Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Justice buckled.

The new Office of Special Investigations (OSI), with a budget of $2.3 million, quickly fielded a staff of twenty lawyers, seven historians, four investigators, and a raft of support personnel with a wide range of language skills—secretaries, paralegals, researchers, and analysts. It was a long leap from the days when DeVito and Schiano had to crawl over each other’s desks to reach the door in an office without even a telephone.

If the INS dragged its feet, lacked direction and leadership, and was compromised, OSI was dogged, focused, ably led, and independent. Most important, it was driven by a deeply felt sense of urgency. Nazi war criminals and eyewitnesses were getting old and sick and were dying. Memories were fading. OSI hit the road running. In the fall of 1979, its team of attorneys gathered in its new office to review more than two hundred case files and twelve pending cases, and to parcel out assignments. Four of the hot targets were names on the original Karbach list: Bishop Valerian Trifa and Andrija Artukovic, friends of the FBI; and Tscherim Soobzokov and Boleslavs Maikovskis, friends of the CIA. There were other big targets not on the original Karbach list, among them Baron Otto von Bolschwing, who had worked for the OSS and CIA, and John Demjanjuk.

Because of its inexperience in trying forty-year-old Nazi cold cases, the pressure to prove itself, and its haste to get alleged Nazi collaborators into court before they and witnesses died, OSI would stumble badly.

While preparing to try John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, government attorneys learned that a former Ukrainian SS guard had identified Demjanjuk as a fellow guard at Sobibor, not Treblinka. Michael Hanusiak, who had included Demjanjuk’s name on his Ukrainian list of Nazi collaborators, reported the allegation in the Ukrainian Daily News in 1976, the year Miriam Radiwker began interviewing Treblinka survivors in Israel. So did Visti z Ukrainy (News from Ukraine ), a communist newspaper for Ukrainians living outside the Soviet Union that was published in Kiev in Ukrainian and in the United States in English.

The Ukrainian guard’s name was Ignat Danilchenko. In 1949, a Soviet court in Kiev had sentenced him to twenty-five years of hard labor in a Siberian gulag for collaborating with the Nazis. He served eight years of that sentence and was released. When the news articles appeared in Ukrainian papers in 1976, he was living and working in Siberia.

News from Ukraine said: “Demjanjuk went over to the other side, betraying the fatherland.” It went on to quote Danilchenko as saying that he had served at Sobibor with Iwan Demjanjuk. And for the first time, the newspaper referred to an official Certificate of Service, or ID card, that the SS had allegedly issued to Iwan Demjanjuk in 1942. According to the newspaper, the card, which included a photo, indicated that Demjanjuk had been posted to Sobibor in March 1943. The card made no mention of Treblinka. If it was authentic, the ID card confirmed what Danilchenko alleged.

The following year, News from Ukraine quoted Danilchenko at length in an article with the threatening title “Punishment Will Come.” Somehow the newspaper had gotten a copy of Danilchenko’s 1949 Soviet trial testimony.

I first met and became acquainted with [Iwan Demjanjuk] in March 1943 in the Sobibor death camp where he served in the secret SS forces as a guard. He wore the uniform of a soldier of the German SS… and carried a firearm.

As an SS guard Demjanjuk participated in mass annihilation of persons of Jewish nationality… guarded them from possible escape before executions, and conveyed them to the [gas chambers] in which these people were executed by suffocation with exhaust from a special motor.

In the spring of 1944, together with me, he was sent to Flossenbürg [Germany] and then to Regensburg [Germany] where he guarded concentration camps of arrested Soviets and other citizens and conveyed them to various jobs.

The newspaper even printed Demjanjuk’s home address in Parma, Ohio. “Today the residents of the city of Parma in the USA know Mr. Demjanjuk as an ordinary automobile inspector,” the article said. “And probably they do not know that in greeting him, they are extending their hands to a murderer of innocent people who has escaped just punishment.”

Most important, the newspaper published two pictures of the ID card called “Certificate of Service No. 1393.” Given that the newspaper was a communist publication, the authenticity of the card was immediately suspect. It would soon go on trial along with Demjanjuk and become, as one government attorney put it, “the most analyzed document of the twentieth century.”

Because official archival documents like “Certificate of Service No. 1393” are carefully guarded, the Soviet government or the KGB must have given photos of the card to News from Ukraine. The leaked photos raised two critical questions. Was the card an authentic document captured by the Red Army from German files, or a clever KGB forgery? And why did the Soviets wait until 1976 to release photos of the card when they knew as early as 1953 that Iwan Demjanjuk had survived the war and was living in Cleveland? In fact, it was John Demjanjuk himself who was indirectly responsible for giving the Soviet government his home address.

One day in 1953, Iwan Demjanjuk’s mother got a letter from America. It was posted from Cleveland and it was from her son. She must have been shocked, for Soviet officials had informed her soon after the war that her son was missing in action and that she was entitled to his military pension. A niece read her the letter from Ohio because Mrs. Demjanjuk was illiterate. It said that her son had a good job, was safe and healthy, and that she had a daughter-in-law, Vera, and a granddaughter, Lydia. Demjanjuk continued writing to his mother and sending care packages to her home in the tiny village where he was born. The niece wrote back in his mother’s name. Then, in the mid-1960s, Vera traveled to Ukraine to visit her own mother and her mother-in-law. Vera’s visa application required her to state the reason for her visit and to give her home address. If the KGB ever wanted to find Iwan Demjanjuk, a Red Army deserter, and assassinate him, they certainly knew where to look.

The two newspaper pictures of the ID card, bearing Iwan Demjanjuk’s alleged signature, showed the front and back of an official-looking German document. The front described the German organization that issued the document. In the left-hand corner on the back side of the card was a wallet-size head and shoulders photo of a young, hatless man with an oval face and short hair, dressed in black or dark clothes. The card identified the man as Iwan Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian, son of Nicolai, born on April 3, 1920, in Duboimarchariwzi. Actually, Demjanjuk was born in Dubovi Makharintsi. The card said the village was in the district of Sporosche. Actually, Demjanjuk’s village was in the Vinitsaya district. The card said he was 175 centimeters tall (about five feet, eight inches). Actually, he was six feet, one inch tall. The card said he had dark blond hair and a scar on his back. The color of his hair would later be disputed.

The card listed two service postings: Okszow, a work-camp farm estate maintained by Jewish women, beginning in September 1942; and the Sobibor death camp, beginning in March 1943. Written on the card was a word-for-word translation of the German into Russian.

The ID card bore two official-looking stamps and the signatures of three men: Karl Streibel, Ernst Teufel, and Iwan Demjanjuk. Streibel was the SS commandant of a camp called Trawniki. Teufel was a Trawniki camp supply officer, and Demjanjuk was a Trawniki graduate.