1. John Demjanjuk fought in World War II and was taken prisoner by the Germans in spring 1942, becoming a Trawniki collaborator.
84 Facts About John Demjanjuk
1. 2.
John Demjanjuk maintained his innocence, claiming that it was a case of mistaken identity.
3.
In September 1993, John Demjanjuk was allowed to return to Ohio.
4.
In 1999, US prosecutors again sought to deport John Demjanjuk for having been a concentration camp guard, and his citizenship was revoked in 2002.
5.
John Demjanjuk was deported from the US to Germany in that same year.
6.
John Demjanjuk lived at a German nursing home in Bad Feilnbach, where he died in 2012.
7.
John Demjanjuk was born in Dubovi Makharyntsi, a farming village in the western part of Soviet Ukraine.
8.
John Demjanjuk's boyhood coincided with the Holodomor famine, and he later worked as a tractor driver in a Soviet collective farm.
9.
John Demjanjuk was assigned to a manorial estate called Okzow on 22 September 1942, but returned to Trawniki on 14 October.
10.
John Demjanjuk was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp, where he was disciplined on 18 January 1943.
11.
John Demjanjuk was sent back to Trawniki and on 26 March 1943 he was assigned to Sobibor concentration camp.
12.
John Demjanjuk later claimed to have been drafted into the Russian Liberation Army in 1944; however, an investigation conducted in the 1990s by the US Office of Special Investigations found this to be a cover story.
13.
John Demjanjuk's application stated that he had worked as a driver in the town of Sobibor in eastern Poland; the nearby Sobibor extermination camp was named after the village.
14.
John Demjanjuk later claimed this was a coincidence, and said that he picked the name Sobibor from an atlas owned by a fellow applicant because it had a large Soviet population.
15.
John Demjanjuk found a job as a driver in a displaced persons camp in the Bavarian city of Landshut, and was transferred to camps in other southern German cities, until ending up in Feldafing near Munich in May 1951.
16.
John Demjanjuk's wife found work at a General Electric facility, and the two had two more children.
17.
On 14 November 1958, Demjanjuk became a naturalized citizen of the United States and legally changed his name from Ivan to John.
18.
Hanusiak claimed that John Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor concentration and death camp.
19.
INS quickly discovered that John Demjanjuk had listed his place of domicile from 1937 to 1943 as Sobibor on his US visa application of 1951.
20.
INS sent photographs to the Israeli government of the nine persons alleged by Hanusiak to have been involved in crimes against Jews: the government's agents asked survivors of Sobibor and Treblinka if they could identify John Demjanjuk based on his visa application picture.
21.
In 1979, three guards from Sobibor gave sworn depositions that they knew John Demjanjuk to have been a guard there, and two identified his photograph.
22.
OSI did not submit these depositions into evidence and took them as a further indication that John Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible, though none of the guards mentioned John Demjanjuk having been at Treblinka.
23.
The proceeding opened with the prosecution calling historian Earl F Ziemke, who reconstructed the situation on the Eastern Front in 1942 and showed that it would have been possible for Demjanjuk to have been captured at the Battle of Kerch and arrive in Trawniki that same year.
24.
The authenticity of the Trawniki card was affirmed by US government experts who examined the original document as well as by Wolfgang Scheffler of the Free University of Berlin during the hearing, Scheffler testified to the crimes committed by Trawniki men and that it was possible that John Demjanjuk had been moved between Sobibor and Treblinka.
25.
Five Holocaust survivors from Treblinka identified John Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka and having been "Ivan the Terrible".
26.
Additionally, OSI submitted the testimony of former SS guard Horn identifying John Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka.
27.
John Demjanjuk instead claimed to have been a German prisoner who completed forced labor.
28.
John Demjanjuk's citizenship was revoked in 1981 for having lied about his past, with the judge persuaded especially by the testimony of Otto Horn.
29.
In 1982, John Demjanjuk was jailed for 10 days after failing to appear for a hearing.
30.
John Demjanjuk subsequently requested political asylum in the United States rather than deportation.
31.
John Demjanjuk's defense was supported by the Ukrainian community and various Eastern European emigre groups; John Demjanjuk's supporters alleged that he was the victim of a communist conspiracy and raised over two million dollars for his defense.
32.
John Demjanjuk attracted the support of conservative political figures such as Pat Buchanan and Ohio congressman James Traficant.
33.
In October 1983, Israel issued an extradition request for John Demjanjuk to stand trial on Israeli soil under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Law of 1950 for crimes allegedly committed at Treblinka.
34.
The appeals court found probable cause that John Demjanjuk "committed murders of uncounted numbers of prisoners" and allowed the extradition to take place.
35.
