and 200 SS guards at the camp and only twenty-five to thirty SS men. How hard would it have been to pick a day and an hour and start shooting? There was a prisoner revolt at Sobibor—the largest escape from any European prison camp during World War II—but there was no SS guard revolt. In fact, SS guards shot and killed as many escaping Jews as they could during their uprising.

Sobibor survivors argue that Iwan Demjanjuk chose to stay at Sobibor because life there was cushier and safer than life in the forest.

Those who followed the Munich trial closely have concluded that John Demjanjuk didn’t have a chance for acquittal. His court-appointed attorney didn’t enjoy a fat defense wallet or an army of researchers at his elbow. He worked diligently, argued even harder, but managed to irritate, if not alienate, the panel of judges with groundless motions to kill or delay the proceedings. His aggressive attitude toward the bench got to associate judge Thomas Lenz during a court session one day.

“You don’t have to sneer at me,” Lenz yelled at Busch. “Stop doing that.”

An analysis of the body language of bored judges, the questions they asked Busch and the defense witnesses, and the constant rejection of defense motions—presiding judge Alt had as many as twelve sitting on his desk at any given time—signaled that the judges were not buying the repetitious arguments of the defense. They appeared to be saying: Who are you trying to kid, Herr Busch? He was at Sobibor.

German trial observer and reporter Gisela Friedrichsen described Busch in unflattering but fair terms. “One doesn’t need to like attorney Busch as a person,” she wrote in Der Spiegel. “One can criticize him for his constant use of abstruse, refuted or unproven arguments. Or for his fruitless motions for rejects, for stay of proceedings or for relief, and his haphazard applications to produce evidence, which numbers in the hundreds and only wasted time. Or his uncontrolled outbursts against the presiding judge Ralph Alt, which truly made his job difficult, as well as against the joint plaintiffs and even against the families of the victims.

“But given the plethora of documents that attest to the detailed record-keeping of the extermination machinery and his client’s proximity to that machinery, Busch defended Demjanjuk with his back to the wall. He knew that it was a hopeless case, but he fought nevertheless.

“He should not have to apologize for this.”

Given the court’s assumption that John Demjanjuk was at Sobibor, would the judges acquit him under the statutes of the criminal code of 1871? Or would the court set a precedent and convict him of accessory to murder? If it did convict him, was the German court making John Demjanjuk a scapegoat for sixty years of guilt and selective justice?

The answer to those questions depended on how the panel of seven judges defined the ambiguous word “collaborator.”

W ho is a Nazi collaborator is such a delicate question in the context of the Holocaust that resistance to examining it and its horrendous implications is fierce and emotional. As a result, the question is so neglected that there isn’t a nuanced vocabulary to describe it, as there is for the action of killing.

In both popular and legal language, killing can include, among other things: voluntary or involuntary manslaughter, first-degree or second-degree murder, negligent homicide, accidental death, malpractice, suicide, self-defense, capital punishment, and a soldier’s wartime duty. If a man collaborates with an enemy who commits war crimes, however, he is simply a “collaborator.”

At the risk of offending Holocaust survivors and their families, it is important to understand and define who is a collaborator in the context of World War II in order to establish a framework of reference for the German trial of John Demjanjuk as SS guard Iwan of Sobibor.