Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

As requested, Radiwker sent the INS a report summarizing her interviews and presenting a concise description of each witness—age, state of mental and physical health, ability to travel, and willingness to testify in the United States. Then she went back to interviewing Treblinka and Sobibor survivors. Maybe she could solve the apparent contradiction.

Back in New York, Zutty couldn’t have been more pleased. All three Treblinka survivors had positively identified Fedorenko as a camp guard and a murderer. As far as eyewitnesses go, they were a category three, la crème de la crème. In the first category were those who had personally known the alleged war criminal—as schoolmate, neighbor, coworker—and knew that he collaborated with the Nazis because they saw him in uniform. They had not, however, actually seen the person commit a war crime. These eyewitnesses were useful because there was little chance of mistaken identity.

Next, there were eyewitnesses who had neither known the alleged war criminal nor had seen him commit a crime. But they had witnessed local Nazi collaborators rounding up victims, brutalizing them, and, sometimes, killing them. These witnesses could testify that the organization the alleged collaborator belonged to habitually committed such war crimes.

Finally, there were eyewitnesses who both had known the alleged war criminal and had actually seen him commit crimes against humanity. The three Treblinka survivors fell into this category. They each had known Fedorenko as an SS auxiliary guard in uniform and armed with a gun. And they had witnessed him beating prisoners with whips and shooting them to death. Important to Zutty was that each eyewitness appeared—at least on paper—as convincing and credible, and each was specific about Fedorenko’s crimes. Who could ask for more?

The three Treblinka survivors, however, surprised Zutty as much as they had Radiwker. Each had paused at the visa photo of Iwan Demjanjuk. Each had pointed to it and said that he was Iwan the Terrible, the most hated and feared man at Treblinka. They had lived with his image in their heads every day for more than thirty years. How could they possibly be mistaken?

In August 1977, two years after the INS received the Ukrainian list, the U.S. attorney’s office in Cleveland filed the complaint: United States of America v. John Demjanjuk, AKA Iwan Demjanjuk, AKA Iwan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible). The charges were clear and simple: Demjanjuk had served as a Treblinka death camp guard and lied about it; and as Ivan the Terrible he had engaged in the “cruel, inhumane and bestial treatment of Jewish prisoners.”

At the same time, the U.S. attorney’s office in Fort Lauderdale filed a similar suit against Fedorenko, who had retired and moved to Florida; it alleged he had been a guard at Treblinka as well. Since the case against him was stronger, Fedorenko faced a judge first.

In July 1978, three years after the INS received the Ukrainian list, six Treblinka survivors confronted Fedorenko in a Florida courtroom. As the first alleged Nazi collaborator to be tried under the rules of the Displaced Persons Act (DPA), his trial turned out to be a watershed case that prepared the legal ground for the prosecution of John Demjanjuk.

Emotions erupted in the grassy courtyard outside the Fort Lauderdale courtroom as twenty-year-old Brett Becker, executive director of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in Miami, led a group of demonstrators in a chant.

“What do we want?” Becker shouted through a bullhorn.

“Fedorenko!” the crowd screamed back like “avenging cheerleaders,” as the Miami Herald described them.

“How do we want him?”

“Dead!”

The chanting was so loud that Judge Norman Roettger interrupted the trial twice, ordering Becker to muzzle the bullhorn and silence the crowd. When he refused, Roettger told U.S. marshals to arrest him. The handcuffs silenced the bullhorn, but the sight of police dragging away a young Jew evoked images of the Gestapo and only inflamed the crowd even more. The arrest and handcuffs also gave the JDL another excuse to ask a federal appeals court to remove Roettger for bias. The court refused.

A group of Holocaust survivors from Miami joined the JDL in the courtyard, adding blind fury to the emotional mix. Members of the Ben Gurion Culture Club, they carried signs reading “Impeach the Judge” and “Remember 6 Million Jews Murdered by the Nazis.” Besides joining in Becker’s chant, they conducted a memorial service in the courtyard.

“We are Jews,” they chanted.

“We couldn’t be prouder.

“If you cannot hear us,

“We’ll yell louder.”

Protected by a cordon of U.S. marshals, one lone Holocaust denier braved the anger of the mob. He carried a sign that said, “The Jews Live a Lie… Six Million Lies.” A female survivor managed to break through the cordon. She ripped the placard from the denier’s hands and stomped on it. Marshals restrained her before she could punch him.

For Fedorenko, entering and leaving the courthouse past jostling demonstrators screaming “Death to Fedorenko!” was an emotional ordeal. One Holocaust survivor broke through the ring of U.S. marshals who escorted him to and from the courthouse and landed a blow before they could pull her away.

Things were just as emotional inside the courtroom during the fourteen-day trial. The tension was, as Judge Roettger put it, “so thick you could almost touch it.” And when Fedorenko took the stand after days of verbal abuse, he was visibly pale and shaken.

At issue in the trial were four questions that went to the heart of the Fedorenko and Demjanjuk cases:

• Did merely serving as a camp guard constitute assisting the enemy?

• Did Fedorenko deliberately lie on his visa application form?

• If so, was it a “material” lie, that is, the suppressing of facts which, if known, either would have made him excludable from the United States, or would have led to the uncovering of facts making him excludable?

• Did it matter whether he volunteered for the guard duty or was drafted?

Recognizing that U.S. citizenship is a priceless treasure, the Supreme Court had deliberately drafted evidentiary standards for denaturalization cases that were stricter than those governing other civil cases. It ruled that the evidence must be “clear, unequivocal, and convincing [and] not leave the issue in doubt.” Those narrow rules are especially necessary, the Court further ruled, when charges of immigration fraud are made long after citizenship or a visa has been granted, and when the accused has met his obligations as an American citizen and has committed no crimes.

Charges against Fedorenko and Demjanjuk were made more than thirty years after their visa applications had been approved. And neither man had a criminal record as an American citizen.

In spite of the heavy burden of proof, the U.S. attorneys assigned to try Fedorenko believed they had an airtight case. Six eyewitnesses from Israel testified that they had identified Fedorenko from a photo spread. All six eyewitnesses also testified that they had seen Fedorenko shoot and beat prisoners with a metal-studded whip. Three eyewitnesses positively identified him in the courtroom as the brutal Treblinka guard they described from the witness stand. A visa application was offered into evidence in which Fedorenko swore he had been a farmer in Poland and a forced factory worker in Germany during the war. A former U.S. vice consul testified that he would not have granted Fedorenko a visa permitting him to enter the United States in 1949 if he had known that Fedorenko had been a guard at Treblinka.