Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Rajgrodzki recalled playing for Iwan and Nikolai one day in the summer of 1943. By that time, the transports to Treblinka were reduced to a trickle and the guards were bored. Himmler had already liquidated Belzec, and it was just a matter of time before he would close Treblinka as well. Rajgrodzki had put together a trio—violin, harmonica, and clarinet. By the time the group finished its first piece, Ivan the Terrible was in tears.

Like the witnesses before him, Rajgrodzki testified that he frequently saw Iwan and Nikolai drive Jews into the larger gas chamber building, enter it, and then, after everyone was locked in one of the ten gas chambers, enter the building that housed the motor.

The next witness was Pinchas Epstein, who was born in Poland and currently lived in Israel. He had positively identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible from the photo spread Miriam Radiwker showed him. The government was fortunate to have Epstein. He was one of the six witnesses who had testified at Fedorenko’s trial three years earlier. Judge Roettger had verbally abused and “attacked” those witnesses so “roughly” that they felt like they, not Fedorenko, were on trial. No one was eager to testify in America again. Epstein lost his whole family at Treblinka—his father and mother, two brothers, and two sisters. That may have been the reason he agreed to sit in the witness chair one more time. For them.

Like the three witnesses before him, Epstein had carried corpses to the pit under the supervision of Otto Horn. He recalled how the Germans had accused a group of Jews of planning an escape. Iwan ordered the men to lie facedown on the ground.

“He split one skull after another… with an iron pipe,” Epstein said.

Epstein also testified about three Jews who did escape. Germans and guards tracked them in the snow and dragged them back to the camp. “Iwan tortured them all day with his metal pipe,” Epstein said. “He broke their hands and feet.”

The SS hanged them during the evening roll call.

“Have you ever had occasion to be present when the motors to the gas chamber were turned on?” Horrigan asked Epstein.

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you able to see this area closely, the area where the chambers were?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And do you know who operated the motors?”

“Two Ukrainians. One was Iwan and the second was Nikolai.”

Epstein described how he sat down to rest one day near the gas chamber building while he waited for Fritz Schmidt, the German officer in charge of camp two and the gassing, to say, “They are all asleep… open the doors.” From his vantage point, Epstein could actually see inside the engine building. He watched Iwan and Nikolai turn on the motor and direct the gas into the chambers.

The final witness was Sonia Lewkowicz from Israel. She had worked in the Treblinka laundry in camp two until the uprising. For the most part, she said the same things the previous four witnesses had testified to. Iwan was cruel. He herded victims into gas chambers and worked in the building with the motor. Demjanjuk was Iwan.

George Parker had been right in his doubt memo. He predicted that the witnesses would strike the court as sincere and unshakable in their conviction that John Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. Through accumulation and repetition, the government scored huge points during its witness examinations. Each one had identified Demjanjuk as Iwan from photo spreads offered to them in the courtroom. Each gave a description of the Iwan they knew that was close to Demjanjuk’s description on the Trawniki card. Each saw Iwan herding Jews into the gas chamber building and entering the motor building. One actually saw Iwan turn the motor on. Each graphically described the cruelty of Iwan.

Given the strength of the combined testimony of five survivors who worked near the gas chambers, the prosecution decided not to call any of the other four survivors waiting in the witness room. Why risk angering Battisti by presenting more of the same?

In the face of such emotionally powerful and convincing evidence, Martin had an impossible job trying to mount any kind of defense. He used a two-point strategy to create as much doubt as he could. First, he attacked the identification process. Then he challenged the witnesses’ physical description of Demjanjuk as Iwan.

Martin pointed out that Miriam Radiwker’s photo spread was seriously flawed. And he insinuated that the witnesses might have been coached or might have talked about the photo spread among themselves, in effect ganging up on Demjanjuk. But try as he might, Martin couldn’t question his way around the dramatic in-court identifications of John Demjanjuk as Iwan from both the Radiwker and OSI photo spreads.

Martin methodically asked each witness to describe Iwan’s height and the color of his eyes and hair so that he could later argue that their descriptions did not match Demjanjuk, and therefore, that the government had got the wrong man, as it did in its Walus case.

Before it rested, the government called four witnesses in a row to prove the last point of its trial strategy: If U.S. immigration examiners had known the truth about Demjanjuk’s wartime activities, they would not have recommended him for a U.S. visa, granted him one, or awarded him U.S. citizenship.

Daniel Segat was a U.S. Army intelligence interrogator during the war. After the war, he helped the International Refugee Organization (IRO) resettle the thousands of refugees under its care. Segat was so good at his job that the IRO quickly promoted him first to chief eligibility officer, then to a seat on its review board, which settled tricky cases.

Moscowitz took Segat’s videotaped testimony in New York. His job was to establish Segat as highly credible, then get him to testify that the IRO would not have recommended Demjanjuk for a U.S. visa if it had known about his wartime activities.

“Would you briefly describe what your duties were as a field eligibility officer?” Moscowitz asked.

“To determine the eligibility of all applicants for IRO assistance in my area,” Segat said.

“What were the consequences to an applicant of a determination that he was eligible for IRO assistance?”

“He acquired a legal document which entitled him to—it’s like a passport almost—to all the services that IRO was able to render, including care, maintenance, and immigration.”

“What were the consequences to the applicant if he were found ineligible? ” Moscowitz asked.

“He was deprived of all the things I mentioned before,” Segat said. “Deprived of the possibility to emigrate.”

Moscowitz handed Segat a copy of the IRO eligibility manual and asked him to find and read to the court the criteria of ineligibility.

“[Any persons] who can be shown to have assisted the enemy in persecuting civilian population… of countries [that were] members of the United Nations,” Segat read. “[Any others who] have voluntarily assisted the enemy forces since the outbreak of the Second World War.”

“If the IRO discovered that an applicant had lied or made misrepresentations… did that have any effect on the processing of his application?”

“He would be prima facie ineligible ,” Segat said.

Moscowitz knew the defense would argue that it was common for immigration personnel to encourage applicants from the Soviet Union to lie about their countries of origin so they would not be forcibly repatriated.