“They gathered them together in the assembly area on the Crimean Peninsula or the Crimea itself, and then, as fast as… transportation was available, they would move them further west away from the front.”
“What type of transportation?”
“Railroad,” Ziemke said.
The answer was important to the prosecution case. Most of the early POW camps like Rovno were in western Ukraine. If Demjanjuk had been marched the more than one thousand miles from Kerch in the south to Rovno in the west, for him to have gotten to Trawniki by July would have been impossible.
“Is there a particular reason,” Horrigan asked, “why the Germans brought the POWs all the way to western Ukraine?”
“The Germans didn’t want to have large numbers of Soviet prisoners of war… right behind their front,” Ziemke said.
In his history lesson from the stand, Ziemke had constructed an unbreakable historical chain of events— Demjanjuk’s capture in Kerch in May, his imprisonment in Rovno in June, and his arrival at Trawniki in July. That chain led straight to the Trawniki card, where the prosecution case against Demjanjuk really began.
Next, the government called Wolfgang Schefler to the strand.
Like Earl Ziemke, Schefler was a historian and researcher who specialized in the study of Nazism. A professor at the Free University of Berlin, he was an old hand at playing expert witness in war crimes trials. And as a historical researcher, he had the opportunity to rummage through World War II archival files all over Europe.
Schefler had three jobs to perform for the prosecution. First, he had to establish that Trawniki men routinely committed crimes against humanity while working for the SS. Second, he had to prove that Trawniki men were routinely shuffled back and forth between Treblinka and Sobibor without the knowledge of Trawniki headquarters. And finally, he had to verify the historical authenticity of the Trawniki card, which he was predisposed to find real. After examining thousands of original and photocopied World War II documents—many supplied by the Soviet Union—Schefler had never found a single forgery.
The government began its direct examination of Schefler by establishing the importance of the Trawniki men in the Nazi extermination program.
“Did Trawniki play a role in any aspects of Action Reinhard?” government prosecutor Norman Moscowitz asked.
“Trawniki units were involved in many ghetto cleanup operations,” Schefler said. “They moved out those deemed transportable. The others were killed on the spot—people in hospitals or orphanages or in old folks’ homes…. Because of the lack of [German] manpower, they were an essential part of Action Reinhard.”
“What kinds of duties did they have at the extermination camps?”
“Guarding the camp and supervising the deportees as they came from the train,” Schefler said. “That includes the supervision of the people being herded into the gas chamber.”
The Supreme Court had ruled in the Fedorenko case that the mere wearing of a uniform and the carrying of a gun at a Nazi camp constituted assistance to the enemy in the persecution of civilians.
“Did they receive uniforms?” Moscowitz asked.
“Former SS uniforms and, to some extent, former Belgian army uniforms,” Schefler said. “The majority were black. Later on they were replaced by… earth-brown uniforms.”
“Were the Trawniki men armed?”
“In varying degrees.”
Next, to strengthen his case against Demjanjuk as a Nazi collaborator, Moscowitz used Schefler to explain how the Trawniki men had been contractually employed by the SS, an organization defined as criminal by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
“Did they take an oath or pledge of any sort?” Moscowitz asked.
“To perform and obey the service orders of the SS and the police,” Schefler said.
“They were legally subject to court-martial… and therefore accepted the discipline and regulation of the SS?”
“Yes, that’s what it means,” Schefler said.
The prosecution had scored its first major point. If it could later prove that Demjanjuk was trained at Trawniki and/or served at Sobibor or Treblinka and lied about it on his visa application, he could be stripped of his U.S. citizenship and deported as a Nazi collaborator. The government did not have to prove that Demjanjuk had personally beaten, shot, or killed anyone. If it did offer credible evidence of war crimes, the evidence would serve to strengthen its argument that Demjanjuk was
Having made that point clearly and with historical precision, Moscowitz quickly moved to a critical issue in the prosecution case: How was it possible that the Trawniki card listed Sobibor as a Demjanjuk posting, but not Treblinka? Ivan the Terrible and Treblinka were the heart of the prosecution case. Sobibor was just a sidebar.
“Is it fair to say,” Moscowitz asked, “that Trawniki men were assigned to varying locations [as] needed?”
“That is completely correct,” Schefler said.
“In the transfers between camps and other places, was the Trawniki administration involved?”
“Normally no,” Schefler said. “Trawniki had no jurisdiction over exchanging back and forth.”
“To your knowledge would Trawniki maintain
“We don’t know of any.”
Moscowitz felt he had scored his point and moved on to the Trawniki card itself, the prosecution’s only piece of documentary evidence. He handed Schefler the Soviet-certified photos of the front and the back of the card.
“Dr. Schefler,” he asked, “would you look at Government Exhibit No. 5 and tell the court what this appears to be?”
“A Service ID with a specific number.”
“Is there any indication on the card where this service record ID is from?”
“The document was issued by the representative of the SS Reichsfuehrer and the chief of police,” Schefler said. He went on to testify that all the organizational details on the card were appropriate and historically accurate, including the three official seals. The defense would later insinuate that they were forged.
There was no date on the Trawniki card and the defense would also later argue that the card was a forgery because it was undated. The Germans would never issue a document without a date. In his questioning of Schefler, Moscowitz used the military rank of Ernst Teufel, the supply clerk who cosigned the card, to determine a probable issue date for the card. Teufel had signed the card as
Schefler testified that German records showed that on July 19, 1942, Teufel was promoted to
According to Ziemke’s and Schefler’s combined testimony, therefore, Demjanjuk arrived at Trawniki sometime between July 1 and July 18, 1942. The prosecution failed, however, to explain why the card was undated.
Moscowitz had one final question before he moved on to another topic. As a historian, did Schefler consider the Trawniki card a forgery?
“[The forger] would have to have supernatural powers,” Schefler said.
In his pretrial deposition, Demjanjuk had admitted openly and candidly that the Germans tattooed him with his blood type.
“Are you familiar with the practice of the German forces… of tattooing the blood-type group on the body of the troops?” Moscowitz asked Schefler.
“Yes… On the inside of the left arm.”
“Was this practice… followed by
“No,” Schefler said. “I only know of the practice in the SS.”
“What would that indicate?”
“That he belonged to some sort of unit which required it,” Schefler said.
“What kind of unit would that be?”
