Useful Enemies

September 1943.

• As an SS guard, John Demjanjuk knew that the 29,060 Jews who arrived at Sobibor while he served there were murdered.

• As an SS guard, John Demjanjuk assisted the Germans in running a smooth killing machine.

After acknowledging that Demjanjuk had already spent ten years in Israeli and German jails, the court sentenced him to five years in prison. Because he was not a flight risk due to poor health and age, the court freed Demjanjuk from prison until all appeals were settled.

The court decision in Munich came thirty-four years after the United States first charged John Demjanjuk with lying on his visa application about his activities during World War II.

Part Five: Epilogue

After thirty-four years of hearings and trials in the United States, Israel, and Germany, the panel of seven German judges found John Demjanjuk guilty of aiding and abetting the Nazis in the murder of more than 29,000 Jews at the death camp of Sobibor. Although the Munich trial was an important legal benchmark in the search for justice, it did not provide closure.

The trial of John Demjanjuk left the case of John Demjanjuk legally, intellectually, and emotionally unresolved. Some observers were satisfied with the verdict and sentencing. But more were disappointed. Most were simply relieved that it was over, except for the tears and rants. They took comfort in the thought that in a short time there would be no one left to cry and rail.

For Sobibor survivors and relatives of the victims who died in the gas chambers there, Munich brought a measure of emotional satisfaction and peace. That the five-year prison sentence was light was irrelevant. Justice was done, and that was all they had asked for in their emotional pleadings before the court.

Munich was the funeral service they never had. Their last good-bye.

For the Treblinka survivors, however, the trial in Germany brought no peace. Those who had died since the Israeli Supreme Court found John Demjanjuk not guilty went to their graves convinced that he was Ivan the Terrible. The Treblinka survivors still alive believe that Ivan of Sobibor was also Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka and should have been swinging from a rope, not freed on his own recognizance because he was too old and disabled to run and hide.

The Ukrainians who believed John Demjanjuk was the victim of an international Jewish conspiracy against emigres still believe that. Jews understandably thirst for revenge, as those Ukrainians still argue, but unfortunately Jews have chosen to vent their blind rage at working-class Americans who also survived the horrors of World War II.

The Jews who believed there is no such thing as an innocent World War II Ukrainian still believe that. Without the complicit silence and active collaboration of Ukrainians, those Jews still argue, the Nazis could never have robbed and murdered nearly a million Ukrainian Jews. They say Ukrainians continue to hide behind their flag, calling the Nazi collaborators among them heroes in the fight against communism and Soviet domination.

Those who believed John Demjanjuk was a pawn in a political game still believe that. They say the Office of Special Investigations used him to buy its continued existence. And Israel used him to educate a new generation of Israelis for whom the Holocaust was only a dry chapter in a history book. And Germany used him to prove that it took seriously its responsibility to try Nazi war criminals, setting a critical legal precedent in the process.

The trial left Demjanjuk supporters, inside and outside the emigre community, bitterly disappointed. To try an old man for something he did in Poland nearly seventy years earlier, when he was a twenty-one-year-old prisoner of war facing starvation, was a form of court-sanctioned torture. How just was it to find a camp guard guilty of assisting in the deaths of thousands, but to acquit four SS officers who ran the camp and issued the orders, as a court had done in Hagen, Germany, in 1965?

Those who believed the KGB duped the United States and framed John Demjanjuk still believe that. In spite of all the tests and expert testimony to the contrary, they still believe that the Trawniki card is a clever KGB forgery, and they continue to point out real or perceived flaws in the card as proof. They will never find satisfaction, however, because their version of the truth will always be just one unexplained blemish away. The simple fact is that, although the United States is still declassifying and releasing Nazi documents, it is unlikely that any significant new evidence relating to John Demjanjuk or the Trawniki card will ever surface.

The lack of closure on the Demjanjuk case, however, does not mean that his trial in Munich was a trivial exercise in belated justice. The highly publicized proceeding has elevated the Demjanjuk case to a larger-than-life status. Like it or not, John Demjanjuk became the coda to the Nazi era. Like Demjanjuk, most alleged war criminals and the witnesses against them are either in their nineties or late eighties. They suffer from health problems, memory lapses, and dementia. More likely than not, that makes Demjanjuk the last major trial of the Nazi war crimes era, which began with the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946 and continued in fits and starts until May 2011 in Munich, Germany.

As a coda, John Demjanjuk’s trial was no heart-stopping finale. Rather, it ended with a pop and a fizzle.

However disappointed, divided, and emotionally unsatisfied the world may be with the thirty-four-year legal journey of John Demjanjuk and the 2011 Munich verdict, the frustrating ordeal—two denaturalization trials, two deportation hearings, two extradition hearings, and two criminal trials—raised an important question.

John Demjanjuk was no Holocaust architect like Adolf Eichmann, no genocide implementer like Heinrich Himmler, no medical experimenter like Dr. Josef Mengele, no gas chamber operator like Sobibor’s Erich Bauer, no anti-Semitic rabble-rouser like Romanian Viorel Trifa, no Nazi puppet mayor like Belorussian Emanuel Jasiuk, no executioner like Karl Linnas, no ethnic cleanser like Croatian Andrija Artukovic, and no sadistic camp guard like Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka.

John Demjanjuk was a poor Ukrainian village boy drafted as an ordinary private into Stalin’s Red Army. He was just one of four million Soviet soldiers captured and imprisoned by the Germans. By Holocaust rankings, he was just an ordinary Nazi collaborator who never rose above the rank of private as an SS guard, and just one of more than five thousand Trawniki men who agreed to work with the Nazis in the hope of surviving the war. As fate would have it, John Demjanjuk was one of the few Trawniki men that Nazis hunters caught, simply because his ID card survived the war.

As a very ordinary young man captured by the Germans and facing a high probability of either starving to death, dying from overwork and disease, or being routinely executed, John Demjanjuk poses a final question to his accusers and critics. It is a question that goes to the heart of the human condition—a question that only an ordinary man like John “Iwan” Demjanjuk could ask:

If you had been me in 1942, what would you have done?

THE OPEN DOOR

If the Nazi war crimes trials have ended, war crimes revelations have not. The ink on historical documents may have faded and pages may have yellowed, but the content of those pages does not suffer from failing memories or dementia. If there is any disease present, it is that of complacency, arrogance, and incompetence, which continues to shield big government, big money, and big political interests from scrutiny and prosecution.

Fortunately, the further one steps away from the Nazi era and its architects, scoundrels, and sadists, the more light shines on the past. The question is: Will anyone still care when documents now buried in file cabinets, safes, and vaults are finally declassified and released?

As the new revelations about Nazi war criminals and their collaborators find their way into the media, Americans who do care will have Eli Rosenbaum and Elizabeth Holtzman to thank. Beginning in 1980, Rosenbaum devoted almost his entire adult life to prosecuting former Nazis and Nazi collaborators, first as an OSI trial attorney,