compile both the list and the summaries of alleged crimes it contained: who, what, where, and when.
The suspicion of Soviet complicity in compiling what would become known as the “Ukrainian list” was confirmed the following year with the publication of
Zutty found himself impaled on the horns of skepticism and pragmatism. The Soviets had consistently denied accredited journalists and international organizations access to the Nazi files it had captured in Berlin and on its long march to get there. Skepticism asked: Why would the Soviets grant rummaging privileges to a Ukrainian American? And why now? Could it be that Hanusiak didn’t rummage? That maybe the KGB prepared the list and gave it to him? Like the CIA, the Soviet spy agency was no stranger to dirty tricks. It was a toss of the coin as to who played dirtier.
Hanusiak himself was no help solving the who-gave-what-to-whom puzzle. He claimed he composed the list from Ukrainian newspaper articles, interviews with editors and journalists, and addresses on letters mailed from America to Ukraine. The explanations limped. How could Hanusiak and communist newspapers know where each of the seventy alleged Nazi collaborators had committed war crimes and which crimes they had committed? How could addresses on letters mailed from the United States provide such information? Either the KGB gave the list to Hanusiak, or it helped him compile it, or it fed the information to the newspapers, editors, and journalists Hanusiak consulted. Simply put, the Ukrainian list had KGB fingerprints all over it.
Pragmatism asked: So what? The names were just leads, like those on the Karbach list. As leads, they were either true or false. Zutty’s job was to figure out which, then to develop solid cases built on the strict rules of evidence required in deportation and denaturalization cases, regardless of where the information came from.
With no investigative staff or budget to speak of, however, it would be impossible for Zutty to open seventy new investigations while juggling a handful of active ones. So he pared down Hanusiak’s Ukrainian list to a more manageable nine names. Two were especially promising—Feodor Fedorenko and Iwan Demjanjuk, both alleged SS death camp guards in Poland. Hanusiak had described Fedorenko as a guard at Treblinka, where he allegedly beat and murdered Jews, and Demjanjuk as a guard at Sobibor. Hanusiak had not, however, attributed any specific war crimes to Demjanjuk as he had to Fedorenko.
If Hanusiak was right, Zutty believed both men were ideal candidates for denaturalization because both had lied on their visa applications. Fedorenko swore he spent the war years farming in the Polish village of Sarny before being deported to Germany as a forced factory worker. And Demjanjuk swore he was a farmer living in the Polish village of Sobibor, not a guard at the camp there.
Fedorenko and Demjanjuk were promising targets for another reason. There were dozens of Treblinka and Sobibor survivors living in the United States and Israel who should be relatively easy to find. They would either recognize the two alleged guards or not, know them by name or not. The other seven targets on the Ukrainian short list had allegedly collaborated with the Nazis in Ukraine as local police officers or members of SS death squads (Einsatzkommandos). Evidence against those seven would require a lot of legwork inside the Soviet Union, and Zutty was short on legs.
There was another positive development for Zutty and his small staff. The State Department had asked Israel for help in collecting evidence against Nazi collaborators in America, and Israel had agreed. Perhaps the Israeli police could find survivors who would positively identify Fedorenko and Demjanjuk as SS camp guards. Gambling on that hope, Zutty asked his new regional boss (Sol Marks had retired) to submit a request to the INS control board for Israeli assistance. To Zutty’s surprise, the board approved, and the pared-down Ukrainian list of nine names with the photographs of eighteen men accused of alleged war crimes left for Jerusalem tucked inside a diplomatic pouch. When the package arrived, the Israeli police made up a photo spread by pasting the eighteen pictures on three pieces of brown cardboard.
