The Justice Department’s Criminal Division is reviewing allegations that its Office of Special Investigations withheld evidence that might have bolstered the defense of John Demjanjuk.
Demjanjuk was sentenced to death by an Israeli court in 1988 for war crimes committed at the Treblinka death camp in eastern Poland, where he was said to have served as a notoriously brutal guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”
Responding to a report Monday by ABC News, the Justice Department said the matter “has a high priority and is being given the most careful attention. Upon completion of the review, the department will take whatever action is appropriate.”
Israel’s High Court of Justice is scheduled to hear the new evidence on Dec. 23.
Existence of the evidence in question, recently acquired from sources in the Soviet Union, was first disclosed in late 1990.
Much of the evidence is contained in the court files in the case of Feodor Fedorenko, whom a Soviet court convicted in June 1986 and ordered executed a year later for having committed war crimes at Treblinka.
Among the new material are affidavits by 21 convicted Nazi concentration camp guards, some of whom identify Ivan the Terrible as having been a Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko.
The name Demjanjuk does not appear in any of the 21 statements, but prosecutors have argued that Demjanjuk, in entering the United States after the war, wrote Marchenko as his mother’s maiden name on one of his visa applications.
In August, Israeli prosecutors were granted a four-month delay to probe the new evidence. Yoram Sheftel, Demjanjuk’s lawyer in Israel, testified that the defendant could not remember his mother’s maiden name at the time and wrote Marchenko because it is a common Ukrainian name.
RELIABILITY OF EVIDENCE IN DOUBT
Demjanjuk was identified at trial as “Ivan the Terrible,” the man who operated the gas chambers at Treblinka, where an estimated 900,000 Jews died.
Demjanjuk, 71, a retired Cleveland auto worker, stood trial in Israel after being extradited there in 1986. He had already been stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981.
An Israeli court also found in 1988 that Demjanjuk served at the Sobibor death camp in Poland, where a few hundred thousand Jews died.
Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, criticized the Demjanjuk defense’s reliance on Soviet evidence to “bolster their case,” casting doubt on the general reliability of Soviet evidence.
Steinberg said that on Monday, prosecutors will present “additional evidence” that Demjanjuk is on a list of concentration camp guards.
A well-placed Justice Department official confirmed the existence of new incriminating evidence, but would not comment on its substance.
Demjanjuk’s defense team has denied that Demjanjuk worked for the Nazis at any time, and claim that after the Nazis overran western Russia, Demjanjuk spent most of his time as a prisoner of war.
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.
