Jewish groups have expressed satisfaction with a federal judge’s report that clears the U.S. Justice Department of any misconduct in the extradition of John Demjanjuk, the man accused of being Nazi death camp guard “Ivan the Terrible.”
“We are very pleased to hear this,” said Mark Weitzman, associate director of educational outreach of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in New York.
“This vindicates the Justice Department’s efforts in pursuing Nazi war criminals,” said Weitzman.
Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said, “Demjanjuk’s lawyers owe an apology to the government,” referring to the defense’s claims that the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations withheld crucial information in the case.
The report by U.S. District Judge Thomas Wiseman Jr. of Nashville, who was appointed by an appeals court in Cincinnati as special master in the case, said the OSI engaged in no judicial misconduct and employed no fraud in prosecuting the case against the 73-year-old retired Cleveland-area autoworker.
But he also found that there was substantial evidence that Demjanjuk may not have been the notorious “Ivan” of the Treblinka death camp, where more than 800,000 Jews were killed.
The extradition was valid, however, he found, because the evidence was solid that Demjanjuk was trained as an SS guard.
BUT WAS HE ‘IVAN THE TERRIBLE’?
Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 and later convicted and sentenced to death for war crimes.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati reopened the case last year after defense attorneys charged that the Justice Department had withheld exculpatory evidence about their client during the extradition proceedings.
The 210-page report, handed to the court and released Wednesday, said the defense’s contentions that the Justice Department had withheld crucial information was “without merit.”
The report recommended that the appeals court close the case and take no action against the government prosecutors. Observers expect the court to follow Wiseman’s recommendation, although it is not binding.
After several months of hearings that were completed earlier this year, Wiseman found there was no evidence that would disprove the authenticity of an identification card from the Trawniki SS training camp that placed Demjanjuk there.
“Because the Trawniki allegations formed an independent ground for Mr. Demjanjuk’s denaturalization and deportation, therefore, the judgment (to extradite) was, and is, a sound one,” Wiseman wrote in his report.
But the judge did express “substantial doubt” as to whether Demjanjuk was in fact “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka.
The identification card of Ivan Demjanjuk from the Trawniki camp lists his posting to the Sobibor camp but not to Treblinka.
Demjanjuk has repeatedly maintained that the card was a forgery and that his was a case of mistaken identity.
‘ATTEMPT TO SHED DOUBT’ HAS FAILED
Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, author of “The Destruction of the European Jews” and the recently published “Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders” said, “I have encountered no forgery in my research or experienced any so-called KGB forgery.”
He said he gave “credence to the fact this man was in the Schutzmannschaft (Order Police), that he was a graduate of Trawniki, that he was, according to that card, in Sobibor.”
He also cautioned, however, against trying to tie Demjanjuk to Treblinka. Eighteen Treblinka survivors placed him there during his trial in Israel.
Another Holocaust historian, Deborah Lipstadt, professor of religious studies at Emory University in Atlanta and author of the just-published “Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,” said Judge Wiseman’s decision “is a very important step.
“It’s clear that Demjanjuk played an exceptionally significant role in the annihilation of many Jews, and the court recognizes this,” she said.
“The attempt to shed doubt on the Justice Department’s role has failed,” said Lipstadt, who studies the attempts by Holocaust-deniers to discredit Holocaust testimony.
A source at the Justice Department who asked not to be identified said he was satisfied by the judge’s ruling in the department’s favor.
But, he added, Wiseman’s expressed doubt about Demjanjuk being the so-called “Ivan the Terrible” is “unfortunate, because it was beyond the scope of the inquiry assigned to him by the 6th Circuit.”
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.
