acid.
July: First major Dumpster papers are retrieved.
February: Maria Dudek identifies Iwan Marchenko as Ivan the Terrible during a
March: Demjanjuk defense learns about the Fedorenko papers filed in Crimea, which identify Iwan Marchenko as Ivan the Terrible.
May: Sheftel argues Demjanjuk appeal before the Israeli Supreme Court.
June: Prosecution in Israel releases the Fedorenko files identifying Iwan Marchenko as Ivan the Terrible.
December: Soviet Union collapses.
June: U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agrees to reopen the Demjanjuk denaturalization case and appoints a special master.
July: Israeli Supreme Court acquits Demjanjuk.
August: U.S. Sixth Circuit court rules that Demjanjuk can return to the United States. Israeli Supreme Court decides not to retry Demjanjuk as Iwan of Sobibor.
November: U.S. Sixth Circuit court finds OSI guilty of prosecutorial misconduct and fraud upon the court and restores Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship.
May: Justice Department files a new complaint against Demjanjuk as an SS guard at Sobibor.
May: Second Demjanjuk denaturalization trial opens in Cleveland. U.S. Sixth Circuit court strips Demjanjuk of his citizenship a second time.
December: U.S. immigration judge orders Demjanjuk deported to Germany, Poland, or Ukraine.
May: Demjanjuk leaves for Munich to stand trial as Iwan of Sobibor.
November: Munich trial opens.
May: Munich court finds Demjanjuk guilty of assisting in the murder of 29,060 Jews at Sobibor and sentences him to five years in prison. Demjanjuk files an appeal.
March: Demjanjuk dies in a nursing home in Germany.
SOURCES AND NOTES
Much of this book is based on transcripts of trials and hearings. These transcripts are unedited and contain spelling and grammatical errors that appear to be made either by the translator or the transcriber. They also contain inconsistencies in the spelling of names. I have corrected these obvious errors without changing the content of the testimony in any way. The italics in transcript quotations are mine.
The spelling of Eastern European names and places poses a problem. Sometimes, there are several spelling variations for a word. For example, a Ukrainian name will have a Ukrainian spelling, a Russian spelling, and sometimes a Polish spelling. The name of a city or town can have four different variations if one adds the German name for the location. Whenever possible, I have chosen the spelling relevant to the country of origin.
The term “Eastern European,” frequently used in this book, encompasses all states once under Soviet influence: Belorussia (today Belarus), Bulgaria, the former Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine.
Numbers are a problem. Older sources tend to have larger numbers. More recent sources tend to have smaller numbers based on the latest research. For some numbers, there is no factual base, making them little more than guesses. As scholars find more archival documents, these numbers will continue to be refined. Unless a number is commonly accepted, I have documented the number used, usually presenting it in a sliding scale such as “an estimated three to four million.”
NA U.S. National Archives, College Park, Maryland
RG Record Group
INTRODUCTION
Berkhoff, Karel C.
Hryshko, Vasyl.
Transcripts of Demjanjuk’s Denaturalization Trial in Cleveland in 1981, Deportation Hearing in Cleveland in 1983–84, and Israeli Trial in Jerusalem in 1986.
This chapter makes no attempt to point out the slightly different versions of and contradictions in Demjanjuk’s own story. They will be dealt with in subsequent chapters.
xi Helped the Nazis murder 29,060 Jews: The number is an estimate taken from the railroad records of Jews transported to Sobibor during the time Demjanjuk worked there as a guard.
xii Estimates for the number of Ukrainians that Stalin starved to death in the Great Famine range from one million to ten million. The three to four million number comes from
