Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Those who believed John Demjanjuk was a pawn in a political game still believe that. They say the Office of Special Investigations used him to buy its continued existence. And Israel used him to educate a new generation of Israelis for whom the Holocaust was only a dry chapter in a history book. And Germany used him to prove that it took seriously its responsibility to try Nazi war criminals, setting a critical legal precedent in the process.

The trial left Demjanjuk supporters, inside and outside the émigré community, bitterly disappointed. To try an old man for something he did in Poland nearly seventy years earlier, when he was a twenty-one-year-old prisoner of war facing starvation, was a form of court-sanctioned torture. How just was it to find a camp guard guilty of assisting in the deaths of thousands, but to acquit four SS officers who ran the camp and issued the orders, as a court had done in Hagen, Germany, in 1965?

Those who believed the KGB duped the United States and framed John Demjanjuk still believe that. In spite of all the tests and expert testimony to the contrary, they still believe that the Trawniki card is a clever KGB forgery, and they continue to point out real or perceived flaws in the card as proof. They will never find satisfaction, however, because their version of the truth will always be just one unexplained blemish away. The simple fact is that, although the United States is still declassifying and releasing Nazi documents, it is unlikely that any significant new evidence relating to John Demjanjuk or the Trawniki card will ever surface.

The lack of closure on the Demjanjuk case, however, does not mean that his trial in Munich was a trivial exercise in belated justice. The highly publicized proceeding has elevated the Demjanjuk case to a larger-than-life status. Like it or not, John Demjanjuk became the coda to the Nazi era. Like Demjanjuk, most alleged war criminals and the witnesses against them are either in their nineties or late eighties. They suffer from health problems, memory lapses, and dementia. More likely than not, that makes Demjanjuk the last major trial of the Nazi war crimes era, which began with the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946 and continued in fits and starts until May 2011 in Munich, Germany.

As a coda, John Demjanjuk’s trial was no heart-stopping finale. Rather, it ended with a pop and a fizzle.

However disappointed, divided, and emotionally unsatisfied the world may be with the thirty-four-year legal journey of John Demjanjuk and the 2011 Munich verdict, the frustrating ordeal—two denaturalization trials, two deportation hearings, two extradition hearings, and two criminal trials—raised an important question.

John Demjanjuk was no Holocaust architect like Adolf Eichmann, no genocide implementer like Heinrich Himmler, no medical experimenter like Dr. Josef Mengele, no gas chamber operator like Sobibor’s Erich Bauer, no anti-Semitic rabble-rouser like Romanian Viorel Trifa, no Nazi puppet mayor like Belorussian Emanuel Jasiuk, no executioner like Karl Linnas, no ethnic cleanser like Croatian Andrija Artukovic, and no sadistic camp guard like Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka.

John Demjanjuk was a poor Ukrainian village boy drafted as an ordinary private into Stalin’s Red Army. He was just one of four million Soviet soldiers captured and imprisoned by the Germans. By Holocaust rankings, he was just an ordinary Nazi collaborator who never rose above the rank of private as an SS guard, and just one of more than five thousand Trawniki men who agreed to work with the Nazis in the hope of surviving the war. As fate would have it, John Demjanjuk was one of the few Trawniki men that Nazis hunters caught, simply because his ID card survived the war.

As a very ordinary young man captured by the Germans and facing a high probability of either starving to death, dying from overwork and disease, or being routinely executed, John Demjanjuk poses a final question to his accusers and critics. It is a question that goes to the heart of the human condition—a question that only an ordinary man like John “Iwan” Demjanjuk could ask:

If you had been me in 1942, what would you have done?

If the Nazi war crimes trials have ended, war crimes revelations have not. The ink on historical documents may have faded and pages may have yellowed, but the content of those pages does not suffer from failing memories or dementia. If there is any disease present, it is that of complacency, arrogance, and incompetence, which continues to shield big government, big money, and big political interests from scrutiny and prosecution.

Fortunately, the further one steps away from the Nazi era and its architects, scoundrels, and sadists, the more light shines on the past. The question is: Will anyone still care when documents now buried in file cabinets, safes, and vaults are finally declassified and released?

As the new revelations about Nazi war criminals and their collaborators find their way into the media, Americans who do care will have Eli Rosenbaum and Elizabeth Holtzman to thank. Beginning in 1980, Rosenbaum devoted almost his entire adult life to prosecuting former Nazis and Nazi collaborators, first as an OSI trial attorney, then as OSI’s last director. During the more than thirty years of OSI existence, government prosecutors won 107 cases against Nazi war criminals and prevented hundreds more from entering the United States. And at least seven suspected Nazis and Nazi collaborators facing investigation committed suicide.

In 2009, the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a country-by-country report card on how aggressively and well each nation had pursued and prosecuted Nazi war criminals. The center gave the United States straight As every single year from 2000 to date. Despite this “scorecard” success, OSI’s 2006 draft internal history of its search for and prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the United States noted that Rosenbaum was “haunted by the belief that additional prosecutions could have been brought had there been more resources—both financial and manpower—available.”

Elizabeth Holtzman began chasing former Nazis through legislation beginning in 1974 after she reviewed the Karbach list files in New York. Over the years, she continued to badger the Justice Department to find and expel Nazis and Nazi collaborators, through her legislative work in Congress and her international network of contacts.

Most recently, Holtzman worked as a consultant in the framing and enactment of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, sponsored by Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio and Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York. The 1978 Holtzman Amendment laid the foundation for the disclosure act, which mandated the declassification and release of files and documents dealing with Nazis known to be, or suspected of being, war criminals. The act further mandated that President Clinton create an interagency working group (IWG) to serve as a watchdog over U.S. intelligence agencies and departments that are custodians of Nazi war crimes documents. Clinton appointed Holtzman to the IWG board.

To date, more than eight million pages from the files of agencies under the umbrellas of the departments of State, Justice, and Defense have been declassified, the largest disclosure in U.S. history. Unfortunately, thousands of those pages have been removed from storage boxes and folders under the notice “Access Restricted.” Thousands more have been so heavily redacted that they are virtually useless. And there are hundreds of references to files, reports, and documents either missing or still classified.

In spite of their limitations and gaps, however, the newly released documents illustrate how the FBI, the State Department, the military, and the CIA opened a wide door for former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. These documents also reveal the identities of many of the war criminals that U.S. government agencies protected in a cynical perversion of justice. How America welcomed those major war criminals stands in stark contrast to how it hounded minor war criminal John Demjanjuk.