Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Walus believed that if it hadn’t been for Jerome Brentar, who dug up the evidence that won him a new trial, he would be a dead man like Demjanjuk would be if he were deported to the Soviet Union.

There was one incident that came to symbolize Walus’s life after Julius Hoffman. He was standing in line at a neighborhood market in Chicago’s Little Poland to buy kielbasa. A non-Jewish, Polish woman cut in front of him. “I don’t have to wait behind a Nazi,” she said. “Nazis have no rights.”

Fueled by comments like that of the Polish woman, Walus’s rage was so consuming that whenever he heard a priest say the word Israel during Mass, he would get up and walk out. When Brentar invited Walus to visit Poland with him, all expenses paid, to prove that Ivan the Terrible was a hoax, Walus pounced on the offer. And when O’Connor asked him to be a witness at Demjanjuk’s deportation hearing, he gladly agreed.

Walus testified that he had visited the villages around Treblinka and interviewed a string of older residents. Most remembered several Ukrainian guards called Iwan. (If the villagers didn’t know the real name of a Ukrainian guard, they simply called him “Iwan.”) The guards came to town to drink and cavort with women—pros as well as wives and single women willing to exchange favors for food, warm clothes, shoes, or money. Not a single villager had ever heard of a Ukrainian guard called Iwan Grozny, Walus testified. He even furnished the court with sworn statements from two of the residents.

When he stepped down from the stand after his brief testimony, Walus was convinced that his “evidence” proved without a doubt that there never was an Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka, and that the government and the Jews were framing John Demjanjuk just as they had framed and destroyed him.

O’Connor then called Jerome Brentar to the stand.

Brentar’s job was to support the testimony of Walus and to prove that Demjanjuk’s fear of forced repatriation was justified.

“They laughed at me,” Brentar testified about his visit to the village of Treblinka. “And I felt a little self-conscious because there just isn’t any Ivan Grozny.”

“Why did you go over there?” O’Connor asked.

“I was interested in learning the truth of Treblinka…..And I think I found the truth. There was no Ivan the Terrible. This is just sheer Hollywood sensationalism to give more emphasis on this man’s deportation.”

“What makes you think he’s innocent?”

“OSI… couldn’t find anything in Washington to nail him with,” Brentar said. “They went to Germany. They couldn’t find anything in Germany to nail him with. They couldn’t find anything in Poland to nail him with. So they went to the Soviet Union, where you can get tailor-made, custom-made, whatever you want—especially to incriminate people who are from the Soviet Union.”

“That’s your opinion?” Judge Angelilli asked.

“That’s the God’s truth.”

Because Brentar had screened refugees for the IRO after the war, O’Connor used him to prove that refugee personnel had encouraged Demjanjuk to lie on his visa application to save his life.

“Were you ever aware of any false statements that were made by displaced persons?” O’Connor asked.

“Especially by the Ukrainians and Russians,” Brentar said. “[They] would try to conceal their place of birth and their residence… saying they came from the Polish part of what was Ukraine…. People disappeared overnight, would be kidnapped, and would be sent back to the Soviet Union….The Soviets had their spies—people who were paid…. Some even had access to files.”

Brentar quickly qualified his testimony, however, by saying he and his staff had no proof the applicants were lying.

“We were not interested in detecting the lies because we knew why the people were lying…. It was not by choice, but by sheer compulsion to save themselves from a fate that [we] would not like to think about…. We gave them the benefit of the doubt.”

“Were you aware of your subordinates putting the wrong place of birth… or encouraging the displaced person to put the wrong place of birth?” O’Connor asked.

“Some were even coaching the person saying ‘it’s better for you to say this or that,’” Brentar said. “The Max Kolbe Foundation, with whom I worked very closely, admitted there were over fifty thousand people who went through the foundation with false names and false histories out of sheer fear of repatriation.”

The Kolbe Foundation was named after Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who died at Auschwitz in August 1941.

“Repatriation by whom?”

“By the gutless allies—the English, the Americans—who sold these people down the river, and sent them forcibly back to the Soviet Union.”

“Was this a reasonable fear or just a paranoia?”

“Reasonable fear,” Brentar said. “There were times I came to the camp to work and there was a lot of commotion, and I asked what happened, and they said this person was here last night but they are not here now, and we don’t know what happened to them. They are from Eastern Europe.”

“Over what period of time?”

It was important for O’Connor to establish that refugees were afraid of repatriation as late as 1951, the year Demjanjuk applied for a U.S. visa.

“Basically ’47, ’48, and ’49… even some in 1950,” Brentar said. “There are people still living in a subconscious fear of being forcefully repatriated….I know a dozen people [in America] who are living under false names.”

“Wasn’t there some concern about the humanitarian issue here, or the moral issue?”

“It was just stupid, selfish indifference on the part of our authorities,” Brentar said. “They couldn’t care less what happened to the people once they left the American [sector]…. And some of these people were skin and bones. They… just threw them in [the trains], and their bones hit the wooden floors and would—oh, you could hear the bones on the floor…. And some of these poor people were starting to fight, resist. And there were all kinds of battles going on to get these people back into the cars, lock the doors, and go. Many people committed suicide even before the trains left the camps.”

On the stand, Demjanjuk had testified that immigration officials encouraged him to lie on his visa application to save himself from forced repatriation to the Soviet Union, where he would be executed as a POW deserter, a Vlasov’s army traitor, and an employee of the U.S. Army. The government, under the pretext of ascertaining facts and only facts, had belittled and challenged that fear, suggesting that Demjanjuk was lying when he testified that he was still afraid in 1951, when he applied for a U.S. visa. The government’s distorted cross-examination—either through historical ignorance, deception, or trickery—left critical questions twisting in the careless breeze of courtroom argument.

Was there an official decree, presidential or otherwise, ending forced repatriation in 1948 as the government contended? If so, who issued it and when? Did forced repatriation actually end after that “decree” was promulgated? If not, were Soviet citizens still afraid after 1950, as Demjanjuk alleged, or was he lying, as the government suggested? If Demjanjuk had reason to fear, was that fear a fact to be considered in deciding whether he was deportable, or was it irrelevant, as the government claimed?

Given that Demjanjuk was pleading for his life, and that both the prosecution and the defense distorted or fabricated historical facts, it is important to dissect the forced repatriation issue with the scalpel of historical hindsight.