Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“Nineteen forty-five.”

“Had you at that time, any plans of coming to the United States?”

“At that time, no one considered such a possibility,” Demjanjuk said. “No one knew anything about immigration then.”

“At that time, had you ever heard of the IRO or Displaced Persons Commission?”

“We didn’t hear anything.”

Martin showed Demjanjuk the photo exhibit of the Trawniki card once again.

“Is that your signature?”

“It is not my signature.”

Martin held up the exhibit for Battisti to see.

“There should also be an apostrophe after the m and following the letter j ,” Demjanjuk said. “Rules require that.”

Demjanjuk’s testimony contained one important and unexpected piece of new information. After claiming for five years in pretrial depositions and interrogatories that he could not remember the name of the Polish POW camp where he had been incarcerated from July 1942 to October 1944 , Demjanjuk testified that the name of the camp was Chelm.

Chelm was the heart of his alibi. How could he have been at Trawniki, Treblinka, and Sobibor if he was penned behind barbed wire in the Chelm POW camp? The admission caught the government by surprise. Moscowitz recalled historian Earl Ziemke as a rebuttal witness.

Ziemke testified that there was a POW camp in Chelm, Poland, in 1942.

“Is it possible for the defendant, or any other prisoner of war of the Germans, to have been in a prisoner of war camp in Chelm, Poland, in October 1944 ?” Moscowitz asked Ziemke.

“No.”

“Why is that not possible, sir?”

“Because Chelm, Poland, was at that time in Soviet hands,” Ziemke said.

“When did the Soviets… push the Germans out of Chelm?”

“Probably on the twentieth of July, 1944.”

It was the defense’s turn to be caught by surprise. It had no one prepared and ready to refute Ziemke.

Before closing the defense’s case, Martin addressed the court in obvious embarrassment. He had failed to find a single defense expert to study and test the Trawniki card. Theoretically, the defense did not have to prove that the card was a forgery. All it had to do was create reasonable doubt that the card was a fake. Practically, however, given the strong prosecution testimony of Gideon Epstein, the only effective way to create that doubt was to have a second expert witness refute Epstein’s findings.

The defense had had ample time to find its own experts. The prosecution had made photos of the card available to the defense months before the trial opened. During the trial, the Soviet embassy in Washington had offered the prosecution and the defense an opportunity to examine the original card at the embassy. The prosecution did; the defense did not. To further accommodate the defense, the embassy brought the card to Cleveland for one day, and only one day, so the defense could study it. Again, the defense failed to have a document expert present. Finally, the Soviets gave the defense one last chance. It kept the card in Washington over the following weekend for the defense experts. Once again, Martin failed to get a document examiner to test the original card before it was returned to the Soviet archives in Moscow.

“I would like to say [this] for the record, lest the court feel we were not there in good faith,” Martin said. “I contacted experts. The one in New York wanted the document flown to New York to the Russian embassy there. The one in Washington… wanted the document at least two days in order to examine it. And [a third one] works for the CIA, and because the government was part of this lawsuit could not become involved….For those reasons, I wanted the court to know we did go and make a conscientious attempt.”

Unfortunately for John Demjanjuk, the defense was forced to close without ever having its own expert refute the conclusion of the prosecution’s expert, Gideon Epstein, that the Trawniki card was authentic.

The following Sunday, the Ukrainian community celebrated with the Demjanjuk family at St. Vladimir’s. They celebrated because they believed that John Demjanjuk would win. And they celebrated their homeland.

After the church service, 450 well-wishers filled the social hall and opened their pocketbooks wider. They rocked the hall with “Nimohayalita,” the traditional Ukrainian song of cheer:

A Ukrainian folk choir sang golden oldies, bringing back memories of a better time and hope for a future independent Ukraine. A Parma high school student played the bandura—a lute-like folk instrument. A young girl dressed in a traditional Ukrainian blouse and skirt presented John and Vera Demjanjuk with a bouquet of roses, and gave corsages to daughters Lydia and Irene.

The Demjanjuk family wept.

In closing, Moscowitz summarized the case against Demjanjuk, arguing that the government had met its burden of proof with convincing and unequivocal evidence.

The German army took Demjanjuk prisoner during the battle of Kerch in May 1942 and sent him to a prisoner of war camp in Rovno, Ukraine, Moscowitz began. A few weeks later, in early June, the Germans transferred him to another POW camp in Chelm, Poland. Soon after his arrival there, around mid-July 1942, he either volunteered or was selected to be trained as an SS guard at Trawniki, where he received military training. After graduation, he took an oath of loyalty to the SS and agreed to submit to them. From Trawniki, he went to Treblinka, where eight hundred thousand men, women, and children were murdered, and where he operated the diesel motor that delivered gas to the chambers. For a period of time in 1943, he also served at Sobibor. Toward the end of the war, he served in a division of Vlasov’s army, recruited by the Germans to fight against the Soviet army. Finally, he admitted in court that he lied on his visa application about where he was during the war, claiming he had been a farmer in Poland, then a forced laborer in Germany.

Next, Moscowitz began to pick the defense apart, piece by piece.

Martin wanted the court to exclude the Trawniki card simply because it was supplied by the Soviet Union and, therefore, was somehow tainted. But Schefler proved that each detail on the card was historically accurate. And Epstein proved the card was neither forged nor tampered with.

Moscowitz argued that all five Treblinka survivor-witnesses had positively identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible from either the Israeli photo spread or a second double photo spread prepared by the prosecution, or from both.

Moscowitz reminded the court that Demjanjuk was, by his own admission, both a driver and a mechanic. Then he quoted from Otto Horn’s testimony to suggest that those two unusual POW skills confirmed that Demjanjuk was Iwan of Treblinka:

“Moscowitz: This Iwan whom you picked out, is there anything else that distinguished him from the other Ukrainians?”

“Horn: Yes, he could drive. He could work the engines.”

Moscowitz reminded the court that Demjanjuk could not have been in Chelm—the core of his alibi—when he said he was because, as historian Ziemke proved, Chelm was in Soviet hands when Demjanjuk testified he was still a German prisoner there.

Ziemke also testified that the Germans only drafted into Vlasov’s army men who were already collaborating with them, not POWs whom they did not trust.

Finally, Moscowitz argued that four former American immigration officials testified that if Demjanjuk had revealed that he had been trained at Trawniki, had served as a guard in a death camp, had received the SS blood-type tattoo, or had been a soldier in Vlasov’s army, he would have been denied a visa to the United States as well as U.S. citizenship.