Reactions to Demjanjuk Sentence Speak of Justice, Not Vengeance

Reactions here to the death sentence imposed Monday in Jerusalem district court on John Demjanjuk refrained from any feelings of vengeance, focusing instead on justice being carried out.

Holocaust survivor Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, said he thought the death sentence for the man known as “Ivan the Terrible” was “appropriate, considering the evidence, which was over-whelming, and because the crime was genocide. What other penalty would be appropriate?” he asked.

But Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman, who as a member of Congress authored legislation allowing the United States to denaturalize and deport anyone who had committed Nazi crimes, was less sure.

Although admitting she “was not surprised” by the sentence imposed on Demjanjuk, she demurred from judging a case that now properly and fully belonged in the hands of the Israeli justice system. “I personally have not been in favor of the death penalty, but this is a decision for the Israelis to make,” she said.

Holtzman admitted it was difficult to decide how to levy justice in the case of genocide. “Clearly, this man is accused of crimes of such savagery, bestiality and horror that . . . there is no way in which he appropriately can be punished. Nothing that we can do to him can somehow be equal to the brutality that he imposed on his victims.”

While against the death penalty in principle, Holtzman conceded that “if the death penalty is ever warranted, these are instances in which it could be considered.”

JUSTICE ‘CAUGHT UP WITH HIM’

In summation, Holtzman said, “I think the most important question to Demjanjuk is that justice finally caught up with him. This is a man who lied, was given every opportunity, and justice finally caught up with him. The due process he received is far more than that which 800,000 Jews slaughtered at Treblinka ever received.”

This was echoed by Benjamin Meed, Holocaust survivor and president of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization. “The man had more opportunity than the millions who perished. None of them had the opportunity to appeal before the court in America.”

Meed said he thought “the Jewish people gave him the chance of a fair trial, of giving him legal representation.”

Meed said he personally knew some of the witnesses at Demjanjuk’s trial, and “I trust them. I feel that they presented the case in such a way that justice shall be not administered on the basis of vengeance.”

In general, he said, he is also opposed to the death penalty. However, “as a Jew, I am asking how justice can at all be paid for the over 800,000 Jews who perished at Treblinka, including members of my own family, without their day in court.”

Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said, “Justice finally comes at last to this foul murderer. It is a lesson that even 40 years after the fact, these perpetrators of the worst crimes in man’s history cannot escape the bar of justice.”