A lawyer for convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk has admitted that a taped interview with an important witness in the case was erased by a supporter of Demjanjuk who was present during the interview.
The interviewed witness, a former SS guard at the Treblinka death camp, had reportedly said previously that he knew a Treblinka guard with a name similar to Demjanjuk.
Demjanjuk, a 72-year-old retired Cleveland auto worker, has repeatedly denied ever being at Treblinka, although he was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel for crimes committed as the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” of the death camp.
Israel’s High Court of Justice is considering an appeal of that conviction. Meanwhile, an American court is reviewing Demjanjuk’s 1986 extradition to Israel.
In that proceeding, Demjanjuk’s public defender, Edward Marek, told U.S.-Justice Department attorney Patty Merkamp Stempler in a letter that “no written report exists” of a 1990 interview with the witness, former Treblinka guard Nikolai Malagon.
And, he said, the tape was “erased two or three days” afterward by an individual named Jaroslaw Dobrowolskyj, who traveled to Ukraine with the defense team to interview Malagon.
Marek, reached by telephone, declined to comment.
His letter was a response to questions put to the defense by Stemler, who is chief of the appellate section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in Washington.
‘REEKS OF A COVERUP’
It was made available by the World Jewish Congress, which decried the erasure.
“This reeks of a coverup,” Kalman Sultanik, a WJC vice president who is himself a Holocaust survivor, said in a statement.
Marek is defending Demjanjuk before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, which is hearing accusations that crucial exculpatory evidence regarding Demjanjuk was withheld by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations during his denaturalization and extradition hearings.
Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel, where he was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to hang.
The Cincinnati court appointed a special master, U.S. District Judge Thomas Wiseman, in Nashville, Tenn., to investigate the Justice Department’s handling of the case.
After two days of testimony last week by two former Justice Department lawyers, both of whom defended their work on the Demjanjuk case, Wiseman told reporters that his investigation is expected to be finished by May.
Demjanjuk has steadfastly maintained that his was a case of mistaken identity and that Ivan the Terrible was in fact a man named Ivan Marchenko.
Malagon, who served a prison sentence for war crimes, told Soviet authorities in 1978 that he remembered both an Ivan Demedyuk or Dem’-yanyuk who was a cook at the Treblinka camp and was later promoted to operating gas chamber Vans.
He also remembered that there was a man named Marchenko who operated the gas chambers.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
