John Demjanjuk died Saturday morning. He was nearly 92 years old and living in a nursing home in southern Germany, the hapless punch line of one of history's bitterest jokes — sentenced to die in Israel as Ivan the Terrible for crimes against humanity while serving the Nazis at Treblinka, then set free after six years on death row by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993, after fresh evidence indicated that another guard had been Ivan, Demjanjuk returned to the U.S., where he'd lived since 1952, and had his citizenship restored, only to be deported to Germany in 2009 to stand trial for being an accessory to murder as a guard at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Occupied Poland.
Convicted in Munich after an 18-month trial, sentenced to prison for a five-year term, Demjanjuk was freed pending his appeal, a ward of the Germans, officially stateless, stranded from home and family in Cleveland, freed to await his death, notorious worldwide as the bottommost dreg of Nazi evil.
Demjanuk was a difficult subject to write about in 2009 and remains so. Born in a farming village in Ukraine, his boyhood coincided with the Holodomor — one of last century's less heralded genocides — a Soviet-forced famine that literally starved to death six or seven million Ukrainians. Demjanjuk survived to become a Red Army conscript during World War II. He was captured by the Germans in 1942, one of roughly six million Soviet POWs, most of whom the Nazis left to die of exposure, illness, or starvation. Many of those who survived did so by helping the Germans do their dirtiest work at hellholes like Treblinka and Sobibor.
What makes Demjanjuk's case particularly strange and ugly is the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice railroaded him. They convinced the Israelis to try Demjanjuk for being Ivan the Terrible even though they had evidence — which they withheld — that he was not. Those lawyers, like the lawyers and judges in Israel, relied upon the testimony of ancient Treblinka survivors and of evidence supplied, and possibly doctored, by the KGB.
In the recent trial in Munich, no witness could place Demjanjuk at Sobibor; he was convicted mainly on the basis of an ID card that also had been a crucial piece of evidence at the earlier Jerusalem trial. But this was of no significance to his German prosecutors, who had concocted a new legal theory for Demjanjuk: If he was at Sobibor, then he was, by virtue of his presence there, guilty.
Further, since he could not be accused of specific criminal acts, he was guilty of being an accessory to murder, not a murderer. And since he was not a German and never a Nazi, he was tried as one of a new class of criminal: non-Germans who could be tried as Germans because they worked for the Nazis. Done and done.
In truth, before Germany ever brought him to trial, John Demjanjuk had already served more time in prison in Israel as a victim of mistaken identity than many actual Nazis had served for being convicted in German courts of committing atrocities witnessed and testified to by other actual Nazis. This mattered nothing to the prosecutors or to those who argued that the millions who died at the hands of the Nazis never had their day in court, a legal theory which boils down to 'two wrongs make a right if one of the wrongs is horrible enough.'
Demjanjuk always maintained that he was innocent. I've studied his case for years, and I tend to think that he was indeed a guard at Sobibor. Tend to think, I say; I am not at all convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm also not a Jew whose vision of Shoah splits all humanity into two classes — monster or human. I never met John Demjanjuk or felt much of sympathy for him. I did get to know his son and a son-in-law, and consider them friends. They hope to have his body returned to Cleveland for burial, and they face considerable opposition — further proof, as if any were needed, that if we insist on treating each other as symbols, we forfeit our own claim to humanity.
