Two former U.S. Justice Department lawyers have defended their actions in an investigation into the handling of the case against John Demjanjuk, accused of being the brutal Treblinka guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”
Bruce Einhorn, one of the lawyers, testified here Friday that he knew of no documents that would have cast doubt on the identity of Demjanjuk.
One week earlier in Boston, Allan Ryan Jr., former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, testified that his office did not withhold any exculpatory evidence in the case.
Both former prosecutors appeared in a court-ordered review of whether lawyers for the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations suppressed evidence that might have cleared Demjanjuk during a nine-year investigation leading to his extradition to Israel in 1986.
Demjanjuk, a 72-year-old retired Cleveland auto worker, has been convicted by an Israeli court of serving as a sadistic gas chamber operator known as “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka death camp, where 900,000 Jews were killed during the war. The Israeli Supreme Court is reviewing Demjanjuk’s appeal of his death sentence.
Demjanjuk’s defense here and in Israel claims that not he, but a fellow Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko, was the real Ivan the Terrible.
Last June, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, on its own initiative, ordered a probe on whether OSI prosecutors concealed documents that might have buttressed Demjanjuk’s claim.
The court appointed U.S. District Judge Thomas Wiseman Jr., of Nashville, as a special master to oversee the investigation.
Between 1977 and 1986, the U.S. government made its case against Demjanjuk in three sequential phases, first denaturalization, then deportation, and finally extradition to Israel.
The primary charges and evidence against Demjanjuk were introduced in the first phase, and then formed the basis of the next two phases.
LAWYER ON STAND FOR THREE HOURS
Einhorn, now a federal immigration judge, took the stand for three hours Friday. Although he was the OSI’s lead attorney in the deportation phase, he said he had hardly any involvement with the earlier denaturalization proceedings, and therefore would not have been privy to evidence introduced at that time.
During questioning by his own attorney, Jeffrey Mausner, and Justice Department attorney Dana Biehl, Einhorn was asked whether he had known of any documents that could have cleared Demjanjuk. Einhorn replied, “Absolutely not.”
To the question, “Did you have any doubts during he deportation hearings that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible, who operated the gas chambers at Treblinka?” Einhorn responded, “None.”
Einhorn is a Los Angeles lay leader of the Anti-Defamation League and heads its regional civil rights committee.
In more than four hours of questioning Jan. 29, Ryan, now an attorney for Harvard University, testified that the first time he saw a February 1980 memo from former OSI attorney George Parker to Walter Rockler, former director of the Nazi-hunting unit, and himself, was last October.
Ryan said the memo contained such statements as “even if we may be comforted as having the right man for the wrong act” and “even though we doubt that Ivan was at the gas chambers.”
Ryan explained that he was certain he had not seen the memo before 1992 because, “I found the things said and the assumptions made so unacceptable that, had I seen it in 1980, I would have set Parker straight,” he said, adding “you either have the right man for the right act or you have nothing.”
Ryan also did not recall having a meeting in March 1980 with both Parker and Rockler. Parker testified last November and told the court that he quit his job in OSI after his co-workers and supervisors ignored his concerns that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible.
MEMO DID NOT RAISE DOUBTS
Before Parker left the office in June 1980, Ryan said he had asked for a memo from Parker about his thoughts on the Demjanjuk case. The three-page memo did not raise the “slightest doubt on the case or the identity of John Demjanjuk,” Ryan said.
Doubts about Demjanjuk’s identity were bolstered in 1991, when the statements of 28 former guards at the Treblinka death camp were released by the former Soviet Union, indicating that Ivan Marchenko was Ivan the Terrible.
Ryan emphasized that it was always his policy that exculpatory evidence should be turned over to the defense, even if it had not been requested. “I always believed that this view was understood by the rest of OSI,” he said. “But it is possible that this may not have been understood by all OSI attorneys.”
The discovery policy was in question due to excerpts from interrogations of Pavel Leleko and Nikolay Malagon, former guards at Treblinka, which came to the attention of the Justice Department during the case of Fedor Fedorenko, another Nazi guard, in 1978. In these statements, both guards identified a man named Marchenko as the guard who operated the gas chambers.
According to the testimony of John Horrigan and Norman Moscowitz last month, the statements were not turned over to Demjanjuk’s attorneys because the proceeding in which Demjanjuk was stripped of his citizenship was a civil action.
It therefore did not require the broad disclosure procedures that are required in criminal cases. Horrigan and Moscowitz were the two attorneys who handled the case against Demjanjuk that led to his deportation.
At the hearing here, Ryan said that he had not seen these documents until last summer.
Ryan defended both Moscowitz and Horrigan, emphasizing that they are “absolutely not lawyers who will cover up evidence.
“I am absolutely confident in Moscowitz’s investigation and discovery requirements,” Ryan said. “Nothing I saw in my office, then and now, leads me to think that we did not do anything that was not worthy of the Department of Justice,” he added.
Friday’s hearing was the last scheduled one in the inquiry before Wiseman is expected to hand in his report to the appeals court in early May.
(Contributing to this report was Roslyn Singer of the Jewish Advocate in Boston.)
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.
