John Demjanjuk - Displaced Person Claim

Displaced Person Claim

On 21 April 2009, The Australian reported that Demjanjuk registered in 1948 as a displaced person, a category largely consisting of Eastern European refugees who were housed in Displaced persons camps after the war until they emigrated to new homes and lives. The International Tracing Service, a German agency that maintains data on Nazi victims, provided a copy of Demjanjuk's 3 March 1948, application to The Australian. In that application, Demjanjuk indicated he was a refugee, sought assistance, and asked for transfer to Argentina. His application stated that he had worked as a driver in the town of Sobibor, in eastern Poland, after which the extermination camp was named. After the war, Demjanjuk lived in southern Germany, working as a driver for various international refugee organisations, according to Spiegel. Demjanjuk found a job as a driver in a displaced persons camp in the Bavarian city of Landshut, and was subsequently transferred to camps in other southern German cities until he ended up in the town of Feldafing near Munich in May 1951. When interviewed in connection with the story, historian Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg (University of Giessen) stated that war criminals sometimes tried to escape justice after 1945 by presenting themselves victims of Nazi persecution, rather than as perpetrators. Many former Soviet POWs and former slave laborers and concentration camp inmates who found themselves as refugees were motivated to seek anonymity, create aliases and hide their Soviet Union origins to avoid forced repatriation to the Stalinist Russia under the terms of Yalta Agreement. Many former Soviet POWs, and Soviets who fought against the Red Army were also motivated to conceal their Soviet origins to avoid being executed under secret Allied military operations such as Operation Keelhaul. After the war ended, there were millions of former forced laborers OST-Arbeiter in occupied Germany, most of whom were Ukrainian, but also Russian, Belarusans, Crimean Tatars, and others. Many of them, having experienced the brutal and genocidal policies of the Stalin regime, wanted to emigrate to the USA or other western democracies rather than be forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union.

According to Gitta Sereny's The German Trauma (2000, ISBN 978-0-14-029263-3) there was a strong reason why Demjanjuk could have put down the Polish town of Sobibor, 5 km east of the Soviet border, as the place where he worked from 1937 to 1943 as a farmhand (according to Sereny) in the application he made on 3 March 1948. Applicants for displaced person status had to fill in a form that required them to say where they had been for the previous twelve years. Unless they could show that they had been living outside the Soviet Union on 1 September 1939, they could not, under the terms of the Yalta agreement, be accepted as displaced persons and would be returned to the Soviet Union. Officials of the International Refugee Organisation, which operated the Landshut office, therefore encouraged applicants to select places outside the Soviet Union. Sobibor was such a place. Sereny further relates that at Demjanjuk's trial in Israel on the Treblinka charges, Judge Dov Levin had asked Demjanjuk, "Why did you put Sobibor?" Demjanjuk had replied that he had no idea what to put on the form and that another applicant had had an atlas and told him to put down Sobibor as there had been many Soviets there. Evidence that Demjanjuk might have been at Sobibor rather than Treblinka contributed to his successful appeal against his conviction in Israel on the Treblinka charges. He was not prosecuted in Israel on any charges relating to Sobibor as, inter alia, his extradition from the U.S. had been obtained on the basis of the Treblinka charges. An 11 August 2010, Esquire magazine article written and researched by Scott Raab questioned the whole idea of Demjanjuk's trial, crime, and punishment, pointing out many of the absurdities of this particular case, stating specifically "Worse, Demjanjuk is essentially on trial not for anything he did, but simply for being at Sobibor. No specific criminal acts need be alleged, much less proved. Page through transcripts of previous Nazi trials and you'll find a rigorous focus on particulars, because that is what should be required to convict a defendant. No one in any such trial ever was convicted simply on the basis of being present at the scene."