The photos Zutty sent to Israel were deeply flawed and would come back to bite U.S. prosecutors during the 1978 trial of Feodor Fedorenko in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In l 977, the year before the Fedorenko trial opened, the U.S. Supreme Court set strict rules for the use of photo spreads in American trials and proceedings. In essence, the court ruled that no single picture should call attention to itself. Photos should be the same size and color, and be uniform in appearance, with no single photo brighter or clearer than the others. No single photo should be labeled or highlighted or matched with unfocused pictures. And all photo subjects should have somewhat similar distinguishing characteristics such as age and race. If the alleged criminal was a twenty-year-old Caucasian, the other photos must also be of young Caucasians.
Unfortunately, Zutty’s photos—and consequently the Israeli photo spread—failed to comply with the specifications set by the U.S. Supreme Court. The first six photos on page one of the spread, for example, were smaller than Fedorenko’s (no. 17) and Demjanjuk’s (no. 16). Each photo in the spread was blurred or shadowed except three—Fedorenko’s, Demjanjuk’s, and photo nine on page two, which was also smaller. If that wasn’t invalidating enough, the Fedorenko and Demjanjuk photos were the only two in the spread with large borders, which made them leap off the page.
The Israeli police had their own Nazi Crimes Unit, whose main job was to help other countries like the United States build cases. The Nazi unit assigned the nine Ukrainians to its ace investigator, Miriam Radiwker, a Ukrainian-born attorney who had fled to the Soviet Union early in the war to escape the Nazis, and who had practiced law in both Poland and the Soviet Union before immigrating to Israel in 1964. Radiwker studied Zutty’s report and arrived at the same conclusion he had and for the same reasons. Fedorenko and Demjanjuk were the two most promising targets on the list.
Radiwker began her preliminary investigation with Feodor Fedorenko, a seventy-year-old retired welder living in Waterbury, Connecticut. He was the easier target because there were more Treblinka survivors living in Israel than Sobibor survivors, and the alleged crimes against Fedorenko were specific—beating and murdering—while those against Demjanjuk were vague.
In May 1976, while Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman was meeting with the Soviets over U.S.-Moscow cooperation, Radiwker placed ads in Israeli newspapers asking Sobibor and Treblinka survivors for help in a Nazi collaboration investigation. She also contacted three Treblinka survivors whom she knew from a previous investigation. All three had escaped from Treblinka during the uprising there in the summer of 1943. She made it a point not to tell them Fedorenko and Demjanjuk were the subjects of the investigation.
Radiwker’s interviews with survivor-witnesses followed a protocol provided by Zutty: Show each witness at least three photos; if the witness recognizes anyone in the spread, get a physical description of the subject at the time the witness knew him; have the witness describe the uniform the subject wore at the camp; and most important, find out whether the survivor had
Radiwker’s first witness was Treblinka survivor Eugen Turowsky. Before presenting the photos, Radiwker asked Turowsky if he could recall the last name of any guard at Treblinka. He could not. She then placed the three- page photo spread in front of him. Each of the eighteen photos was a visa picture of a young Ukrainian.
“Please, sir,” she asked. “Look and see whether you find someone you know.”
An experienced lawyer and investigator, Radiwker made it a point of asking this unembellished question lest she be accused of prompting or trying to influence the witness.
Turowsky didn’t recognize anyone on the first or second cardboard pages. But when he came to the third page, featuring photos sixteen and seventeen, he became visibly agitated, then pointed to number sixteen, the visa picture of a round-faced, well-fed Ivan Demjanjuk dressed in a dark suit and tie.
“Iwan,” he shouted. “Iwan from Treblinka. Iwan Grozny.”
Iwan of Treblinka was well-known to Nazi hunters worldwide as the guard who operated Treblinka’s gas chambers. He sat at the top of Simon Wiesenthal’s most-wanted list of Nazi collaborators. Treblinka prisoners gave him the name Ivan the Terrible (Grozny). The historical Ivan the Terrible was Ivan IV (Vasilyevich), who became the first czar of Russia.
Radiwker’s first reaction to Turowsky’s identification was that the survivor had to be mistaken. Iwan
