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Chapter 3 John Demjanjuk and Ivan the Terrible In 1986, a quarter-century after the Eichmann trial, Israel once again undertook the prosecution ofa Holocaust perpetrator:John Demjanjuk, whom some survivors ofTreblinka identified as "Ivan the Terrible." Ivan the Terrible was not, like Eichmann, a bureaucrat involved in planning the "Final Solution." Ivan the Terrible had earned his name by operating the gas chambers, herding hapless victims into the killing rooms, and demonstrating gratuitous sadism toward camp inmates on other occasions. Trying a perpetrator who had been personally, directly, and immediately involved in extermination-camp operations became, for the State of Israel, a way to honor Holocaust survivors, whose numbers were dwindling rapidly a half-century after the outbreak of World War II. The case had all the earmarks of a grand Nuremberg-style prosecution and followed the precedents that Israel had set in Eichmann. Initially , Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950. The problem was that Demjanjuk was almost certainly not Ivan the Terrible. This Ukrainian who had been captured by the Germans may indeed have been a concentration-camp guard, but the documentary evidence tied him to Sobib6r, not Treblinka, and other evidence suggested strongly that Ivan the Terrible was another man. The Israeli Supreme Court overturned Demjanjuk's conviction in 1993, citing numerous prosecutorial, defense, and judicial errors. He was freed and returned to the United States that same year. The miscarriage ofjustice in the Demjanjuk case was eventually corrected , but the entire affair had serious consequences for the prosecution of crimes arising out of the Holocaust. The effort to prosecute Demjanjuk had begun in the United States, as part of the human-rights agenda developed in the mid 1970s. The U.S. case had focused on his immigration and naturalization, not primarily on the crimes he may have committed before arriving in the United States in 1952. Demjanjuk John Demjanjuk and Ivan the Terrible 111 was found to have lied on his applications for American residency and citizenship and was awaiting deportation when the United States extradited him to Israel for trial as a Holocaust perpetrator. However, the same problems that marred the Israeli proceedings had affected the original American case. A special master appointed by the Federal Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found that misconduct and prejudice had riddled even the more narrowly focused U.S. proceedings, and Demjanjuk's denaturalization was voided in 1993. The American and Israelijudicial systems were, finally, self-correcting, but the failures of these trials to proceed in a fair manner and to convict the defendant marked the end of the renewed effort to prosecute Holocaust perpetrators in Israel. Demja~uk may have committed grave crimes as a concentration-camp guard at Sobib6r, and he certainly made false statements to facilitate his entry into the United States. However, the miscarriages ofjustice in his two trials were more than sufficient to acquit him. The entire case boomeranged, deterring prosecution of other perpetrators. Efriam Zuroff, one of Israel's chief Nazi-hunters, concluded that in the wake of "Demjanjuk's acquittal by the Israeli Supreme Court despite the unequivocal evidence regarding his service at Sobib6r death camp ... [it is] highly unlikely, if not impossible, that Israel will ever again attempt to prosecute a Nazi war criminal."1 The American Case against Demjanjuk The 1981 denaturalization and deportation proceeding against John Demjanjuk began when influential Americans persuaded the government to take action against the war criminals it had admitted after World War II. Gradual shifts in American thinking about the Holocaust, a growing determination to end the U.S. role as a place ofsafety and immunity for people who had perpetrated terrible crimes in other countries, and emergent efforts to make the advancement of universal human rights an American policy priority led the U.S. government to do something about the war criminals in its midst, even if the action it took was primarily symbolic. From the end of the Nuremberg trial until the mid-1970s, the United States proceeded as if the question of Nazi genocide were a matter for other countries. Allan Ryan, the one-time head of the Department of Justice unit charged with identifying and deporting Nazi war criminals, recalled that it was as if a "curtain of silence had fallen over the Holocaust , in this country."2 Before 1973, only nine cases had been brought against alleged Nazi war criminals residing in the United States, even...

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