[55] Others, particularly American Jews, were outraged by the presence of Demjanjuk in the United States and vocally supported his deportation. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. [43] During the trial, Demjanjuk admitted to having lied on his US visa application but claimed that it was out of fear of being returned to the Soviet Union and denied having been a concentration camp guard. This was the first time someone has been convicted by a German court solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of being involved in the death of any specific inmate. [158], John Demjanjuk died at a home for the elderly in Bad Feilnbach, Germany on 17 March 2012, aged 91. Such a proceeding became possible upon the discovery of internal Trawniki training camp personnel correspondence in the Archives of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation in Moscow. Two photos, out of 361 from Sobibor and other camps, show Demjanjuk, a German Holocaust research centre says. John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demjanjuk; Ukrainian: '; 3 April 1920 17 March 2012) was a Ukrainian-American who served as a Trawniki man and Nazi camp guard at Sobibor extermination camp, Majdanek, and Flossenbrg[2] Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, when he was tried and convicted in Israel after being misidentified as Ivan the Terrible, a notoriously cruel watchman at Treblinka extermination camp. While living in the United States, he was married to Vera Demjanjuk and they had three children. [73][74] Four of the survivors who had originally identified Demjanjuk's photograph had died before the trial began. Their video showed him walking unaided to an appointment. [67] On 19 May 1999, the Justice Department filed a complaint against Demjanjuk to seek his denaturalization. [160], Following his death, his relatives requested that he be buried in the United States, where he once lived. This removed any obstacles to federal agents seizing him for deportation to Germany. [111] On 30 January 2008, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit denied Demjanjuk's request for review. While interviews with Demjanjuk's family portray him as an innocent family man unfairly maligned, the evidence against him is haunting. #ECtHR backs #Germanys refusal to reimburse legal expenses of #Sobibr extermination camp guard John #Demjanjuk rejects #ECHR complaint from widow & son https://t.co/wLvIf1PPuu pic.twitter.com/9I7eFtV1qX, Council of Europe (@coe) January 24, 2019. [11] Having died before a final judgment on his appeal could be issued, under German law, Demjanjuk remains technically innocent. US officials had originally been aware, without informing Demjanjuk's attorneys, of the testimony of two of these German guards. Moreover, after Demjanjuk's extradition to Israel, investigators at the OSI, while reviewing original personnel and administrative records from Flossenbrg, found references to Demjanjuk's name linked to his Trawniki military identification number (1393), thus independently corroborating Danil'chenko's testimony that Demjanjuk served at Flossenbrg. Vera Demjanjuk, John Demjanjuk's wife, never believed her husband was Ivan the Terrible. However, Demjanjuk's family, who had always claimed he was a Ukrainian prisoner of war, and that the accusations were simply a case of mistaken identity, had fought vigorously to prevent his deportation to Germany, defended him, and stood by his side until his death. The video, shot in Demjanjuk's living room, showed a smiling John Demjanjuk playing with a grandchild born during the trial . Demjanjuk became a US citizen in 1958. [132] Demjanjuk was tried without any connection to a concrete act of murder or cruelty, but rather on the theory that as a guard at Sobibor he was per se guilty of murder, a novelty in the German justice system that was seen as risky for the prosecution. [122][123] On 10 April, the BIA found there was "little likelihood of success that [Demjanjuk's] pending motion to re-open the case will be granted" and accordingly denied his motion for a stay pending the disposition of his motion to reopen. In 1988, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death. [92], The judge's acquittal of Demjanjuk for being Ivan the Terrible was based on the written statements of 37former guards at Treblinka that identified Ivan the Terrible as "Ivan Marchenko". [18] According to German records, Demjanjuk most likely arrived at Trawniki concentration camp to be trained as a camp guard for the Nazis on 13 June 1942. [17] After a battle in Eastern Crimea, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and was held in a camp for Soviet prisoners of war in Chem. [66] According to prosecutors, Demjanjuk had been recruited into the Soviet army in 1940, and had fought until he was captured by German troops in Eastern Crimea in May 1942. In Israel, he was convicted of being Ivan the Terrible, a conviction that was later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court. Most of the guards were executed after the war by the Soviets,[93] and their written statements were not obtained by Israeli authorities until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court's rulings on the authenticity of the Trawniki card and the falsity of Demjanjuk's alibi but ruled