John Demjanjuk - Background To Alleged Holocaust Involvement

Background To Alleged Holocaust Involvement

Demjanjuk was born in Dubovi Makharyntsi, Ukraine, a farming village, and at the age of 12 and 13 had survived the starvation and trauma of the Holodomor. When Demjanjuk was convicted in 2011 his son claimed, in an email to Associated Press, "My dad is a survivor of the genocide famine in Ukraine.. " When interviewed in late December 2009, residents of Dubovi Makharyntsi declared that Demjanjuk got along well with the Jewish families living nearby. Before joining the Soviet army, Demjanjuk worked as a tractor driver on a Soviet collective farm. In 1941, after Germany's attack on Soviet Occupied Poland, Demjanjuk was drafted into the Red Army. After a battle in Eastern Crimea he was captured and became a German prisoner of war and was moved to a Nazi German concentration camp for Soviet POWs. See: Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs.

He survived the ordeal and was allegedly sent to the Trawniki concentration camp utilized for training guards recruited from Soviet POWs, later allegedly serving in Majdanek, Sobibor and Flossenbürg Nazi camps and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Stroop Report}. Demjanjuk claims that, in early 1945, he joined the Russian Liberation Army (Russian: Russkaya osvoboditel'naya armiya, Русская освободительная армия, abbreviated in Cyrillic as РОА, in Latin as ROA, also known as the Vlasov army), led by Andrey Vlasov, which was organized by Nazi Germany to fight against the Soviet Red Army. Many Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) volunteered to serve under the Nazi German command in order to get out from Nazi German POW camps, notorious for starving the Soviet prisoners to death. Such non-German volunteers that served in Germany's foreign legions were referred to by the German command as Freiwillige. the German word for volunteer, and also as Hilfswilliger, literally one willing to help, often shortened to Hiwi, in auxiliary non-combat paramilitary and civilian capacities. According to Allied general Lt. Gen. Wladyslaw Wladyslaw Anders, by 1942, there were about a million such volunteers from the USSR alone, many of whom opposed the oppressive Soviet regime, or the domination of Soviet regime in their homelands.

Demjanjuk, his wife and their child arrived in New York City aboard the USS General W. G. Haan on 9 February 1952. On 14 November 1958, Demjanjuk became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He and his wife, whom he met in a displaced persons' camp, moved to Indiana with their daughter and then to the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, where Demjanjuk became a UAW diesel engine mechanic at the nearby Ford auto plant. Demjanjuk and his wife later had two more children.

In 1975 Michael Hanusiak, editor of the Ukrainian News, presented a list of ethnic Ukrainians living in the United States suspected of collaborating with Germans in World War II to what was then the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service; Demjanjuk's name was on that list. Soviet newspapers and archives had provided the names during Hanusiak's visit to the Soviet Union in 1974. Hanusiak also handed over a purported copy of a Nazi ID card issued to Demjanjuk at Trawniki.

In August 1977, the Justice Department submitted a request to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio that Demjanjuk's citizenship be revoked on the basis that he had allegedly concealed his involvement with Nazi death camps on his immigration application in 1951. The request followed a lengthy investigation by the INS after Demjanjuk was identified by five Holocaust survivors on a photo spread used in the investigation of Feodor Fedorenko, a Treblinka concentration camp guard. Fedorenko was later extradited to the USSR on his admission that he was such a guard and that he lied on his U.S. immigration applications.