general and a hassle-free travel pass signed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
As a hands-on expert on displaced persons, O’Connor had testified before Congress and the United Nations, and President Truman appointed him to the Displaced Persons Commission when it was created. Given his experience, O’Connor’s credentials as an expert witness on the plight of European refugees were impeccable. If the prosecution knew anything about his Catholic bias and his ties to the CIA and neo-Nazi organizations, it did not use the information to impugn his testimony in support of John Demjanjuk.
O’Connor’s only job as a defense witness was to establish beyond doubt that refugees were
“You testified that you had occasion to visit the [IRO] camps during your tenure as a commissioner between 1948 and 1952,” Martin said. “During that span of time, did you yourself experience
“Oh, yes,” O’Connor said. “And, more particularly, these kinds of matters were brought to my attention by the various chaplains of all faiths that were serving in these camps, who were very close to these political refugees…. I would try to persuade [them] that no one could be forcibly repatriated against their will. But those fears remained.”
O’Connor further testified that if a refugee lied about his past
“Were you familiar with a Soviet list containing names of alleged Nazi collaborators?” Martin asked.
“There was no
Like that of the prosecution, the defense’s opening salvo was strong. All three of its expert witnesses presented clear and compelling arguments that Soviet citizens were afraid of forced repatriation well after 1948, the year the prosecution argued the practice had ended. The problem for the defense was—its strong argument was irrelevant. The Supreme Court had ruled in its precedent-setting Fedorenko decision that extenuating circumstances, like fear and voluntariness, could not be used in determining eligibility for a U.S. visa. The defense also failed to suggest with any degree of credibility that the Trawniki card was a forgery. Up to this point, the defense of John Demjanjuk was a hopeless nondefense.
Before the defense called its most important witness to the stand, it presented five reputation and character witnesses—the lay president of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Church, the president of the church council, a fellow worker at the Ford plant, a neighbor, and the Reverend Stephen Hankevich, who had served at St. Vladimir’s for twenty years. Father Hankevich’s testimony was typical.
“How do you know Mr. Demjanjuk?” Gonakis asked the priest.
“He’s been a member of my parish since I arrived in Cleveland,” Father Hankevich said. “I see him at church practically every Sunday. The [Demjanjuks] are practical Christians, receive the sacraments of our church. Their children attend our school. He was on our board of auditors of our church, elected by the body of our congregation. He was a member of our Ukrainian school PTA.”
“Do you have an opinion as to Mr. Demjanjuk’s reputation for truthfulness and honesty?” Gonakis asked.
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I think he’s an honest man, a devoted man, a family man, a practical Christian,” Father Hankevich said.
The defense called John Demjanjuk to the stand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The courtroom was packed on the morning of March 4, 1981, when Demjanjuk took the stand, and U.S. marshals were turning people away at the courthouse door. In an attempt to maintain order and control, they had resorted to issuing tickets to the trial. Inside the second-floor courtroom, more marshals walked up and down the aisles collecting tickets and escorting out anyone who had managed to sneak in.
From the witness chair, John Demjanjuk radiated the same calm and confidence he had from his pew in the front row facing Judge Battisti and the Treblinka survivor-witnesses. Other than leaning closer to his interpreter to ask a question, he sat still and not even a ripple of emotion clouded his face. He had waited six years for this moment and the chance to defend himself.
The Demjanjuk family’s ordeal began in 1975 with three mysterious phone calls in a row from a man claiming to be an officer at the West German consulate in Detroit. Vera took the calls. Each time she told the man, who refused to say why he was calling, that her husband was at work. A week later, the man appeared on her doorstep on Meadow Lane in Seven Hills. This time her husband was home.
The man identified himself by name and produced his diplomatic identification badge. West German prosecutors wanted Mr. Demjanjuk to testify at a war crimes trial, the diplomat explained. They believed he had useful information about Sobibor and Treblinka.
Soon after that strange and troubling encounter, friends and neighbors began telling the Demjanjuks about being interviewed by INS investigators who wanted to know if Mr. Demjanjuk had ever talked about what he did during the war.
John Demjanjuk knew for sure he was a target in 1976, when the INS summoned him to its Cleveland office for questioning. And he knew the investigation was official when he opened a certified envelope from the Department of Justice on August 25, 1977. Inside the envelope was the government’s complaint,
Vera fainted. An ambulance took her to a hospital.
Like Frank Walus’s attorney, John Martin chose an alibi defense. Demjanjuk could not have been at Trawniki, Sobibor, and Treblinka when the government alleged he was, because he was a POW in a labor camp in Poland at the time. And later, he couldn’t have been a guard at any other camp or Nazi institution because the Germans had first sent him to Graz, Austria, to be inducted into an all-Ukrainian unit of the German army, then to a place called Oelberg, Austria, to be inducted into Vlasov’s liberation army.
Martin began the serious questioning of his client with the blood-type tattoo, which, the prosecution had argued, was proof that Demjanjuk worked for the SS. Since Demjanjuk’s command of English was minimal, the court provided an interpreter.
“While you were at Graz, did you have occasion to receive a blood-grouping type tattoo?” Martin asked.
“Yes.”
“Would you point to where this was placed on your body?”
Demjanjuk pointed to the inside of his upper left arm.
“This was done at Graz by whom?”
“A doctor.”
“Did the other POWs taken to Graz receive this tattoo also?”
“Everyone,” Demjanjuk said.
Danilchenko had sworn in his statement taken by Soviet prosecutor Natalia Kolesnikova that he and Demjanjuk were tattooed while doing guard duty in Flossenburg, Germany. Martin’s argument: Yes, my client had the tattoo—not because he was an SS guard, but because he was an involuntary soldier in Vlasov’s liberation