that reasonable doubt existed that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. [140] Demjanjuk arrived in the courtroom in a wheelchair pushed by a German police officer. [139] On 30 November 2009, Demjanjuk's trial, expected to last for several months, began in Munich. Proceedings in the United States twice stripped him of his American citizenship and ordered him deported. Though key to the American government's and the Israeli prosecution's case, the identity card did not place Demjanjuk in Treblinka, but rather as a guard at an SS estate in Okzw, near Chelm in September 1942, and as a guard at the Sobibor killing center from March 1943. Vera, also from Ukraine, told Cleveland.com that she lived through World War II and famine. [169] Author Philip Roth, who briefly attended the Demjanjuk trial in Israel, portrays a fictionalized version of Demjanjuk and his trial in the 1993 novel Operation Shylock. The theme was never forget.. [32][36] Lawyers at the US Office of Special Investigations (OSI), in the Department of Justice, valued the identifications made by these survivors, as they had interacted with and seen "Ivan the Terrible" over a protracted period of time. Upon his arrival, German authorities arrested him and held him in Munich's Stadelheim prison. On Demjanjuk's return to Seven Hills after the acquittal, the family gave Mike Conway, then a reporter for WJW-TV in Cleveland, the exclusive right to broadcast images of Demjanjuk back in the bosom of his loving family. They believe the collection includes two photos showing Demjanjuk with fellow guards at the camp, which would be the first documentary evidence to conclusively establish he had served there. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including NYmag.com, Flavorwire and Tina Brown Media's Women in the World. Its investigation reduced the list to nine individuals, including Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk immigrated to the United States in 1952 and became a naturalized US citizen in 1958. [149], Demjanjuk declined to testify or make a final statement during the trial. He was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp, where he was disciplined on 18 January 1943. She was the same age as John Demjanjuks wife, but it is not yet confirmed if this is the same Vera. As Demjanjuk's appeal made its way to the Israeli Supreme Court, the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. Just before he was sent to Germany, 19 News saw the same thing. )[23] Demjanjuk later claimed this was a coincidence, and said that he picked the name "Sobibor" from an atlas owned by a fellow applicant because it had a large Soviet population. After his original extradition to Israel, Demjanjuk's family had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Department of Justice to obtain access to all investigative files at the OSI that related to Demjanjuk, Trawniki, and Treblinka. Conscripted into the Soviet army, he was captured by German troops at the battle of Kerch in May 1942. In 1988, during one of his trials, Irene, John Jr., and his wife Vera walked onto the stage and yelled at the prosecutors, telling them that they were all liars. He was 91. Demjanjuk was convicted by a Munich court in 2011. [37] While the government was preparing for trial, Hanusiak published pictures of an ID card identifying Demjanjuk as having been a Trawniki man and guard at Sobibor in News from Ukraine. Previously, historians knew of only two photos taken at Sobibor while it was still operational; the camp was dismantled after a prisoner revolt in 1943. These documents placed Demjanjuk at the Sobibor killing center as of March 26, 1943, and at the Flossenbrg concentration camp as of October 1, 1943. He was then brought to a German prisoner of war camp in Chem in July 1942. [58] The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Demjanjuk's appeal on 25 February 1986, allowing the extradition to move forward. [45][46] Five Holocaust survivors from Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka and having been "Ivan the Terrible. [151], On 15 January 2011, Spain requested a European arrest warrant be issued for Nazi war crimes against Spaniards; the request was refused for a lack of evidence. [19], Demjanjuk would later claim to have been drafted into the Russian Liberation Army in 1944. Federal investigators never forgot, and after Demjanjuk returned to the U.S. after the Supreme Court decision, they investigated his claim that he was too ill to go to Germany where he had been newly indicted. [142], On 14 April 2010, Anton Dallmeyer, an expert witness, testified that the typeset and handwriting on an ID card being used as key evidence matched four other ID cards believed to have been issued at the SS training camp at Trawniki. It chose to investigate the names as leads. The first, Adolf Eichmann, was found guilty in 1961 and executed in 1962. The case had begun as an investigation into the Sobibor camp, due to Demjanjuk's alleged service at that killing center and to the testimony of a Soviet witness named Ignat' Danil'chenko in the late 1940s. [143] The prosecution also produced orders to a man identified as Demjanjuk to go to Sobibor and other records to show that Demjanjuk had served as a guard there.

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