Useful Enemies

• • •

The prosecution was not without potential live witnesses. But they were a mixed blessing. Two former SS guards and a Sobibor survivor had volunteered to testify for the prosecution. Each proved to be a jack-in-the-box— unpredictable and unexpected.

Alex Nagorny, a ninety-three-year-old former Ukrainian Trawniki man, testified that he had worked with and shared a barrack with Iwan Demjanjuk at Flossenburg. The court asked Nagorny if the man lying on the stretcher in front of him was the Iwan Demjanjuk he had known. Nagorny stepped away from the witness stand, walked over to the gurney, and studied Demjanjuk’s face.

“That’s definitely not him,” he said. “No resemblance.”

Nagorny went on to help the defense even more. He testified that when the war was over, the Trawniki men destroyed their ID cards (incriminating evidence) so that the Allies would not deliver them to the Soviets as Nazi collaborators. Wouldn’t Iwan Demjanjuk have done the same? If so, where did the Demjanjuk ID card on trial in Munich come from?

Eighty-nine-year-old Samuel Kunz, another Trawniki man, volunteered to testify that all SS guards knew what happened to the Jews who entered a death camp even if they didn’t work near the gas chambers. They all understood they were part of a killing machine.

Prosecutors had known for several years that Kunz had been a guard at Belzec, but they declined to prosecute him because they had no evidence that he had committed a specific murder as defined by the 1871 German penal code. However, during their background check for the Demjanjuk trial, prosecutors learned that Kunz, an ethnic national who had been living in Germany for sixty years, had personally shot at least a dozen Jews at Belzec.

Germany charged Kunz with assisting in the murder of 430,000 Jews at Belzec, but he never faced a panel of judges. Someone was one step ahead of the court. On a cold night in April 2011, assassins entered Kunz’s home in Bonn, snatched him from his bed, and left him outside to die of hypothermia.

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Not long after the Demjanjuk trial opened in Munich, a Moscow correspondent for a Czech radio station happened to see a brief item in a Russian newspaper about a former POW from Sobibor named Alexei Vaitsen. The news item led her to a cramped apartment in Ryazan, Russia, a picturesque city two hundred miles southeast of Moscow.

Vaitsen was an eighty-seven-year-old former Jewish Red Army officer who had been imprisoned at Sobibor. Assigned an important role in the October 1943 uprising, he escaped during the revolt and fled into the forest. Like the military commander of the uprising, Soviet Army Lieutenant Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, Vaitsen rejoined the Red Army and survived the war, only to suffer severe discrimination as a Russian Jew in the Soviet Union.

Vaitsen told the correspondent that he had seen Iwan Demjanjuk at Sobibor leading a Waldkommando (Forest Kommando) out of the camp into the forest to cut wood. Vaitsen said that he later recognized Iwan Demjanjuk from an old photo published in a Soviet newspaper. The photo Vaitsen was referring to was probably the Trawniki card picture that the KGB released to the Soviet press in 1976.

“It’s him,” Vaitsen said. “I know him. I’m one hundred percent certain.”

German prosecutors did not find Vaitsen credible. Why did he wait thirty years to come forward, they asked.

But Vaitsen hadn’t come forward. He had been found and interviewed.

Why didn’t he say something during the Israeli trial, they asked.

Assuming he even knew about the Ivan the Terrible trial, Vaitsen suffered from wartime nightmares and never talked about what he had seen and endured during the war, according to family members.

Vaitsen had testified at the Soviet trials of Trawniki men in the 1960s during which he identified several Sobibor guards by name. Why didn’t he mention Iwan Demjanjuk, the German prosecutors asked.

Vaitsen knew Demjanjuk’s face, but not his name. And no one showed him a picture of Iwan Demjanjuk in the 1960s.

German prosecutors decided not to call Vaitsen to the stand, but they did call two other Sobibor survivors to testify. Neither one recognized Iwan Demjanjuk’s name as a Sobibor guard. Neither one could identify his photo or recognize him in court as an SS guard they had seen at Sobibor. Neither one had ever entered camp three, where the Jews were gassed. All they could do from the witness stand was describe the killing process at Sobibor from personal observation and which roles the SS guards played in it.

Thomas “Toivi” Blatt, whose father, mother, and sister were murdered at Sobibor on the day the family arrived there, made an important statement during the trial. Commenting on his failure to identify John Demjanjuk as a Sobibor SS guard, Blatt said: “I can’t say I remember Demjanjuk’s face. But frankly, I can’t even recall [the faces] of my father or mother after so many decades.” Blatt testified that he saw SS guards enter camp three through the camouflaged gate. He heard gunshots. He heard the motor start up and rumble. He heard screams. But he couldn’t say precisely what the SS guards did once they entered camp three. Did they beat prisoners? Whip them? Force them into the gas chamber? Did they torture them like Ivan the Terrible did at Treblinka? Should the court assume that if the Treblinka SS guards drove Jews into the gas chambers, Sobibor guards must have done the same thing? Furthermore, Blatt could not testify that every single SS guard at Sobibor had actually worked in camp three at one time or another.

In sum, all Blatt could testify to was that there were SS guards at Sobibor and they were essential to the killing process.

• • •

The important role of all SS guards in the Sobibor killing process was not lost on the court. But what weight should it give that participation? During the sixteen months of killing at the camp, approximately 250,000 Jews were gassed. As an alleged SS guard at the death camp, John Demjanjuk assisted the SS in murdering them. But how many deaths was he co-responsible for?

Early in the trial, presiding judge Alt took out his calculator and tallied up from transportation records how many Jews arrived at Sobibor between March 1943 and September 1943, when John Demjanjuk allegedly served there. Alt came up with 29,900. Ninety-nine percent of them were Dutch.

Defense attorney Busch objected. The court was assuming, he argued, that Demjanjuk—if he had ever been at Sobibor—was working at the camp seven days a week. Guards had days off and leave time, Busch reminded the court. Shouldn’t days away from the camp be factored into the court’s murder formula?

Judge Alt agreed and recalculated. He came up with 29,060. Busch accepted the number and the court began the tedious task of reading into the record individual transport numbers and names, if known. Readers spoke rapidly in hushed, flat, monotonous tones:

“From Amsterdam on June 21, 1943, six hundred… from Westerbork…”

To the spectators in the gallery, it sounded as if the court was reading names and numbers from the Munich white pages. But to the living who lost loved ones at Sobibor, it was an emotional moment. When they heard Alt say the name of their mother or brother, father or sister, they burst into tears.

When Alt finished the reading of names, the testimony of relatives who had lost family at Sobibor began. Under German law, these prosecution witnesses could be co-plaintiffs in the trial and they could be represented by their own attorneys. They testified through their tears and rage about how they suffered because they lost a mother or father, brother or sister at Sobibor. With hands shaking, they read from the last letter they had received from a loved one, or held up a faded picture for the judges to see. Few wanted revenge. All wanted to keep Sobibor alive in the collective memory of the world as a tribute to those who died there. A spiritual gravestone.

• • •

Somewhere along the way—with all the killing process calculations—the court seemed to have lost sight of why John Demjanjuk was on trial. The proceedings were about the men, women, and children murdered at Sobibor, not about statistics. Philip Bialowitz, the second survivor witness to testify, played an important role in reminding the court of this fact.

Like the Treblinka survivors at the Israeli trial, Bialowitz brought reality into the courtroom. He directed the