John Demjanjuk - Trial in Israel

Trial in Israel

In October 1983, Israel issued an extradition request for Demjanjuk to stand trial on Israeli soil under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950. Demjanjuk appealed his deportation with the case heard on 8 July 1985. During the appeal, the authenticity of the identity card was questioned when it was revealed that the card's number, 1393, had been issued in June/July 1942 with the seal of SS Commissioner, Odilo Globocnik, who had in fact been dismissed from this post in March 1942 at which time his seal was destroyed. The three identity cards supplied by the KGB that the experts had used to compare their paper and ink with Demjanjuk's card to prove its authenticity were also disputed. Among other issues such as graphic inconsistencies, the cards, all dated 1942, carried Waffen SS stamps despite their not taking control of the Trawniki until 1943. Two bore the signature of Corporal Teufel when he was at that time a Sergeant while the other card, which had been issued earlier in the year when Teufel was still a Corporal, had his rank listed as Sergeant. The cards were also signed by Captain Hermann Hoefle, who was actually a Major. The court ruled on this claim: the record before us lends no support to this very serious charge, and we reject it. Witnesses fully qualified to testify on the subject stated their opinions that the Trawniki documents were authentic. Even if this documentary evidence had been rejected, the eyewitness evidence alone was found sufficient. Since the district court did not rely on the "Trawniki card", its validity is not before the court. The appeal was dismissed on 31 October 1985.

Demjanjuk was deported to Israel on 28 February 1986. His trial took place in the Jerusalem District Court between 26 November 1986 and 18 April 1988, before a special tribunal comprising Israeli Supreme Court Judge Dov Levin and Jerusalem District Court Judges Zvi Tal and Dalia Dorner.

Demjanjuk was represented by Israeli trial lawyer, Yoram Sheftel. One of the reasons why Yoram Sheftel defended Demjanjuk was that he was convinced John was not at Teblinka, Sobibor or any other Nazi German concentration or extermination camp as a guard was because he did not recognise the word "gewalt." This was the word Jewish victims would shout as they were shuffled to their death. Gewalt is a German and Yiddish word which means violence or ‘use of force,’ and was cried out as a "cry of desperation," an expression of woe, alarm and a call for help. All Trawinki-trained camp guards either knew German because they were predominantly Volksdeutsche, from ethnic German colonies in Ukraine or Russia, or were taught German. John Demjanjuk had no response to "gewalt" and had no significant fluency in German.

The prosecution team consisting of State Attorney Yonah Blatman, Michael Shaked of the Jerusalem District Attorney's Office, Dennis Goldman and Eli Gabay of the International Section of the State Attorney's Office and others. According to prosecutors, Demjanjuk had been recruited into the Soviet army in 1940, and that he had fought until he was captured by German troops in the Eastern Crimea in May 1942. He was then brought to a German prisoner of war camp in Chełm in July 1942. Prosecutors claimed that Demjanjuk volunteered to collaborate with the Germans and was sent to the camp at Trawniki, where he was trained to guard prisoners and was given a firearm, a uniform, and an ID card with his photograph. The principal allegation was that three former prisoners identified Demjanjuk as "Иван Грозный" (Ivan Grozny, Russian for "Ivan the Terrible") of Treblinka, who operated the diesel engines sending gas to the death chamber.

Prosecutors based part of these allegations on an ID card referred to as the "Trawnicki card." This alleged original ID card was obtained from the USSR and provided to Israel by American industrialist Armand Hammer, a close associate of several Kremlin leaders, including Lenin and Stalin. The defense claimed that the card was forged by Soviet authorities to discredit Demjanjuk. The card had Demjanjuk's photograph, which he identified as his picture at the time. The prosecution called expert witnesses to testify on the authenticity of the card including its signatures by various Nazi officers, paper, and ink.

