Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The Israeli police had their own Nazi Crimes Unit, whose main job was to help other countries like the United States build cases. The Nazi unit assigned the nine Ukrainians to its ace investigator, Miriam Radiwker, a Ukrainian-born attorney who had fled to the Soviet Union early in the war to escape the Nazis, and who had practiced law in both Poland and the Soviet Union before immigrating to Israel in 1964. Radiwker studied Zutty’s report and arrived at the same conclusion he had and for the same reasons. Fedorenko and Demjanjuk were the two most promising targets on the list.

Radiwker began her preliminary investigation with Feodor Fedorenko, a seventy-year-old retired welder living in Waterbury, Connecticut. He was the easier target because there were more Treblinka survivors living in Israel than Sobibor survivors, and the alleged crimes against Fedorenko were specific—beating and murdering—while those against Demjanjuk were vague.

In May 1976, while Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman was meeting with the Soviets over U.S.-Moscow cooperation, Radiwker placed ads in Israeli newspapers asking Sobibor and Treblinka survivors for help in a Nazi collaboration investigation. She also contacted three Treblinka survivors whom she knew from a previous investigation. All three had escaped from Treblinka during the uprising there in the summer of 1943. She made it a point not to tell them Fedorenko and Demjanjuk were the subjects of the investigation.

Radiwker’s interviews with survivor-witnesses followed a protocol provided by Zutty: Show each witness at least three photos; if the witness recognizes anyone in the spread, get a physical description of the subject at the time the witness knew him; have the witness describe the uniform the subject wore at the camp; and most important, find out whether the survivor had personally seen the subject commit acts of violence on civilians (if so, from what vantage point) and had personally suffered at the hands of the subject.

Radiwker’s first witness was Treblinka survivor Eugen Turowsky. Before presenting the photos, Radiwker asked Turowsky if he could recall the last name of any guard at Treblinka. He could not. She then placed the three-page photo spread in front of him. Each of the eighteen photos was a visa picture of a young Ukrainian.

“Please, sir,” she asked. “Look and see whether you find someone you know.”

An experienced lawyer and investigator, Radiwker made it a point of asking this unembellished question lest she be accused of prompting or trying to influence the witness.

Turowsky didn’t recognize anyone on the first or second cardboard pages. But when he came to the third page, featuring photos sixteen and seventeen, he became visibly agitated, then pointed to number sixteen, the visa picture of a round-faced, well-fed Ivan Demjanjuk dressed in a dark suit and tie.

“Iwan,” he shouted. “Iwan from Treblinka. Iwan Grozny.”

Iwan of Treblinka was well-known to Nazi hunters worldwide as the guard who operated Treblinka’s gas chambers. He sat at the top of Simon Wiesenthal’s most-wanted list of Nazi collaborators. Treblinka prisoners gave him the name Ivan the Terrible (Grozny). The historical Ivan the Terrible was Ivan IV (Vasilyevich), who became the first czar of Russia.

Radiwker’s first reaction to Turowsky’s identification was that the survivor had to be mistaken. Iwan Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor, not Treblinka. Information from America was always accurate, in her experience, and she didn’t have the slightest doubt that it might be wrong this time. Since Turowsky was emotionally shaken, Radiwker chose not to probe his memory, however gently. Instead she asked him to describe Iwan Grozny, as the INS had requested.

“He was of medium height, solidly built, with a round, full face,” Turowsky said. “He had a short broad neck, high forehead with the beginning of baldness… He could have been 23–24 years old at most.”

Turowsky did not work near the Treblinka gas chamber in camp two, but he saw Iwan almost daily as he passed from one camp to another. Given her witness’s emotional state, Radiwker decided to end the interview. “Mr. Turowsky,” she said, “we can talk about this more tomorrow.” Then she wrote up what Turowsky had told her, as the INS had requested. When Turowsky returned the next morning, she showed him the photo spread a second time.

“Look at the pictures,” she said. “Perhaps you will find someone you know.”

“The man in photograph seventeen is familiar to me,” Turowsky said. “This could be Fedorenko. I am almost certain of it, but I must comment that I always saw him in uniform and here he is in civilian clothes.”

The more he studied photo seventeen, the more certain Turowsky became. “This is Fedorenko. I am sure of this. I don’t remember his first name…. I saw him almost daily…. He was tall, about 180 cm [five feet, nine inches], age about 30, with broad shoulders….He committed crimes. He murdered Jews on his own.”

Radiwker added the new information to her report and offered it to Turowsky, who read and signed it. That afternoon, she placed the same three pages of photos on the table in front of Treblinka survivor Avraham Goldfarb.

“Please, sir. Look and see whether you find someone you know.”

Like Turowsky, Goldfarb picked out Demjanjuk as Iwan of Treblinka. But unlike Turowsky, he was not visibly agitated. He was certain the man in photo sixteen was Ivan the Terrible, he told Radiwker, because he worked only a few yards from the gas chamber and could see Iwan drive the prisoners into the chambers, then enter the building that housed the motors that delivered the lethal carbon monoxide gas.

“We workers called him Iwan Grozny,” Goldfarb said. “Ivan the Terrible.”

Either the information Zutty had given Radiwker was wrong or Goldfarb was wrong. Faced with the dilemma, Radiwker decided to probe. She pointed to photo sixteen, Demjanjuk.

“This man was at Sobibor , not Treblinka,” she said.

Goldfarb was adamant. “When I came, he was already at Treblinka,” he said.

Next, Radiwker showed the photos to Eliyahu Rosenberg. Like Turowsky and Goldfarb before him, he pointed to photo sixteen, but was more cautious.

“The man in this photo,” he said, “is very similar to the Ukrainian Iwan who… was called Iwan Grozny.”

Without any prompting from Radiwker, Rosenberg went on to describe Iwan. “He had a round face, full…. He had a high forehead with the beginning of baldness. He also had very short hair. His neck was short, fat….I remember that he had prominent ears….He was 22–23 years old.”

Rosenberg hastened to add that he was not 100 percent sure. “I refuse to say that I identify him with certainty,” he said. “This photo apparently originates from a much later period. Here he is dressed in civilian clothes while I always saw him in… a black uniform.”

Rosenberg’s point was valid. Demjanjuk’s visa application photo was taken in 1951, eight years after the SS liquidated Treblinka.

Rosenberg then went on to positively identify Fedorenko as a guard at Treblinka. Once again, Radiwker decided to probe. According to the information she had, she told Rosenberg, the man in photo sixteen was a guard at Sobibor, not Treblinka.

“Madam, I know the face, and I am telling you he was at Treblinka,” Rosenberg replied. “In the course of 1942, several prisoners—construction workers—were sent to Sobibor together with some Ukrainians who did not return from there. However, I saw Ivan the Terrible until the last day.”

Radiwker concluded that the two positive (and one probable) identifications of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible were hardly a coincidence. All three Treblinka survivors had based their identification on the same set of physical characteristics—round face, premature receding hairline, short bull neck, protruding ears, and age. There was some discrepancy on Iwan’s height. Was Demjanjuk Iwan Grozny, Radiwker asked herself, or did he just look like Iwan Grozny?