An SS identification card alleged to have been issued to the Treblinka death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” was presented as evidence in Jerusalem district court Thursday in the trial of accused war criminal John Demjanjuk.
The card, supplied by the Soviet Union, has been branded a forgery by defense lawyer Mark O’Connor. He contends that the Ukrainian-born defendant Demjanjuk is the victim of mistaken identity and a Soviet plot to punish him for having left the USSR after World War II to settle in the United States.
But Alex Ish-Shalom, head of the Israeli police team that interrogated Demjanjuk in prison, testified that far from volunteering the evidence, the Soviet authorities provided the card only after pressure was exerted by Israel and Armand Hammer, the American industrialist who heads the Occidental Petroleum Co. and has often served as an intermediary between the West and the Soviet Union.
Demjanjuk, the first suspected Nazi war criminal ever extradited to Israel, maintains that he spent most of the war years as a German POW and was never in Treblinka. But four Treblinka survivors have identified him in court as “Ivan the Terrible” who operated the gas chambers.
Ish-Shalom told the court that Demjanjuk, under interrogation, could not recall the names of any of his Ukrainian fellow-inmates at the POW camp where he claims to have been incarcerated. The trial ended its third week Thursday and will resume on Monday.
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