Israel’s High Court on Wednesday rejected an application by John Demjanjuk’s lawyer to release his client in light of what he says is new evidence in the case against the convicted death camp guard.
However, the five-justice panel, under President Meir Shamgar, agreed to listen to the evidence at a hearing in December.
The request, by Israeli defense attorney Yoram Sheftel, was based on evidence obtained from Soviet lawyers. The evidence purportedly shows that the sadistic SS guard at Treblinka known as “Ivan the Terrible” was named Ivan Marchenko, not Ivan Demjanjuk.
The same claim was raised during the Demjanjuk trial, which ran from 1987 to 1988. But the prosecution countered that Marchenko was just another name used by Demjanjuk, whose mother’s maiden name was Marchenko.
Nevertheless, the hearing is being deferred to the end of the year in response to prosecutor Michael Shaked’s request for time prepare his response to Demjanjuk’s appeal of his conviction and sentence. He was sentenced to death in April 1988.
In 1986, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel from the United States, where he had lived for decades in Cleveland’s Ukrainian community. His photograph was picked out as that of “Ivan the Terrible” by witnesses searching for another war criminal’s picture among photographs provided by the U.S. Justice Department.
But the defense never desisted from its claim that Demjanjuk had been a victim of mistaken identity, and that the real “Ivan the Terrible” was Ivan Marchenko, also a Ukrainian and member of the German SS.
On Wednesday, Sheftel presented the testimonies of 20 Ukrainian SS men, submitted to Soviet courts and interrogators during the 1940s and 1950s, in which they described “Ivan the Terrible” in terms that were said to fit Marchenko’s physical features but not Demjanjuk’s.
Many of these witnesses were eventually hanged by the Soviets as war criminals.
Sheftel could not say if any of them is still alive today.
Shaked, in turn, argued that even if there were doubt at this stage over Demjanjuk’s identity, there is no doubt that he voluntarily joined the SS and thus there is no need for the Court to release him pending continuation of his appeal.
As he did during his trial, a fit Demjanjuk greeted reporters in Hebrew and said he hoped justice would be done and that he would go free.
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