Useful Enemies

Demjanjuk opened in Cleveland at the end of May 2001. As expected, the government presented an impressive array of historical and technical document experts to testify about the authenticity of the Trawniki card as a whole and the validity of each element on it, from signatures to photo and seals, from typefaces to paper and ink. This time, however, they had four new Trawniki identity cards to use for comparison. The new documents came from archives in a number of countries and, like the Demjanjuk card, had spelling mistakes. One of the new cards was a service pass issued to Ignat Danilchenko.

Prosecution historians and document examiners authenticated each new card, including the signatures of Trawniki commander Karl Streibel and supply officer Ernst Teufel, which matched their signatures on the Demjanjuk card. The four new ID cards destroyed the defense argument that Trawniki did not issue service passes, as some of its witnesses had testified at the first denaturalization trial and in Israel. And since none of the new cards was exactly alike, they also refuted the argument that the Demjanjuk card was unique, and therefore it must have been forged.

Demjanjuk’s new defense attorneys were John Broadley, who had helped the Demjanjuk family retrieve OSI documents through FOIA requests and lawsuits, and Michael Tigar. In the face of the new evidence, they mounted a well-prepared and aggressive defense. In fact, it was the best defense John Demjanjuk had received to date. But no matter how clearly, cogently, and fiercely they fought, they could not tumble the array of government expert witnesses.

In lieu of its own experts, the defense had to rely on an old strategy—pounce on what the prosecution experts had not done. They had not dusted the Demjanjuk Trawniki card for fingerprints—which would have proven that Iwan Demjanjuk had never touched the document—when the technology to do so was available. They failed to follow the archival trails of the new documents, which would have led them to evidence favorable to the defense. They also failed to establish a proper chain of evidence, which allowed for forgery and cast serious doubt on the authenticity of the new documents.

Given the embarrassing acquittal of John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible by the Israeli Supreme Court and the finding of OSI prosecutorial misconduct by the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Paul Matia took extra care to be fair, reasoned, and precise in his analysis of the evidence presented by both sides. To make sure that it was clear at all times where the court stood on each piece of evidence, Matia wrote a ninety-three-page supplemental court paper, Findings of Fact, to serve as a foundation for his rulings.

In his analysis of the authenticity of the Demjanjuk Trawniki card, Judge Matia noted that there were spelling mistakes on the document. (The defense argued that the errors proved forgery.) After ruling that the mistakes were minor and inconsequential, Matia attributed them not to sloppy forgers but to uneducated ethnic German interrogators who entered the data on personnel forms.

Matia also noted discrepancies in the descriptions of the height of Iwan Demjanjuk as reported by Treblinka survivors and various documents. The numbers ranged from five feet, eight inches, to six feet, one inch. (The defense argued that the height discrepancy proved forgery.) Given the consistency in the descriptions of other physical characteristics of Iwan Demjanjuk, Matia ruled that the height discrepancy was not critical.

In making his ruling, Matia took into account the fact that the height of both Demjanjuk and Danilchenko had been underreported on their individual ID cards. A comparison of the data showed that Demjanjuk had been described as two centimeters taller than Danilchenko. The height difference between the two men was consistent with what Danilchenko had reported in his 1979 sworn statement to a Soviet prosecutor. (At the Israeli trial, Judge Dorner had observed from the bench that tallness was a prized Aryan physical feature. The ethnic German interviewers at Trawniki, she pointed out, may have consciously or subconsciously made tall Soviet POWs appear shorter as a matter of ethnic pride.)

Like Judge Battisti in his analysis of the evidence presented at Demjanjuk’s first denaturalization trial, Judge Matia accused the defense of arguing Trawniki-card forgery without offering any credible evidence. The defense had submitted into evidence the Israeli trial testimony of document examiner Julius Grant, in which he concluded that the Cyrillic signature of Iwan Demjanjuk on the Trawniki card was a forgery. To rebut Grant’s testimony, the prosecution put document examiner Gideon Epstein on the stand. (Epstein had also testified for the prosecution at the 1981 denaturalization trial and at the Israeli trial.) Judge Matia, like Judge Levin’s court in Jerusalem, did not find Grant’s testimony reliable or credible. However, Matia did find Gideon Epstein’s rebuttal testimony persuasive.

