A longtime supporter of convicted war criminal John Demjanjuk wrote a letter to a German archive 10 years ago asking for Demjanjuk’s “original military card issued in Camp Treblinka.”
The letter seems to support charges that Demjanjuk did indeed serve as a guard in Treblinka. The Ukrainian emigre, who was convicted in 1988 of being the notorious Treblinka guard known as “Ivan the Terrible,” has repeatedly denied ever having been at the camp.
The letter might also refute new evidence uncovered in long-secret Soviet archives suggesting that a guard by the name of Ivan Marchenko was in fact “Ivan the Terrible.”
Jerome Brentar, a Cleveland travel agent described in various newspaper articles as Demjanjuk’s main financial supporter, wrote the letter in German to a war research facility in Munich called the Institute for Contemporary History.
The 1982 letter was obtained by Charles Allen Jr., a researcher and writer on Nazi crimes. It was published in the latest edition of Reform Judaism, a publication of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.
Questions about whether Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland autoworker, had ever been at Treblinka arose in the past year and turned the case against him askew. He had been sentenced to death by an Israeli court for war crimes committed at the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps.
The Israeli High Court of Justice is reviewing the case and a federal appeals court in Ohio this year named a special investigator to study whether the Justice Department withheld possibly exculpatory evidence in his denaturalization proceedings.
Another letter has been made available to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that was written to Brentar by the attorney for Kurt Franz, the commandant of Treblinka who is serving a life sentence in Germany for war crimes.
The attorney, Rudolf Stratmann, wrote in January 1990 that his client did not know anyone named Marchenko.
“But Franz does not remember if in this context the name Demjanjuk was mentioned,” Stratmann wrote.
A Jewish witness who was called in the Demjanjuk trial wrote a letter, also obtained by JTA, which described Franz and “Ivan the Terrible” as regular companions.
This new information was made available by the World Jewish Congress, “in light of the publicity already given to the other material,” said Elan Steinberg, WJC executive director.
Brentar, in his letter to the Munich research facility, derided one of the key pieces of evidence against Demjanjuk — a military card from an SS training camp at Trawniki, Poland.
He said it was “obviously forged by the Soviets” and tried to tie the case against Demjanjuk to Simon Wiesenthal, the Vienna-based Nazi-hunter. Wiesenthal had nothing to do with obtaining the card.
Brentar wrote that Wiesenthal “persecuted” Demjanjuk “in a totally unjustified way.” He wrote that Demjanjuk’s “indictment is based, inter alia, on service identification obtained which was falsified by the Soviets, which Wiesenthal gave.”
Brentar wrote that it would be “very important,” to find “Demjanjuk’s original military card issued in the Treblinka camp, to compare it to the one for Soviet Wiesenthal’s clique, which was accepted by the Cleveland court.”
Brentar sent the letter to what he thought was a sympathetic audience, the Institute for Historical Research. He wrote the note on stationery with the letterhead of a group called St. Raphaels-Verein, which Steinberg of the WJC described as a Holocaust-denial group. Brentar signed the letter as president of the group.
But the Munich-based institute is one of the most respected, mainstream facilities for World War II research in Germany.
Brentar could not be reached by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But he told The New York Times that the “letter was just exploratory.” He denied that his note gave credence to prosecution charges that Demjanjuk had been in Treblinka.
He said, “The only way to get any information is by accepting there must have been something. And I would like to have that something or copy of that something so I can make my own decision whether the man is guilty or not.”
Brentar was dismissed as co-chairman of an ethnic coalition backing George Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign on charges of anti-Semitism.
He denied he was anti-Semitic but told the Times, “Hitler could not have accomplished what he did accomplish in the so-called Holocaust if it wasn’t for the full-hearted cooperation of the Jews themselves.”
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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.
