Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

“It seems to me that you’ve already determined my guilt,” Demjanjuk told the court, “and that my punishment is certain to be death.”

Anticipating a large number of spectators and reporters, the government decided to conduct the trial in the Hall of the People, an auditorium with banked rows of old, red movie theater seats inside Jerusalem’s convention center. Adjacent to the Hall of the People was a room wired for live, closed-circuit TV coverage of the trial. Two signs at the entrance to the center, used mostly for community entertainment, foreshadowed the legal proceedings.

One read: “Box Office for Performances.” The other read: “Deposit Weapons Here.”

The State of Israel versus John Demjanjuk opened on February 15, 1987, almost a full year after Demjanjuk stepped off the Boeing 747 at Ben Gurion Airport and asked to kiss the ground. The trial would revolve around four identity questions, the answers to which would determine whether Demjanjuk would live or die:

• Was the photo identification procedure used by Miriam Radiwker valid? If not, witness identifications of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible would be cast into doubt or ruled invalid.

• Were the witnesses who identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible credible under cross-examination? If not, there could be a reasonable doubt that Demjanjuk was Iwan Grozny.

• Was the Trawniki card valid? If not, there would be no documentary evidence that Demjanjuk was trained at Trawniki and served as a guard at any death camp.

• Was John Demjanjuk’s alibi credible? If not, he would fail to prove without a reasonable doubt that he was elsewhere when the government alleged he was at Treblinka.

The evidence offered by both the prosecution and the defense in answer to those four questions would go far beyond what had been offered at Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial and deportation hearing, both in terms of the number of witnesses and the scope and depth of their testimony.

Like defendants at Nuremberg, John Demjanjuk would face not a jury but a tribunal of three judges. Israeli law required the Supreme Court of Israel to select the president of the panel. It chose one of its own, Justice Dov Levin, a recent appointee. Levin had the reputation of being accommodating in the courtroom but tough on sentencing in his chambers. A whip-cracking courtroom manager, he brought an important skill to a trial that was bound to generate heat at the bench and emotion in the audience.

The two teams of attorneys in black robes took their places shortly before 8:30 A.M. on Monday, February 15. The defense team—Mark O’Connor and his two co-counsels, John Gill and Yoram Sheftel—sat to the left of the auditorium stage where the judges would preside. The prosecution team sat on the right—state attorney Yonah Blatman, lead attorney Michael Shaked, and attorneys Michael Horovitz and Dennis Gouldman.

While the lawyers were shuffling papers at twin curved tables, a smiling John Demjanjuk entered the courtroom dressed in a brown sport coat and open shirt. “Boker Tov,” he called to the thin crowd of mostly elderly survivors and religious Jews quietly sitting on benches. Good morning! Then to the TV cameras, “Hello, Cleveland.”

Unlike Eichmann, who was locked in a glass booth, Demjanjuk took his place in a dock directly behind his legal team, a translator next to him. Police officers sat on either side, more to protect than to guard.

The panel of judges entered at 8:30 sharp dressed in white shirts and black ties. Justice Levin took the middle seat on the stage under the seal of the State of Israel and next to the blue and white Israeli flag. District court judge Zvi Tal took the seat on Levin’s left, district court judge Dalia Dorner on his right.

Mark O’Connor was the first to address the court. “John Demjanjuk,” he said in his opening statement, “was never in a death camp…. He was conscripted and served in combat against the Third Reich. He…”

So began the much-anticipated trial of John Demjanjuk, aka Ivan the Terrible. The ordeal for him and his family and the trauma for Israel would last a year.

The first critical witness to take the stand was Israeli police investigator Miriam Radiwker. She would spend three days there, caught in a good-guy, bad-guy tug of war, with Judge Dov Levin as the referee. Both the prosecution and the defense wanted to pull her to their side of the guilty-or-innocent line. To a great degree, the validity of the photo identifications of John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible rested on her testimony.

The prosecution questioned Radiwker first, gently and surely guiding her through her photo identification process with Treblinka survivors. Who created the photo album. How she found the witnesses and arranged for interviews. How she presented the photos. What questions she asked and how she asked them. How and when she handwrote the deposition reports signed by the witnesses.

Radiwker came across as professional and thorough. That left the defense team with the task of rattling her into inconsistencies, breaking her self-confidence, and destroying her credibility.

The problem was, there was no defense team. There was an uneasy shotgun marriage between Cleveland and Jerusalem, with Mark O’Connor as the autocratic lead attorney and Yoram Sheftel as his flamboyant co-counsel. They would take turns cross-examining Radiwker.

O’Connor was out to get first blood. His job was daunting. Prove that Radiwker had a faulty memory and, therefore, was an unreliable witness, and convince the panel of judges, especially Levin, that she was biased and unprofessional. The 1950 Israeli “Nazi and Nazi Collaborator Punishment Law” acknowledged the pitfalls of relying on witness identification years after an event. The law sought to protect defendants in Nazi and Nazi collaboration cases from misidentification, as happened in the Frank Walus case. The defense was encouraged to use extensive “memory tests” in its cross-examination of witnesses like Radiwker, who was testifying about what she did and said twelve years earlier, and Treblinka survivors, who would be describing what they saw more than forty years ago.

O’Connor planned to use the memory test as the major weapon in his attack on Radiwker, hoping to hear her say, “I don’t remember… I’m sorry but I don’t remember.” He had an advantage over her in the cat-and-mouse game about to begin. She was eighty years old. How hard could it be to break an old lady alone and vulnerable on the witness stand?

But Radiwker had an advantage over O’Connor. As a hunted Jew, she had survived World War II. If she could outwit the Nazis and the Soviets, how hard would it be to outfox a country lawyer from Buffalo?

“Shalom! Boker Tov!” O’Connor began. “Mrs. Radiwker, you indicated that your date of birth was 1906. Is that correct, ma’am?”

When Radiwker didn’t respond, O’Connor said: “That’s very impolite for me to ask that as the first question. I understand.”

“Not at that age, Mr. O’Connor,” Judge Levin said. “At that age, we already know the truth.”

The courtroom grinned.

O’Connor questioned Radiwker American-style. Unlike the Israeli attorneys, who stood behind their court-appointed tables, he paced the floor, tossing out questions over his shoulder, spinning to face the witness, approaching the stand, looking the witness in the eye as if searching for the hint of a lie. Israeli schoolchildren loved him, even though they shouldn’t have. Wasn’t he defending a Nazi collaborator? Wasn’t he the dude in the black hat? But O’Connor was such a good imitation of the lawyers they watched in American gangster movies and on American TV shows that they began to imitate his walk and his American-accented Hebrew—“boker tov… tada raba.”