Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Ryan stepped into Rockler’s shoes. As OSI’s first full-time director, he had a critical decision to make. Should he try John Demjanjuk for lying on his U.S. visa application about being a guard at Treblinka, or for being a guard at Sobibor? It wasn’t an easy call, and it had caused a rift on the OSI team even before Rockler left and while Ryan was still deputy director.

The major sliver under Ryan’s skin was George Parker. The Justice Department attorney had been assigned to investigate the Demjanjuk case when OSI was still just a gleam in Elizabeth Holtzman’s eye. No one knew the shoals and eddies of the Demjanjuk case better than Parker. And Parker was deeply troubled.

Soon after its first organizational meeting in the summer of 1979, OSI had asked Moscow for a certified copy of the alleged Trawniki card and any information it might have on Demjanjuk. A package from Moscow arrived in Washington several months later, in January 1980. It contained a sworn statement from Ignat Danilchenko, the former Trawniki man who said Demjanjuk had served with him at Sobibor; two certified photos of Iwan Demjanjuk’s Trawniki card (front and back); and statements from two former Treblinka guards.

Ryan looked at the photos of the ID card placing Demjanjuk at Sobibor and said to himself: “Gotcha, you son-of-a-bitch.” To Ryan, the Trawniki card complemented the government’s complaint that Demjanjuk was Treblinka’s Ivan the Terrible.

George Parker looked at the photos, read the three statements, and was worried. Both former Treblinka guards swore they had never heard of Iwan Demjanjuk and neither one recognized his photo. Parker feared that Demjanjuk was turning into another Frank Walus. And the last thing OSI needed, while it stretched its legal wings, was another Walus.

Frank (Franciszek) Walus was a fifty-five-year-old immigrant and retired factory worker from southwest Chicago who didn’t smoke or drink and rarely left Little Poland except to go fishing and pick wild mushrooms. In January 1977, around the time the government filed charges against Fedorenko, it also filed a complaint against Walus, alleging he had been a member of the Nazi Gestapo, had committed atrocities against Jews in the Polish towns of Kielce and Czestochowa, and during his naturalization hearing had failed to report his membership in a Nazi organization.

Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal triggered the investigation into Walus’s background with a letter to the INS outlining the Gestapo allegations and furnishing the names of several eyewitnesses. That Walus was born in Germany and was a citizen of Poland and could speak both Polish and German did not help his case.

Waving his U.S. citizenship papers over his head and close to tears, Walus shouted to the reporters who had gathered outside his home minutes after the government served him a copy of the charges: “It’s a dirty, dirty, dirty trick…. The Jews are making a lot of trouble for me.” The cry echoed across Chicago for months before, during, and after the Walus trial as Poles, Jews, and neo-Nazis drew lines in the sand. Media coverage was heavy. Emotions seethed, then boiled over.

In an assault that came to symbolize Chicago’s polarization, a man with an aerosol can attacked Walus in the Loop and sprayed his face and eyes with a chemical. When police caught the attacker running down LaSalle Street and asked him why he did it, he said: “Because I’m a Jew and he’s a Nazi.”

Walus was taken to a hospital, where doctors cleaned and bathed his eyes. He suffered no permanent injury and the Jewish community issued a public apology. But emotions continued to run at such fever pitch that authorities requested extra marshals in the courtroom and the hallway outside and ordered security guards to search all spectators before they passed through a metal detector. The threat of violence was so real that Walus’s defense attorney refused to appear for the court’s reading of its finding, fearing for his personal safety.

If he had enemies, Walus had supporters, too. A neo-Nazi group publicly offered to hire an attorney to represent him and to help foot his legal bills, no strings attached. Calling the trial “a Jewish witch hunt and mockery of justice,” the group threatened to march through predominantly Jewish Skokie, a Chicago suburb. Walus declined the neo-Nazi offer until unpaid invoices mounted on his desk.

“If the devil would give me money,” he said, “I would take it.”

Presiding over the three-and-a-half-week bench trial was eighty-two-year-old Julius Hoffman, known to Chicagoans as the crotchety, cantankerous judge who steered the post–Democratic National Convention trial of the “Chicago Seven” ten years earlier, in 1969. Judge Hoffman had been the star of that raucous show. The drama climaxed when he ordered U.S. marshals to bind, gag, and chain defendant Bobby Seale to his chair. Hoffman didn’t like being insulted in Yiddish and called “pig… fascist… racist… dinosaur…Julius Hitler… a disgrace to Jews.” And worse.

Although Hoffman was a media sweetheart who provided good copy, the “sadistic old bastard” was disliked by attorneys who had the misfortune to face him. Nothing illustrated their contempt for the judge better than a survey conducted by the Chicago Council of Lawyers long before the Chicago Seven trial.

When asked, “Viewed over-all, do you favor his [Hoffman’s] continued service in his present post?” only 25 percent of the lawyers who responded to the survey said yes.

When asked, “Does he demonstrate patience and a willingness to listen to all sides?” 78 percent said no.

When asked, “Is he impartially courteous towards lawyers and litigants?” 79 percent said no.

With numbers like those, the judge was sure to turn the Walus trial into another Julius Hoffman Show.

As with Fedorenko, the government’s case against Walus was built entirely on eyewitness identification and testimony. Eleven men and women identified Walus as the brutal Gestapo agent they remembered, first from a photo spread, then in person in the courtroom. One eyewitness described how she saw Walus shoot a woman as she left a hospital. “Her daughter came running out and bent down over her mother,” the witness said weeping. “He shot her, too.”

Another witness testified that a superior officer ordered Walus to “dispose” of two sick, crippled men. “Walus motioned with his hand for them to walk ahead,” the witness said. “I saw [him] take out his pistol and shoot the two men in the back.”

A third eyewitness said that he saw Walus stop a Jewish woman and her two young daughters during the liquidation of the Czestochowa ghetto. He ordered her to undress. When she refused, he shot her dead.

Yet another eyewitness testified that she saw Walus separate a group of children from their parents. “He took them to a near-by building,” she said. “I heard horrible cries and screams.” Then she heard gunshots. Then silence. Pointing to Walus seated in the courtroom less than six feet from her, she cried, “Here is the murderer!”

Anticipating a defense argument that it was unlikely that eyewitnesses could positively identify Walus after nearly forty years, Judge Hoffman studied old photos of himself as a young lawyer before he went bald. “It is remarkable how I look today much as I did then—even though the curl is now out of my hair,” he told the defense attorney from the bench.

The packed courtroom burst into laughter, including five neo-Nazis sitting in a pew dressed in Nazi uniforms. Hoffman grinned from his perch.

In his defense, Walus argued that the Reich had taken him to Germany as a forced laborer in 1941, when he was seventeen years old, and that he worked on farms until the end of the war. Unlike the prosecution, however, the defense presented both eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence to substantiate the alibi. Among the documents were health insurance records that listed employer payments to the government for Walus’s service (similar to U.S. Social Security payments). The records placed Walus on farms as he had testified. And five German farm wives testified that Walus was working for their husbands during the time when the prosecution said he was beating and killing Jews in Poland.