Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Like all guards at Sobibor, including me, Demjanjuk took part in the mass killing process—from unloading the boxcars, to marching the new arrivals to the gas chamber, to forcing them inside. I don’t know if Demjanjuk ever killed anyone for resisting.

Unlike the healthy arrivals, the sick were immediately taken to camp three under the pretext of going to an infirmary for medical help. When they got there, they were shot. It is possible that some guards did the shooting on orders from the Germans. If so, I couldn’t say if Demjanjuk was among them because I was never present.

I saw Demjanjuk hit and rifle-butt prisoners at the unloading dock like all the other guards, including me. But from what I observed, he did not stand out as especially cruel.

The Germans considered Demjanjuk an experienced and efficient guard, and they repeatedly assigned him to round up Jews from the neighboring ghettos and villages and bring them back to die. For conscientiously following orders, the Germans rewarded him with extra leave. I am not sure if he also got a promotion.

Just before the Soviet army crossed into Poland, the Germans posted me and Demjanjuk to Flossenbürg, Germany, to guard an aircraft factory and a concentration camp there. Each guard at Flossenbürg, including Demjanjuk and me, was tattooed on the inside of the left arm with his blood type in case he was ever wounded. I still have my tattoo—the letter B.

In April 1945, as the Russian army began pushing across Germany, the Germans evacuated the entire camp of Regensburg, where Demjanjuk and I now worked, and assigned us to guard the prisoners on their march to another camp in Nuremberg. I escaped. I suggested that Demjanjuk come with me, but he refused. I never saw Demjanjuk again, and I have no idea what happened to him.

Danilchenko read the transcribed deposition without requesting any corrections or changes. Before signing it, he swore that the statement was correct. Either Kolesnikova or an assistant prosecutor showed Danilchenko three photo spreads with three pictures each, one of which was Demjanjuk. The three men in the first spread were soldiers in Soviet uniforms. Danilchenko correctly identified Demjanjuk. The men in the second set of photos wore Trawniki-type uniforms. Danilchenko correctly identified Demjanjuk. And the men in the third spread wore suits and ties. Once again, Danilchenko correctly identified Demjanjuk.

Two other former Sobibor guards also signed sworn statements that they knew Demjanjuk from Sobibor. One picked him out from the photo spread. The other did not, but recognized his name.

Kolesnikova was convinced that Danilchenko was telling the truth. None of what he said contradicted what he had testified to in his Kiev trial or what she knew about Sobibor and the mass murders that took place there. Most important, Danilchenko understood the penalty for perjury. And since Danilchenko had already served time for his crime, there was no advantage for him to lie.

OSI chose to view Danilchenko’s sworn statement as supportive of its Ivan the Terrible theory rather than a contradiction to it. Buttressed by the statement, Ryan decided to amend OSI’s complaint. Service at Trawniki and Sobibor was added to the Ivan the Terrible allegation. Although the court most probably would have accepted Danilchenko’s sworn statement into evidence, Ryan chose not to offer it.

Ryan also declined Moscow’s invitation to OSI investigators to depose, cross-examine, and videotape Danilchenko for themselves, instead of relying on Kolesnikova’s interrogation. The denaturalization trial of John Demjanjuk that was about to open would focus totally on Treblinka and Ivan the Terrible, not on Sobibor. The ghost of that decision would eventually come back to haunt OSI. When it needed Danilchenko, it would be too late. He would be dead. On February 10, 1981, the day before the trial opened, Judge Frank J. Battisti granted OSI’s motion to add Trawniki and Sobibor to the government’s complaint. Demjanjuk’s attorney, John W. Martin, was not dancing for joy. Even though he had known about the alleged Demjanjuk-Trawniki connection for more than a year because he had a copy of the Trawniki card photos, he felt the need for more time to prepare a defense against the new amendment.

Martin asked Judge Battisti for a sixty-day delay of trial. Battisti said no. Martin filed a motion for a jury trial. Battisti denied the motion.

In 1980, Bishop Valerian Trifa agreed to voluntary deportation rather than face trial for concealing his collaboration with the Nazis as the Romanian Iron Guard leader who instigated the 1941 pogrom against the Jews of Bucharest. He said that continued court proceedings placed a great financial strain on his Romanian Orthodox Church. Portugal agreed to accept him in 1982, then changed its mind two years later when it learned of his fascist sympathies. Before Portugal could expel him, Bishop Trifa died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-two.

In 1981, the Justice Department cut a deal with an ailing Otto von Bolschwing. If he voluntarily gave up his U.S. citizenship rather than face a long denaturalization process for collaborating with the Iron Guard in Romania, the government would allow him to remain in the United States. The deal was apparently a reward for his years of government service as an OSS-CIA operative. Baron von Bolschwing died in Sacramento, California, from a rare brain disease in 1982 at the age of seventy-two.

Also in 1981, the Justice Department filed charges of immigration fraud against Tscherim Soobzokov, who was then embroiled in a lawsuit with Anthony DeVito, Howard Blum (who had written a book about DeVito called Wanted! ), CBS, and the New York Times. Soobzokov argued that he had fully disclosed his wartime activity to the CIA before the agency hired him. Since OSI did not have enough clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence against Soobzokov, it lost the case.

In 1983, a district court in New York stripped Boleslavs Maikovskis of his U.S. citizenship. The court ruled that he had concealed his collaboration with the Nazis in the murder of the entire population of the Latvian town of Audrini, among other war crimes. Fearing he would be executed if extradited to Latvia, Maikovskis fled in 1987 to Germany, where he was tried for war crimes. Before his trial was over, the court ruled he was too frail to continue. He died in 1992 at the age of ninety-two.

In 1986, after a protracted legal battle, a district court in California finally stripped Andrija Artukovic of his citizenship. He was found guilty of concealing his membership in the Croatian Ustasha and for ordering the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Christian Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. He was extradited to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, where a court sentenced him to death for war crimes. He was never executed because the court later ruled he was too ill with dementia. Artukovic died in a prison hospital at the age of eighty-eight.

In 1985, vigilantes assassinated Tscherim Soobzokov in Paterson, New Jersey. His murder in Paterson—home to 2,500 American Circassians—was described in over one thousand pages of reports released to me by the FBI under an FOIA request. These FBI reports shed light on a little-known chapter in America’s relationship with former Nazis.

Soobzokov’s next-door neighbor was startled from her sleep at 4:20 A.M. on August 15, 1985, by the incessant barking of her dog and someone banging on her front door. She jumped out of bed and ran to the window to see who was there. Soobzokov’s new Buick Riviera, parked at the curb, was on fire.

The woman rushed downstairs and opened the door for the caller, whom she knew. While he was dialing 911, she ran next door to Soobzokov’s house, her black and white terrier barking at her heels. The house was dark. She rang the bell and banged on the window. A light flipped on and the sixty-one-year-old Soobzokov appeared in the hallway.