On 5 March 1992, German weekly Stern published a shocking revelation that the Israeli prosecution concealed crucial information about the Travniki card being a forgery; and that the Israelis had the full co-operation of the German police and the Ministry of Justice. The article stated that on 23 January 1987, three weeks before the trial, Superintendent Amnon Bezaleli took the original Trawniki card for examination at the German police force's main criminal-identification laboratory in Weisbaden, known by its initials as the BKA. Bezaleli was the prosecution's central witness on the Trawniki document. According to Stern, the BKA, after a cursory examination, told Bezaleli that this was a counterfeit document forged in a more or less amateur way. The laboratory's preliminary analysis addressed the following points: the face in the photograph, which the prosecution identified as Demjanjuk's, had been pasted on to the uniform using photomontage techniques; the picture was not originally attached to the card, but had been transferred from another document; there was no match between the seal on the Travniki picture and that on the document itself. The analysts did not have time to compare Demjanjuk's known signature with the Demjanjuk signature on the Travniki document. Dr Louis Ferdinand Werner, head of the BKA, informed Bezaleli in a private conversation that the card was counterfeit. Bezaleli consulted people from the state prosecutor's office in Jerusalem, then instructed Werner to stop all tests on the card.

Other controversial evidence included Demjanjuk's tattoo. Demjanjuk admitted the scar under his armpit was a Waffen-SS tattoo, which he removed after the war, as did many soldiers to avoid capture and summary execution by the Soviets. The tattoo was likely a SS blood group tattoo given to him when he joined the Russian Liberation Army. The blood group tattoo was applied by army medics and used by combat soldiers in Waffen-SS foreign volunteers and conscripts because they were likely to need blood transfusions. There is no evidence that POWs trained as police auxiliaries at Trawniki received such tattoos.

During the trial, he was again identified on the photo spread by Otto Horn, a former German Nazi SS guard at Treblinka. This testimony became controversial later because it was discovered by Yoram Sheftel that on 14 November 1979, Otto Horn was interviewed by the newly created US Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI). The OSI showed him the picture of Demjanjuk, but Horn failed to identify Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, or even as a guard from Treblinka, or as anyone he ever knew in the SS forces. The OSI report regarding Otto Horn's failure to identify John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible would have been exculpatory, but was withheld by the OSI.

One remarkable event, involved a star witness for the prosecution, Eliyahu Rosenberg. Asked by the prosecution if he recognized Demjanjuk, Rosenberg asked that the defendant remove his glasses "so I can see his eyes." Rosenberg approached and peered closely at Demjanjuk's face. When Demjanjuk smiled and offered his hand, Rosenberg recoiled and shouted "Grozny!" meaning "Terrible" in Polish and Russian. "Ivan," Rosenberg said. "I say it unhesitatingly, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. It is Ivan from Treblinka, from the gas chambers, the man I am looking at now." "I saw his eyes, I saw those murderous eyes," Rosenberg told the court, glaring at Demjanjuk. Rosenberg then exclaimed directly to Demjanjuk: "How dare you put out your hand, murderer that you are!" It was later revealed with great embarrassment for the prosecution, that Eliyahu Rosenberg had previously testified in a 1947 deposition that “Ivan the Terrible” had been killed during a prisoner uprising.

Demjanjuk testified during the trial that he was imprisoned in a camp in Chełm until 1944, when he was transferred to another camp in Austria, where he remained until he joined an anti-Soviet Ukrainian army group. At that time, Ukrainian military groups were forming in western Austria, including the Ukrainian National Army. Demjanjuk claimed that a few months later he joined an anti-Soviet Russian military organization, the Russian Liberation Army (Vlasov Army) funded by the Nazi German government until the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies in 1945. Demjanjuk's memory regarding specifics of this period may have been impaired by severe trauma and malnutrition during his internment as a POW in Nazi German concentration camps. The reliability of witnesses' memory, e.g. confabulation, stress-impaired memory, memory errors and the psychology of witnesses' testimony, e.g. unconscious transference and mistaken identity, positive response bias, weapon focus effect, confirmation bias, were also key issues of expert testimony.

On 18 April 1988, the court found Demjanjuk "unhesitatingly and with utter conviction" guilty of all charges and being Ivan the Terrible. One week later it sentenced him to death by hanging. Demjanjuk was placed in solitary confinement during the appeals process.