Useful Enemies

building and entering the motor building. One actually saw Iwan turn the motor on. Each graphically described the cruelty of Iwan.

Given the strength of the combined testimony of five survivors who worked near the gas chambers, the prosecution decided not to call any of the other four survivors waiting in the witness room. Why risk angering Battisti by presenting more of the same?

• • •

In the face of such emotionally powerful and convincing evidence, Martin had an impossible job trying to mount any kind of defense. He used a two-point strategy to create as much doubt as he could. First, he attacked the identification process. Then he challenged the witnesses’ physical description of Demjanjuk as Iwan.

Martin pointed out that Miriam Radiwker’s photo spread was seriously flawed. And he insinuated that the witnesses might have been coached or might have talked about the photo spread among themselves, in effect ganging up on Demjanjuk. But try as he might, Martin couldn’t question his way around the dramatic in-court identifications of John Demjanjuk as Iwan from both the Radiwker and OSI photo spreads.

Martin methodically asked each witness to describe Iwan’s height and the color of his eyes and hair so that he could later argue that their descriptions did not match Demjanjuk, and therefore, that the government had got the wrong man, as it did in its Walus case.

• • •

Before it rested, the government called four witnesses in a row to prove the last point of its trial strategy: If U.S. immigration examiners had known the truth about Demjanjuk’s wartime activities, they would not have recommended him for a U.S. visa, granted him one, or awarded him U.S. citizenship.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN A Question of Eligibility

Daniel Segat was a U.S. Army intelligence interrogator during the war. After the war, he helped the International Refugee Organization (IRO) resettle the thousands of refugees under its care. Segat was so good at his job that the IRO quickly promoted him first to chief eligibility officer, then to a seat on its review board, which settled tricky cases.

Moscowitz took Segat’s videotaped testimony in New York. His job was to establish Segat as highly credible, then get him to testify that the IRO would not have recommended Demjanjuk for a U.S. visa if it had known about his wartime activities.

“Would you briefly describe what your duties were as a field eligibility officer?” Moscowitz asked.

“To determine the eligibility of all applicants for IRO assistance in my area,” Segat said.

“What were the consequences to an applicant of a determination that he was eligible for IRO assistance?”

“He acquired a legal document which entitled him to—it’s like a passport almost—to all the services that IRO was able to render, including care, maintenance, and immigration.”

“What were the consequences to the applicant if he were found ineligible?” Moscowitz asked.

“He was deprived of all the things I mentioned before,” Segat said. “Deprived of the possibility to emigrate.”

Moscowitz handed Segat a copy of the IRO eligibility manual and asked him to find and read to the court the criteria of ineligibility.

“[Any persons] who can be shown to have assisted the enemy in persecuting civilian population… of countries [that were] members of the United Nations,” Segat read. “[Any others who] have voluntarily assisted the enemy forces since the outbreak of the Second World War.”

“If the IRO discovered that an applicant had lied or made misrepresentations… did that have any effect on the processing of his application?”

“He would be prima facie ineligible,” Segat said.

Moscowitz knew the defense would argue that it was common for immigration personnel to encourage applicants from the Soviet Union to lie about their countries of origin so they would not be forcibly repatriated.

“Did you, or any members or employees of IRO ever encourage or instruct an applicant to give incorrect information?” Moscowitz asked.

“To the contrary,” Segat said. “Our job was to elicit the truth.”

“If an applicant… was a citizen of the Soviet Union, would that fact… have any impact or effect on finding that he be eligible or ineligible?”

“No,” Segat said. “Not in itself.”

“If the applicant… became a German prisoner of war, would [that] have any impact on the applicant’s eligibility?”

“No bearing on his eligibility,” Segat said.

In a pretrial deposition, Demjanjuk admitted to being a soldier in General Vlasov’s liberation army. Moscowitz asked if membership in Vlasov’s army made him ineligible for a U.S. visa.

“It would make him prima facie ineligible,” Segat said. “The burden of proof shifts to him…. We would listen to their appeal, and if we are satisfied that they are not volunteers, they are eligible.”

“What if… an applicant were a former Soviet soldier taken prisoner by the Germans who was later trained by the Germans at a training camp for concentration camp guards?” Moscowitz asked, referring to Trawniki. “What impact, if any, would that have on that applicant’s eligibility?”

“He would be declared prima facie ineligible,” Segat said.

“If an applicant were a Soviet soldier, taken prisoner by the Germans, who served as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp or… extermination camp, what impact if any would that have on that applicant’s eligibility for IRO assistance?”

“He would be declared ineligible.”

Segat’s damaging testimony presented Martin with a huge challenge in his defense of Demjanjuk, whose main argument was that he had lied out of fear of repatriation to the Soviet Union, where he would have been executed for serving in Vlasov’s army.

“Were you aware,” Martin asked Segat, “that Russian repatriation officials visited DP camps in the American zone, and that there was a time when they forcibly repatriated USSR citizens found in these camps?”

“I am aware that they were visiting camps,” Segat said. “But I am not aware of a Russian repatriation official forcibly taking anybody out of the camp.”

“Did you ever gain any knowledge of an executive order issued by President Truman putting a halt to forcible repatriation?”

“No, sir,” Segat said. He couldn’t have because Truman never issued such an order.

Since the refugees spoke more than a dozen different languages, the IRO hired hundreds of interpreters to interview them and record their answers. Martin tried to establish that refugees paid interpreters to falsify their applications by saying they were born in a country other than the Soviet Union, usually Poland, because they were afraid of being forcibly repatriated.

Did Segat know about any cases where interpreters forged applications for refugees?

“I know of many cases where that occurred, yes….If [we] found out that there was some forgery or something, we simply got rid of them.” The government called Leo B. Curry Jr. to the stand.

• • •

Like Judge Battisti, Leo Curry had landed on the beaches of Normandy. After the war, he served as an investigator for the war crimes trials tribunal in Manila. From 1948 to 1952, he worked with the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission, which reviewed the reports of the IRO and passed further judgment on the eligibility of applicants for U.S. visas. Curry’s job as a prosecution witness was to complement and reinforce Segat’s testimony. He had personally approved Demjanjuk for a U.S. visa in 1950.