Soviet Documents on Nazi War Criminals Said to Be Valid

Repeatedly in the cases of alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk, in Israel, and admitted Nazi Karl Linnas, in the United States, voices have been raised against the use of wartime documents provided by the Soviets for use in the proceedings, which has been challenged and denounced by those who say the Soviets cannot be trusted to provide truthful evidence.

Apprehension about such usage was negated Tuesday by Martin Mendelsohn, a Washington attorney who serves as counsel to Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna as well as to the Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center.

Mendelsohn, addressing the Jewish Community Relations Council Holocaust Commission, said that although Linnas — who as of this writing still remains in the U.S. despite court orders to deport him — “tried to raise a smokescreen that somehow his conviction in the U.S. courts was a result of Soviet evidence. While some Soviet evidence and Soviet material was used in preparing U.S. evidence, in fact, there’s very little of that.”

EVIDENCE IN THE LINNAS CASE

In the Linnas case, Mendelsohn said, “evidence was used which came in part from the Soviet Union and in part from other places in the world. But all of that evidence was presented to the court under existing U.S. federal rules of evidence, and was examined by the U.S. district court judge according to those rules and found to be valid under those rules,” and admitted as such.

Linnas and his lawyers, said Mendelsohn, did not rebut the evidence despite being “given every opportunity under our system to prove that it was false, to show if there was a mistake, to show that there might be some misinterpretation.” The U.S. judge, he emphasized, “found the evidence overwhelming and essentially unrebutted.”

Above all, said Mendelsohn, the two men have been tried not so much on the basis of this evidence but on the testimony of eyewitnesses from Treblinka death camp in Demjanjuk’s case, and Linnas’s “unrebutted confession” made to a newspaper reporter in 1961 and “to one of his neighbors more recently.”

ISSUE OF A SOVIET IDENTITY CARD

Mendelsohn spoke specifically about the identity card provided Israel by the Soviets which places Demjanjuk at the Trawniki training camp, which the SS used to train Soviet POWs to be “good concentration camp guards.” This card, said Mendelsohn, “whether it’s genuine or not, really doesn’t matter.” Sole use of that card as evidence could probably not prove Demjanjuk’s guilt or identity as “Ivan the Terrible,” Mendelsohn feels. “It is the six eyewitnesses… who testified to the atrocities that he committed” that will prove the case, he said. “What Demjanjuk’s lawyers have been able to do, however,” he said, is “engage in media manipulation,” making the card central to the case. “But it is not.” Demjanjuk was repeatedly given the opportunity in Cleveland, six years ago, to prove the card false, “a piece of KGB disinformation. And he did nothing. He produced no witnesses, he produced no contrary evidence. He did play the press,” Mendelsohn said, but “the judge was not deceived.

“The judge knew that the government had produced experts to testify that the card was genuine and accepted it as genuine. The reason he accepted it as genuine was because he believed the U.S. witnesses and because Demjanjuk’s lawyers, despite what they said outside the courtroom, did nothing to refute the genuineness of that card. That’s a very important point that has been lost.”

Mendelsohn said he is “not apologizing at all” for using Soviet evidence. “I think it’s good stuff.”