High Court Begins Final Hearing on Demjanjuk Appeal of Conviction

Israel’s High Court of Justice this week began its final hearing of the appeal by John Demjanjuk against his 1988 war crimes conviction and death sentence.

The court, which began the final hearing Monday, plans to wind up the proceedings next week and render a final decision in a few months.

Yoram Sheftel, lawyer for the 72-year-old Ukrainian-born former U.S. citizen, claimed new evidence proves his client was not the sadistic death camp guard, known as “Ivan the Terrible,” who brutalized inmates and operated the Treblinka gas chambers, in which nearly 900,000 Jews died during World War II.

But the state prosecution, which won a conviction on the basis of eyewitness testimony, was just as insistent that the accused is without doubt the dreaded “Ivan” who committed countless atrocities and deserves to die.

The prosecution offered proof that Demjanjuk served at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland and the Flossenburg camp in Germany, as well as at Treblinka.

Sheftel argued that “the wording of his extradition and indictment required that he be tried only on the Treblinka charge.”

Demjanjuk claims he was never at Treblinka and that his loss of U.S. citizenship, his extradition to Israel in 1986 and his conviction by a Jerusalem district court two years later were entirely the result of mistaken identity.

Sheftel told the five-judge panel that newly uncovered Nazi files and statements made by 37 death camp guards up to 45 years ago showed “Ivan” was an older man with a facial scar and was the married father of three at a time when Demjanjuk, who has no facial scar, was single.

According to the defense, the guard who operated the gas chambers was a man named Ivan Marchenko, believed now to be deceased.

“Today, there are 80 pieces of evidence and it’s so simple for the defense to show unequivocally and quite completely that Ivan the Terrible is not John Demjanjuk,” Sheftel said.

He claimed that the five Treblinka survivors who identified Demjanjuk as “Ivan” in court suffered either from senility, lapse of memory or lack of firsthand encounters with “Ivan” at the death camp.

The burly Demjanjuk was brought to the hearing in a wheelchair, claiming to have hurt his back during the rough ride to court in a prison van. Afterward, he was returned to Ramla prison, where he has been kept in solitary confinement.