Ukrainian Iwan (John) Demjanjuk has been sentenced to 5 years in prison for complicity in the murder of 28,000 Jews in Sobibor extermination camp. Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies Johannes Houwink ten Cate became involved as a researcher in the case against Demjanjuk. He did extensive historical research into the life of the camp executioner.
John Demjanjuk was born on April 3, 1920 as Ivan Mikhailovich Demjanjuk in Dubovi Makharintsi, a small village in what is now called Ukraine, but at that time was part of the Soviet Union.
He had just turned twenty when he was drafted into the Red Army by the Soviet authorities. World War II had begun and the army desperately needed every man. Conscientious objectors were often shot without mercy. Demjanjuk had no choice and left his family to fight at the front. During a battle in Crimea, Demjanjuk was taken prisoner of war by the Nazis and imprisoned in a prison camp near the town of Rivni.
Conditions in the Nazi prison camps were very bad. As a soldier of the Red Army you had better not end up there. After all, the Nazis saw the communists as their archenemies. Starvation was a common method of getting rid of them. In the eyes of the Nazis, Soviet soldiers were unworthy of a bullet. In the harsh winter of 1941-'42, hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in this horrific way. There are even known cases of cannibalism in camp Rivni.
Trawniki
Prisoners who managed to keep themselves alive under these conditions had to be rock hard. However, the Nazis could use these types of people to guard their concentration camps. It therefore regularly happened that officers of the SS - Hitler's 'elite soldiers' - went to the camps to recruit hardened men.
And so Demjanjuk was also selected. It is not clear exactly how that happened and why he was chosen. Perhaps he convinced the SS officers that he hated communism as much as they did. It is certain that enlisting as a camp guard was one of the few ways to escape starvation. At that time, Demjanjuk didn't know exactly what his new job entailed; the program of mass murder of the Jews had to remain absolutely secret.
Demjanjuk was sent to Trawniki training camp as Hilfswillige (Hiwi). He was 22 years old at the time and belonged to the youth section. Next to this camp was also a prison camp for Jews, so that Demjanjuk and his colleagues could already 'practice'. Trawniki was also a storage place for the food and luggage of deported Jews, which made the conditions in which Demjanjuk now ended up a lot better than in the prison camp.
Trawniki was a kind of reservoir for manpower to do all kinds of dirty jobs that the Nazis themselves didn't feel like doing. The men from the camp were used for the most terrible tasks.
For example, there is a story about the mass murder of 1700 Jews in the town of Lomazy. In the village, the Jews were first herded together by the local police. Then they waited for the arrival of fifty men from Trawniki. They were given a firearm and had to shoot the Jews one by one. Probably with a vodka bottle handed out as well. According to eyewitnesses, whom Houwink ten Cate cites in his investigation, the Hiwis from Trawniki were up to their ankles in a pool of groundwater and blood. One after the other fell over drunk.
Recruted camp guard
As a 'flexible force', Demjanjuk ended up in the Majdanek extermination camp in Poland in January 1943. According to Houwink ten Cate, it is established that he worked here as a guard, but what he did exactly is not entirely clear. Demjanjuk was in Majdanek when the gas chambers were already operational there. It's unlikely he wouldn't have known about that. Demjanjuk did not stay long in Majdanek. On March 27, 1943, he was picked up for a new assignment:in the infamous Sobibor extermination camp.
Demjanjuk is now on trial for his time in Sobibor. On April 3, a large transport of Jews from the Netherlands arrived in Sobibor. Demjanjuk probably helped with the 'processing' of this transport. Guards like Demjanjuk helped unload, forcibly undress and drive the victims with whips and bayonets to the gas chambers. According to Houwink ten Cate, it is not entirely clear what Demjanjuk's exact share was; but it is certain that he was present.
Demjanjuk was never promoted in Sobibor and had no leadership position in the camp. He was and remained a jack-of-all-trades who followed orders. According to survivors of Sobibor, the reputation of the men from Trawniki was bad. They were taught unscrupulousness and they were often even harsher and meaner than their German teachers.
In October 1943 Demjanjuk was transferred to Flossenbürg concentration camp. His name appears regularly in the camp's archives. Here he was promoted in early 1944 to an active member of the Waffen-SS, in the division "Totenkopf Flossenbürg". The reason for this was probably that Flossenbürg, with the enormous influx of prisoners from evacuated camps further east, had a growing shortage of manpower.
New members of the SS received a tattoo of the SS logo and a number on the right forearm. The scar he still has in this spot may be a remnant of this. In the chaos that ensued in the German camp system as the Allied armies approached, Demjanjuk disappeared from Flossenbürg in December 1944.
Demjanjuk then joined the "Russian Liberation Army", a division of anti-communist Russians and Ukrainians, and fought the Red Army for some time. He is eventually captured by the Americans near Bisschopshofen in Austria. However, he was soon released and entered American service as a truck driver.
Wanted by the Russians for collusion with the enemy, Demjanjuk resolved to leave Europe as soon as possible and emigrate to the US. For this he had to be granted international refugee status. He reported to the International Refugee Organization. . in March 1948 Demjanjunk stated here that from April 1937 to January 1943 he worked as a driver in “Sobibor, Chelm, Poland”. It was not yet generally known that there was an extermination camp near that Polish village. The trick worked:Demjanjuk got a visa for the United States. He arrived in New York on February 9, 1952 and soon found a job as an auto mechanic at Ford.
Trial in Israel
It was not until the late 1970s that the American authorities carefully began to make the connection between Demjanjuk's statements and the death camp in Sobibor. On June 25, 1981, a judge ruled that Demjanjuk had to be stripped of American citizenship because he lied about his work during the war. Things got moving. Holocaust survivors in Israel initially thought they recognized him as a guard at another extermination camp, Treblinka, also in Poland. Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel to face trial.
All the witnesses identified him as "Ivan the Terrible", the cruelest and most notorious guard from Treblinka, who, among other things, operated the diesel engines that operated the gas chambers. Demjanjuk was sentenced to hang and serve his remaining time in solitary confinement. It was not until 1993 that the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the witness accounts were unreliable forty years later. Demjanjuk was acquitted and allowed to return to the United States.
The Americans had meanwhile become convinced that Demjanjuk had obtained his citizenship on illegal grounds. There were also strong indications that he did not work as a truck driver in Sobibor, but as a camp guard. In 2001, Demjanjuk was again on trial. Again, it was not possible to reach a conviction.
In the summer of 2008, a new extradition request came, this time from Germany. German Nazi fighters said they had massive evidence that Demjanjuk was partly responsible for the deaths of at least 28,000 Jews in Sobibor.
Demjanjuk naturally objected to the extradition. He said he was innocent and his physical health would not allow for deportation and trial. But this time he couldn't escape the dance. He was arrested and put on a plane to Munich, where he was recently sentenced to 5 years in prison.
Demjanjuk is now 91 years old. The Munich trial will be one of the last avenues to convict those responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people during World War II. Most of those involved have since passed away.