Finally, Judge Matia found that the “defendant has attacked the authenticity of the [document] on various grounds, but the expert testimony of the [prosecution’s] document examiners is devastating to the defendant’s contentions.”

Like Judge Battisti in 1981 and the Israeli court in 1988, Judge Matia ruled that the Trawniki card was “an authentic German wartime document issued to the defendant.” Because the card was authentic, it proved three of the prosecution’s charges: Iwan Demjanjuk had graduated from Trawniki, had served as an SS guard at Sobibor, and had lied about his wartime activity on his visa application to the United States.

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The government also offered into evidence six new documents supporting the authenticity of the Trawniki card. The first document was found in the Lithuanian Central State Archives in Vilnius. The other five came from the German Federal Archives in Berlin. Prosecution historians and document examiners had studied and tested each piece of new evidence for historical consistency and authenticity as thoroughly as they had the Trawniki card. They concluded that all six documents were authentic.

Document one was a disciplinary report issued at Majdanek on January 20, 1943. The Majdanek concentration-work camp was suffering from a typhus epidemic that month and the camp commandant imposed a quarantine on all camp personnel, from SS officers to SS guards.

Four guards violated the quarantine on January 18 to go shopping in Lublin. They got caught. On the order of SS Sergeant Hermann Erlinger, they each received twenty-five lashes “with a stick” as punishment. One of the punished guards was Deminjuk 1393.

Serving with “Deminjuk” at Majdanek, with its gas chambers and ovens, was Hermine Braunsteiner, the Mare of Majdanek, who was later tried and convicted of stomping to death hundreds of women and children. Besides Jews and Poles, there were Soviet POWs imprisoned in the camp as well, creating another World War II irony. A Soviet POW was paid by the Nazis to prevent fellow Soviet POWs from escaping almost certain death by overwork, typhus, starvation, a bullet, or gas.

Document two, issued on or about March 26, 1943, was a roster of eighty-four Trawniki men who were assigned to be transferred from Trawniki to Sobibor. “Effective today,” the roster said, “the following guards will be brought from Trawniki Training camp to the above place of duty.”

Number thirty on the list was Demianiuk 1393. The transfer roster gave his rank as Wachmann (private), and his date and place of birth. Except for the spelling of Demjanjuk’s name, the information on the roster was consistent with the information on the Trawniki card. A notation at the top of the roster indicated that only eighty of the eighty-four men listed had actually been transferred to Sobibor as part of an “SS Special Detachment.” Number thirty was one of the transfers. Danilchenko, who was also on the list, was transferred to Sobibor as well.

Document three was another transfer roster, dated October 1, 1943, two weeks before the prisoner uprising at Sobibor, the death knell of that death camp. The 140 men on the transfer roster were being sent from Trawniki to a concentration camp in Flossenburg, Bavaria, near the Czech border, not far from Plattling, where the Soviet POW revolt against forced repatriation took place.

Early on, Flossenburg employed prisoners to work in nearby limestone quarries. In 1943, however, there was a more urgent need. The Messerschmitt Aircraft Corporation had built an assembly plant a mile from Flossenburg and needed workers. So while Operation Reinhard was winding down in eastern Poland, where Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka had already been liquidated, Flossenburg was “bursting at the seams.” More prisoners required more SS guards.

Entry number fifty on the Flossenburg transfer roster was Demianjuk 1393. Once again, his name was misspelled. Once again, the roster listed his date and place of birth and gave his rank as Wachmann, indicating that he had not received a promotion in the two years he had served as a Trawniki man. The personal data were consistent with the entries on the Demjanjuk ID card.

Historical documents indicate that an SS Death Head’s battalion ran the Flossenburg camp, where thousands