Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Adolf Hitler assigned the task of building and managing the Reich’s more than six thousand transit, POW, concentration, labor, and death camps to the SS. SS officers selected the healthiest POWs and penned them inside hastily constructed camps in the Reich-occupied territories until they could be placed in proper labor camps. Iwan was sent first to Rovno in June 1942, then to an outdoor holding camp in Chelm, Poland, a historic city founded in the ninth century and only a twenty-minute train ride from the Bug River, which divided Poland and the Soviet Union. Chelm served as a cultural center for both Poles and Jews, who had lived in relative harmony until Hitler made it legal to rob and kill Jews.

The Soviet army occupied Chelm for eleven days in 1939, before retreating back across the Bug as the German army advanced eastward. Many Chelm Jews, who feared the Nazis more than they loved their homes, fled into the Soviet Union behind the Red Army. After the war, the majority stayed there.

The Nazis eventually killed, or sent to work camps and death camps, all but a few Chelm Jews, who managed to hide. The Chelm holding camp for Soviet POWs (including Iwan Demjanjuk) is not to be confused with the tiny village of Chelmno, the site of a not-so-secret Nazi extermination camp in northern Poland. It was at Chelmno that the Nazis experimented with gas as a murder weapon, first in sealed vans, then in two primitive gas chambers with adjacent crematoria. The Chelmno guinea pigs were mostly Polish Jews, Gypsies (Roma), and Russian POWs.

The Chelm prisoner holding camp was a corral without barracks, ringed with rolls of barbed wire. Prisoners who tried to escape got caught in the wire and were left to die of exposure and dehydration. During the 1942–43 winter, the SS gave the camp’s first sixty thousand Soviet POWs wood and tools, and ordered them to build their own barracks. Most died of starvation or sickness. The following winter was almost as cruel. The only survivors were prisoners who were selected to work in labor camps or who “volunteered” to serve as camp guards. Iwan survived the winter.

Late in 1943, the SS sent Iwan to Graz, Austria, to be inducted into an all-Ukrainian unit of the Waffen SS (armed SS) to fight the Red Army. At Graz, a doctor tattooed Iwan’s blood type on his upper left arm in case he was wounded and needed a blood transfusion. A few weeks later, the SS transferred Iwan to Heuberg, Germany, where he was inducted into the Russian Liberation Army (RLA). Given his hatred of the communists as a Ukrainian and as a Christian, young Iwan saw his service in the RLA as both an honor and a patriotic duty.

The RLA was under the command of Andrei Vlasov, a Red Army general whom the Germans had taken prisoner a few months after Iwan. To the Reich, General Vlasov was a public relations coup—a Soviet war hero because of his brilliant defense of Moscow and Leningrad in the deadly winter of 1941. In reality, Vlasov was, like Iwan, an anti-Stalinist.

When Vlasov offered to collaborate with the German army against the Soviet Union, Berlin accepted. In September 1944, as the Red Army relentlessly drove the Germans west, the Reich incorporated the RLA into the German army.

Although most RLA soldiers ( Vlasovtsy ) saw action in the final year of the war and suffered heavy casualties, Iwan survived. General Vlasov never called up Iwan’s unit, so he sat out the last days of the war far from the front.

When Germany surrendered in May 1945, there were more than ten million uprooted and starving men, women, and children in Western Europe. They poured through the gates of displaced persons (DP) camps in the American, British, and French military sectors like a human tsunami. Most were former slave laborers, concentration camp inmates, and POWs. Among them was Iwan Demjanjuk.

Iwan entered a DP camp in Landshut, the former site of a slave labor subcamp of the infamous Dachau prison complex. While in Landshut, he joined the camp’s uniformed police force and met Vera Kowlowa, a fellow Ukrainian whom the Germans had uprooted to work as a domestic. They married in September 1947, then moved to the much larger, American-run DP camp in Regensburg, Bavaria, hoping to find better food and living conditions. As an insurance policy, Iwan worked for the U.S. Army as a truck driver, hauling wood, coal, and other camp supplies.

Postwar Europe offered three choices to DPs like Iwan: return to one’s home country, create a new life in Western Europe, or emigrate to a country outside Europe. Iwan chose emigration. As a first step in the process, he requested refugee status from the International Refugee Organization. That step posed a moral problem. If Iwan told refugee officials that he was a former Russian POW who had served in the RLA, he could be handed over to the Red Army for extradition back to the Soviet Union. The 1945 Yalta Agreement between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union stipulated that all Soviet POWs had to be remanded to Soviet authorities along with any Soviet citizen who had lived in the Soviet Union before 1937. Iwan Demjanjuk was both a POW and someone who had lived in the Soviet Union before 1937.

Iwan knew that if he were handed over to the Soviets, he was a dead man. Word had drifted across the Bug River that Stalin was trying POWs as Nazi collaborators. Some were executed. Most were sentenced to a slow death in Siberia. Vlasovtsy officers got special handling. Stalin summarily hung them publicly as traitors, including General Vlasov himself, whom the Red Army had captured during the waning months of the war.

In March 1948, Iwan wrote on his refugee application form that from 1937 to 1943 he had worked as a farmer in Sobibor, a tiny village in eastern Poland near the Bug River. That lie put him beyond the legal reach of the Soviet Union. Iwan chose the town of Sobibor as his fake residence because there was a sizable Ukrainian colony there, a fact that would make his story realistic if anyone bothered to check. To account for the months between 1943 and the end of the war in June 1945, Iwan wrote on his application that he had worked as a stevedore on the docks of Pillau, a German port on the Baltic Sea, and as a laborer in Munich.

Refugee officials accepted Iwan’s application without challenge. They had to process millions of forms, didn’t have time to check details, and had no access to records.

In 1950, Iwan and Vera had their first child, Lydia. Hoping to create a better life for his new family, Iwan applied for and received a visa to the United States, based on a sworn statement that he had spent the years 1937–45 working in Sobibor, Pillau, and Munich, and that he had taken no part in the persecution of any person due to race, religion, or national origin. Under the aegis of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, Iwan, Vera and Lydia Demjanjuk steamed into New York harbor on the USS General W. G. Haan on February 9, 1952. Vera cried when she caught sight of the Statue of Liberty.

The Demjanjuks were only three of approximately one hundred thousand war refugees who entered the United States that year. Between four and five hundred thousand European refugees would eventually sink new roots in America after World War II.

For both Iwan and Vera, New York was the end of a harrowing journey of cunning and luck. Burying their painful memories under a comforter of hope, they settled into the harsh life of a penniless immigrant family. With all their possessions crammed into two boxes, they boarded a train for Decatur, Indiana, where a farmer and a spare room were waiting.

Iwan (now Ivan) began his new life in America tending pigs. Unable to speak English, the life of the Demjanjuks in rural Indiana was isolated and depressing until they made friends with a neighboring Polish family. When his new friends learned that Ivan was a mechanic, they found him a full-time job at a garage in Decatur. It didn’t pay well, but it was a step up from castrating piglets.