Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“Make a copy,” he said. “I’ll read it, and place it into the record, and take it into account when I make my decision.”

The defense also had a copy of a National Archives film showing American soldiers in Plattling, Bavaria, in February 1946, forcibly rounding up Russian soldiers who had been German POWs for repatriation to the Soviet Union. Shot in black-and-white without sound by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the eight-minute film was drenched in despair. Hundreds of frightened Soviet soldiers, not a single smile among them. Waiting for their names to be called by a Russian official. Climbing into trucks with armed American escorts. The trucks backing up to empty boxcars. Being searched for weapons by American soldiers. Filing into the cars. A train engine billowing smoke that refuses to rise. A string of boxcars stuffed with Soviet soldiers heading east through a flat, bleak landscape.

One frame graphically portrays POW despair. A young soldier’s bare chest is crisscrossed with razor cuts. The cameraman had documented for posterity at least one symbolic instance of what was really happening at Plattling in 1946.

Angelilli refused to enter the film into evidence.

Before Demjanjuk stood down, Angelilli wanted to make sure that he understood what he had to prove to win his asylum plea. “You must base your claim on… what the foreign government would do to threaten your life, or your freedom,” Angelilli explained. “Or to persecute you on account of five elements—race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and social group.”

Angelilli then gave Demjanjuk a chance to plead for his life without the threat of cross-examination. Demjanjuk thanked him.

“First of all, I’m a deeply religious person, a Christian,” he began. “I believe in God… I give this as my first reason why I cannot go back to the Soviet Union. Most of the churches are closed… converted into warehouses, social clubs with dances going on, or warehouses for military ammunition. A large number of priests and bishops were murdered, and there is no religious freedom in that country.

“Second point. As a Ukrainian national, I cannot go back to the USSR because Ukraine, my fatherland, does not exist…. My country is an occupied country, and there is absolutely no freedom…. I would be persecuted in that place, not only as a politically guilty person, but simply as a Ukrainian national….

“I would also like to say that, should I be deported to the Soviet Union as a former member of the Soviet army, I’m pretty sure they would drag me from one locality to another simply to show that, even after forty years, they were able to succeed to get a person… back… for punishment.”

Next, Mark O’Connor called three Demjanjuk supporters to the stand—Michael Pap, Frank Walus, and Jerome Brentar. Both Pap and Brentar had testified at his 1981 denaturalization trial.

O’Connor needed historian Michael Pap to bolster Demjanjuk’s plea for asylum based on fear of execution or assassination. Pap treated the court to a brief but important history lesson.

The Germans captured four million Soviet soldiers during the war, he testified. Hitler deliberately starved, executed, or worked to death half of them, and the Soviets forcibly repatriated most of the rest. Stalin was tough on his returning soldiers.

“They were all given fifteen years of hard labor with an indication that none of them should be alive at the end of fifteen years,” Pap said. “Stalin could have given them the death sentence, but he needed manpower. [When] Khrushchev offered amnesty… there were very few alive.”

“Dr. Pap, what would [happen] if John Demjanjuk was deported back to the Soviet Union by order of this court?” O’Connor asked.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviets would apply Article 133 of the Constitution… desertion to the enemy. He was a deserter from the Red Army, and therefore he would be punished. Severely punished. He might get the death penalty.”

“What advantage would there be [in] persecuting a simple factory worker?”

“It would show to the people—to the oppressed nations in Eastern Europe—that they have no alternative but to cooperate with the system,” Pap said. “‘Look what happened to this individual! That’s what will happen to you.’”

Demjanjuk had also argued that the KGB would assassinate him if he were deported to any country outside the Soviet Union, but for the most part he had failed to document his fear during Einhorn’s cross-examination. O’Connor used Pap to provide evidence of continued KGB assassinations of former Soviet citizens living in the West.

“Since the Second World War we have evidence of at least twelve cases where assassinations took place,” Pap testified. “At first the Soviet government denied it. In one case an Austrian court, and in one case a French court proved beyond a doubt the involvement of the KGB. The [KGB] admitted it.”

O’Connor’s next witness would be Frank Walus, who was testifying at the request of Jerome Brentar.

Brentar was working closely with O’Connor, who called him a “key figure” in the defense of Demjanjuk. The Cleveland travel agent was out to prove that the Ivan the Terrible charge was a lie concocted by OSI and the international Jewish cabal. In preparation for the deportation hearing, Brentar made more than twenty trips to Europe and two to Israel to expose the fraud.

He visited former SS officer Kurt Franz, the last commander of Treblinka, in a prison just outside Düsseldorf, where he was serving a life sentence. Franz told Brentar: “Several years ago, six of you people were here…. And I told them [Demjanjuk] is not Ivan the Terrible. Ivan the Terrible was much older, had dark hair, and was taller. He had to stoop because he was so tall. So why do you come here again and ask the same questions?”

Brentar tried to get an interview with German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Kohl’s adjutant told him: “If you want any help from us, you have to ask the Israelis for permission.”

Brentar interviewed Menachem Russek, head of the Israeli police investigation unit on Nazi crimes. He told Russek: “You’re being misled by the OSI. This is an innocent man.” Brentar concluded that Russek was as eager as OSI to frame Demjanjuk as he had framed Frank Walus.

Brentar visited Treblinka and its neighboring villages. He knocked on doors and showed residents a photo of Demjanjuk. No one had ever seen the man in the picture before. He located three former inmates of Treblinka who remembered a guard called Iwan and who agreed to testify at the deportation hearing that Demjanjuk was not the Iwan they knew. Brentar learned that someone at OSI had warned Polish authorities not to issue visas to these witnesses because Jerome Brentar was a rich Holocaust revisionist who had bought their testimony with American dollars. Brentar also discovered that the same person had called the U.S. consulate in Warsaw and said, “Don’t let the witnesses come. The [deportation] hearing is over.”

But the hearing wasn’t over, leading Brentar to conclude that OSI’s case against John Demjanjuk was built on lies, exaggerations, distortions, fabrications, innuendos, and dirty tricks.

In Frank Walus, Brentar had found a dedicated collaborator who spoke fluent German and Polish. Walus was a bitter man. He never forgave the U.S. government and the Jews for conspiring to have him executed as a former Gestapo agent. His trial before Judge Julius Hoffman in Chicago had ruined his reputation and forced him to live in isolation, like a moral leper in a legal limbo.

Julius Hoffman convicted him. The appeals court declined to overturn the conviction. Instead, it granted him a new trial. But OSI refused to retry him. Where did that leave him? In the eyes of Chicago’s Jews and Poles alike, Frank Walus was a convicted war criminal who got off the hook.