Lawyer Says He’ll Call 7 Witnesses to Verify Demjanjuk Isn’t ‘ivan’

Mark O’Connor, the American lawyer defending accused war criminal John Demjanjuk, said he plans to call seven witnesses to verify Demjanjuk’s claim that he was a German prisoner of war during most of World War II and never was near the Treblinka death camp where he is alleged to have been the sadistic guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”

O’Connor refused to divulge the names of the witnesses in the course of a wide-ranging interview with Tom Segev, editor of the political weekly Koteret Rashit. “Naturally, they fear for their welfare,” he said, adding that they come from different countries and “are people who were with him (Demjanjuk) during the whole war.”

Four Treblinka survivors have positively identified Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible,” pointing to the prisoner in Jerusalem district court where the trial finished its third week last Thursday. In addition, a senior police officer. Alex Ish-Shalom, who headed the team that interrogated the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk before the trial, testified Thursday that Demjanjuk was unable to recall the name of even one of his fellow Ukrainians he claimed were in the POW camp with him.

Nevertheless, O’Connor said he has “not a shadow of a doubt” that Demjanjuk is an innocent victim of mistaken identity. He insisted that the SS identification card of Demjanjuk placed in evidence last week was a Soviet forgery. He charged that the prosecution has refused to allow independent experts to examine and test it for authenticity.

SAYS HE CAN’T VIEW CARD

“They won’t let my expert touch the document. They maintain that we’ll destroy it,” O’Connor said. Proof of forgery will put Israel in a “very embarrassing” position, O’Connor warned. “This is a very delicate moment in negotiations between Israel and the Soviet Union” and the problem of the card’s authenticity is “a great political question,” he said.

O’Connor rejected Segev’s charge that the implied collusion between Israel and the USSR served the interests of anti-Semitic Ukrainian exile organizations. “I do not represent” the Ukrainians he said. They “are working against Mark O’Connor.” He was apparently referring to Ukrainian groups in the U.S. which had lobbied against Demjanjuk’s extradition to Israel more than a year ago.

O’Connor said he plans to test the memories of the Treblinka survivors testifying at the trial “to examine their mental state at the time they absorbed into their memories the information they now impart … what happened to that information during the half century that has passed since then, and what was added meanwhile to the reservoir of their memory.” He said in doing this he would “unfold the story of the Holocaust in more detail than the prosecution.”

O’Connor would not answer directly when asked if he believes in the independence of the Israeli court hearing the case. “It’s not a question of whether I believe or not … I maintain that an Israeli court has never stood before a question with such far-reaching political meaning… The independence of an Israeli court has never been placed before such a difficult test.”

O’Connor was joined in Israel Saturday by his three children, who will remain with him for the duration of the trial. He said he believed “it is more important that they should experience this historic trial together with me than to have another years’ schooling.”