packages to her home in the tiny village where he was born. The niece wrote back in his mother’s name. Then, in the mid-1960s, Vera traveled to Ukraine to visit her own mother and her mother-in-law. Vera’s visa application required her to state the reason for her visit and to give her home address. If the KGB ever wanted to find Iwan Demjanjuk, a Red Army deserter, and assassinate him, they certainly knew where to look.
The two newspaper pictures of the ID card, bearing Iwan Demjanjuk’s alleged signature, showed the front and back of an official-looking German document. The front described the German organization that issued the document. In the left-hand corner on the back side of the card was a wallet-size head and shoulders photo of a young, hatless man with an oval face and short hair, dressed in black or dark clothes. The card identified the man as Iwan Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian, son of Nicolai, born on April 3, 1920, in Duboimarchariwzi. Actually, Demjanjuk was born in Dubovi Makharintsi. The card said the village was in the district of Sporosche. Actually, Demjanjuk’s village was in the Vinitsaya district. The card said he was 175 centimeters tall (about five feet, eight inches). Actually, he was six feet, one inch tall. The card said he had dark blond hair and a scar on his back. The color of his hair would later be disputed.
The card listed two service postings: Okszow, a work-camp farm estate maintained by Jewish women, beginning in September 1942; and the Sobibor death camp, beginning in March 1943. Written on the card was a word-for-word translation of the German into Russian.
The ID card bore two official-looking stamps and the signatures of three men: Karl Streibel, Ernst Teufel, and Iwan Demjanjuk. Streibel was the SS commandant of a camp called Trawniki. Teufel was a Trawniki camp supply officer, and Demjanjuk was a Trawniki graduate.
The village of Trawniki is a few miles northwest of the village of Sobibor, where, on his visa application, Demjanjuk had sworn he worked as a farmer before and during the early part of the war. Trawniki’s landmark was an abandoned sugar refinery near the railroad tracks. The SS established a school for auxiliary guards on the site. In 1942, the year Demjanjuk was captured by the German army during the battle of Kerch, nearly all of the auxiliary guards in training at Trawniki were Red Army prisoners recruited from POW camps in eastern Poland and western Ukraine, especially from Rovno and Chelm, where Demjanjuk said he had been held prisoner.
Just as the SS could not round up, rob, and kill the 2.1 million Jews in Russia and the Soviet-occupied territories east of the Bug River without the help of volunteers (
The SS envisioned a disciplined corps of one hundred thousand guards but ultimately fell far short of that goal. By July 1944, when the Red Army captured the town of Trawniki, the school had only trained approximately five thousand, and they were far from disciplined.
The SS deliberately chose Soviet POWs to become “Trawniki men,” as they were called, because they already had military training, had seen action, and were no strangers to death and killing. Most were Ukrainians, the largest ethnic group among the prisoners. The SS favorites were ethnic Germans (
Major General Odilo Globocnik, the SS officer and police leader who ran Operation Reinhard and its death camps in the Lublin district of Poland, appointed SS Captain Karl Streibel as Trawniki’s first and only commandant. Initially, Streibel personally visited the POW camps to select candidates for his new school.
Before Streibel or his recruiters visited a POW site, camp security personnel conducted a preliminary screening of potential candidates. That narrowed the number of prisoners Streibel and the doctor he brought with him had to interview and evaluate.
The first selection criterion was good health. If a Soviet POW was in reasonably good physical shape under starvation conditions, he would be cheaper to maintain, and easier to train and deploy. Furthermore, good health more than likely signaled that the prisoner had received extra rations for providing a service to the camp staff. That meant he had already crossed a line by collaborating with the enemy to stay alive.
Besides healthy men, Streibel wanted anticommunists who would be less likely to desert to the Red Army, and anti-Semites who would find it easier to brutalize and kill Jews. The ability to understand and speak German and the skill to drive a transport truck made a candidate especially valuable to the SS and its mission in Poland to capture, rob, and kill all Polish Jews with speed and efficiency.
The vast majority of the POW Trawniki men, most in their early twenties or younger, did not volunteer. They were recruited to collaborate without being specifically told for what. As an inducement to work with the Germans, they were promised better food and warm clothes. If the SS had asked for volunteers, however, they would have been deluged. Life in a POW camp in 1941–42 (especially 1941) was a virtual death sentence. The Germans shot hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners they didn’t know what to do with. Starvation and disease were rampant. Soviet POWs would volunteer for almost anything for an extra crust of bread.
“Because we were all starving,” a former Trawniki man recalled after the war, “no one… who had been selected, refused.”
Of course, if a POW was selected to collaborate, he could always refuse. If he did, depending on who was the recruiter that day, he could be killed or sent back into the prison ranks, where he had less than a 20 percent chance of surviving. There is at least one recorded instance of a group of Soviet POWs refusing the offer to collaborate and
Most trainees from the POW camps arrived at Trawniki relatively healthy, but undernourished and in rags. They were cleaned up, deloused, given a haircut, and clothed in recycled military uniforms—black ones made from old SS uniforms or Polish army uniforms dyed black, or earth-brown Belgian military uniforms appropriated from the warehouses of Reich-occupied Belgium.
Most of the time, an SS officer would explain to the new recruit—through a
After the lecture, the new recruit would be given the choice to accept the assignment or return to a POW camp. “No one wanted to return,” a former Trawniki man from Chelm (Stalag 319) explained after the war. The POWs feared they would either be shot if they said no or would starve to death in a camp. Although camp conditions had improved after the terrible winter of 1941–42 because the Germans decided to use Soviet POWs as forced laborers, the fear of starvation was still very real.
An ethnic German interviewed the recruits and recorded their data on a personnel form (
The identification number was important in the German human accounting system. It was the number, not the name, that administrators used on most routine documents such as personnel rosters. The service pass was equally important. How else would a Trawniki man explain to a local police officer why he was wearing an unusual uniform, carrying a gun, unable to speak German, and walking in a restricted area?
The new recruit had to sign a service obligation form swearing allegiance to the SS and promising to abide by the rules, regulations, and disciplines of the guard service (
