Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“If an applicant… concealed his place of birth solely out of fear of repatriation back to Russia, would that exclude him?” Martin asked.

The question was a tactical error.

“I would not have considered it reason for the misrepresentation of place of birth,” Curry said.

Moscowitz had the option to make a re-direct examination of Curry. He took it.

“Mr. Curry, you indicated that a lot of the information which the Commission relied upon came from the applicant,” Moscowitz said. “Could all of that information… have been checked out?”

“No.”

Moscowitz was making a vital prosecution point here. The defense had argued, and would continue to argue, that the IRO and the Displaced Persons Commission had thoroughly checked Demjanjuk’s background and failed to find his name on any list of Nazi collaborators, weakly suggesting that he could not have been a collaborator if he was not on a list of suspects. Moscowitz destroyed the argument.

“You indicated… that you were aware that at some point prior to your service with the Commission, there was forcible repatriation of Soviet citizens. Do you know when that was?” Moscowitz asked.

“It would be the summer of 1945.”

“To your knowledge did it continue beyond that?”

“No.”

Demjanjuk began his U.S. visa application process in 1950, when, according to Curry, there were no more forced repatriations.

The prosecution presented two more witnesses to hammer home its ineligibility argument.

Harold Henrikson was the vice consul who had granted Demjanjuk a visa to the United States in 1952. Like Segat and Curry, he testified that if he had known Demjanjuk was a Trawniki man, or served as a death camp guard, or was a soldier in Vlasov’s army, he would have found him ineligible for a U.S. visa. And if he had known that an applicant was a Soviet citizen, a soldier in the Soviet army, or a Soviet POW, those facts would not render him ineligible.

Donald Pritchard was the naturalization examiner in Cleveland who had interviewed John Demjanjuk when he applied for U.S. citizenship in 1956. Pritchard testified that if he knew an applicant for citizenship assisted the Nazis in the persecution of civilians, he would have recommended denial of U.S. citizenship.

Pritchard closed the prosecution’s circle of interlocking testimony. Each of the four former immigration and naturalization officials—three of whom had personally reviewed Demjanjuk’s applications and had interviewed him—testified that if he had known that Demjanjuk had graduated from Trawniki, or served at a death camp, or had been a member of Vlasov’s army, or misrepresented his country of origin for whatever reason, he would have either denied Demjanjuk a visa or recommended against naturalization. Each testified that fear of repatriation was not a valid extenuating circumstance. Taken as a whole, the testimony was about as unassailable as testimony can get.

Before resting its case as planned, the prosecution requested the court’s permission to recall Gideon Epstein, the prosecution’s forgery expert. Epstein had just returned from Washington, D.C., where he had examined the original Trawniki card, which the Soviets had made available at its embassy there.

“After comparing the original document with the government Exhibits 5 and 6,” Horrigan asked Epstein, “what conclusions, if any, did you come to?”

“Government’s Exhibits 5 and 6 are photographic copies of that original document I examined at the Soviet embassy,” Epstein said. He went on to say that nothing he saw on the original Trawniki card changed his opinion about its authenticity.

As part of his examination of the original card, Epstein compared Demjanjuk’s Cyrillic signature on the original and two other Demjanjuk non-Cyrillic signatures—one from his visa application and one from a postal change-of-address card filed in a Cleveland post office. It was an apples-and-oranges comparison and Epstein was forced to conclude: “I was unable to reach a definitive conclusion as to the common authorship… due to the absence of sufficient individual handwriting characteristics between the questioned and the known.”

Epstein also admitted that he still had not conducted any ink, paper, or typeface analysis of the card. Neither the prosecution nor the defense asked him why.

Epstein’s final testimony was a disappointing conclusion to a strong government case. Demjanjuk’s signature on the Trawniki card was the most important element in determining authenticity or fraud.

On that somewhat disheartening note, the prosecution rested.

In quick succession, the defense called Michael Pap, Jerome Brentar, and Edward O’Connor to the stand. The three expert witnesses would constitute the core of the Demjanjuk defense. Martin gave them two tasks—suggest that the Trawniki card was a KGB forgery, and firmly establish the fact that Demjanjuk hid his true wartime activity from immigration officials because he was afraid of being forcibly deported to the Soviet Union and executed as a deserter.

Michael S. Pap, a Ukrainian American, was a professor of history at John Carroll University, outside Cleveland. He lectured across the country on the evils of communism, wrote extensively on the history of Ukraine, and directed John Carroll’s Institute for Soviet and East European Studies. He was bitterly anticommunist and anti-Soviet, and a national promoter of the Independent Ukraine movement.

“Pap” is a relatively common ethnic German name in Volksdeutsche communities in Bohemia, Slovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Hungary. OSI deposed him in 1980 in preparation for Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial. During the deposition, Pap made a distinction between his nationality (Ukrainian) and his citizenship (Czech). He argued that because he was born in Czechoslovakia, he was a citizen of that country and not a citizen of the Soviet Union. The distinction was important because as a Czech citizen he could not be forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union after the war.

Pap testified that he was a student at the State College of Czechoslovakia when the war started. When the Reich invaded Czechoslovakia in 1941, the Germans deported him to Austria as a forced laborer. He worked in a factory outside Vienna until Austria was liberated by the Allies.

If Pap was an ethnic German ( Volksdeutsche ), he was a lucky one. The Reich had passed a law requiring all ethnic Germans living in the territories it occupied to enlist in the Waffen SS. The Displaced Persons Commission defined the Waffen SS as inimical to the United States. Therefore, its members were ineligible for a U.S. visa. (Members of the Waffen SS Baltic Legions were an exception.)

After the war, Pap studied at the University of Heidelberg. After receiving his doctorate in political science in 1948, he worked briefly for the International Refugee Organization as a counselor. More than likely he knew Edward O’Connor, who was the European director for the war relief services of the U.S. Catholic Church. Pap entered the United States in 1949 and became a U.S. citizen in 1952. He taught at the University of Notre Dame before joining the history faculty of John Carroll University in 1958.

By any definition, Jerome Brentar was a controversial figure. He was either a Good Samaritan trying to save the life of an innocent man, or an intellectual who honestly questioned the “absurdities and contradictions in the Holocaust story,” or an anti-Semitic Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi revisionist.

Because he was a player in Republican Party politics, Brentar tried to hide whatever his true feelings were about Jews and the Holocaust. But he let his guard down during a live radio interview after the Demjanjuk trial. On the John McCulloch show at WJW in Cleveland he compared John Demjanjuk standing before American judges to Jesus Christ standing before Pontius Pilate.