John Demjanjuk's trial took place in the Jerusalem District Court between 26 November 1986 and 18 April 1988, before a special tribunal comprising Israeli Supreme Court Judge Dov Levin and Jerusalem District Court Judges Zvi Tal and Dalia Dorner.
36.
Prosecutors claimed that John Demjanjuk volunteered to collaborate with the Germans and was sent to the camp at Trawniki, where he was trained to guard prisoners as part of Operation Reinhard.
37.
The prosecution alleged that John Demjanjuk had listed Sobibor on his US immigration application in an attempt to cover up his presence at Treblinka.
38.
The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Holocaust survivors to establish that John Demjanjuk had been at Treblinka, five of whom were put on the stand.
39.
Four of the survivors who had originally identified John Demjanjuk's photograph had died before the trial began.
40.
John Demjanjuk admitted the scar under his armpit was an SS blood group tattoo, which he removed after the war, as did many SS men to avoid summary execution by the Soviets.
41.
Demjanjuk was at first represented by attorney Mark J O'Connor of New York State; Demjanjuk fired him in July 1987 just a week before he was scheduled to testify at his trial.
42.
Sheftel focused the defense largely on the claim that John Demjanjuk's Trawniki card was a KGB forgery.
43.
John Demjanjuk called Dutch psychologist Willem Albert Wagenaar, who testified to flaws in the method by which Treblinka survivors had identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible.
44.
Additionally, Sheftel alleged that the trial was a show trial, and referred to the trial as "the John Demjanjuk affair", alluding to the famous antisemitic Dreyfus Affair.
45.
John Demjanjuk had not mentioned Chelm in his initial depositions in the United States, first referring to Chelm during his denaturalization trial in 1981.
46.
John Demjanjuk denied having known how to drive a truck in 1943, despite having stated this on his application for refugee assistance in 1948; John Demjanjuk alleged that he had not filled out the form himself and the clerk must have misunderstood him.
47.
John Demjanjuk's denial related both to the supposed operation of a truck's diesel engine by "Ivan the Terrible" for the gas chamber at Treblinka and to the SS's singling out of Ukrainians with experience driving trucks as Trawniki men.
48.
John Demjanjuk changed his testimony as to why he had listed Sobibor as his place of domicile from his earlier trials; he now claimed to have been advised to do so by an official of the United Nations Relief Administration to list a place in Poland or Czechoslovakia in order to avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union, after which another Soviet refugee waiting with him suggested John Demjanjuk list Sobibor.
49.
John Demjanjuk further claimed that in 1944 he was drafted into an anti-Soviet Russian military organization, the Russian Liberation Army, funded by the Nazi German government, until the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies in 1945.
50.
John Demjanjuk was placed in solitary confinement during the appeals process.
51.
The Trawniki certificate implied that John Demjanjuk had served at Sobibor, as did the German orders of March 1943 posting his Trawniki unit to the area.
52.
One described Ivan the Terrible as having brown hair, hazel eyes and a large scar down to his neck; John Demjanjuk was blond with grayish-blue eyes and no such scar.
53.
John Demjanjuk said he just wrote a common Ukrainian surname after he forgot his mother's real name.
54.
John Demjanjuk's acquittal was met with outrage in Israel, including threats against the justices' lives.
55.
Simon Wiesenthal, an iconic figure in Nazi-hunting, first believed John Demjanjuk was guilty; after John Demjanjuk's acquittal by the Israeli Supreme Court, he said he would have cleared him given the new evidence.
56.
In Ukraine, John Demjanjuk was viewed as a national hero and received a personal invitation to return to Ukraine by then-president Leonid Kravchuk.
57.
John Demjanjuk's return was met by protests and counter-protests, with supporters including members of the Ku Klux Klan.
58.
The investigation charged that OSI had ignored evidence indicating that John Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, and uncovered an internal OSI memo that questioned the case against John Demjanjuk.
59.
OSI continued to investigate John Demjanjuk, relying solely on documentary evidence rather than eye-witnesses.
60.
On 19 May 1999, the Justice Department filed a complaint against John Demjanjuk to seek his denaturalization.
61.
The complaint alleged that John Demjanjuk served as a guard at the Sobibor and Majdanek camps in Poland under German occupation and as a member of an SS death's head battalion at Flossenburg.
62.
Matia ruled that John Demjanjuk had not produced any credible evidence of his whereabouts during the war and that the Justice Department had proved its case against him.
63.
On 28 December 2005, an immigration judge ordered John Demjanjuk deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine.
64.
The file on John Demjanjuk was compiled by Germany's Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes.
65.
On 10 November 2008, German federal prosecutor Kurt Schrimm directed prosecutors to file in Munich for extradition, since John Demjanjuk once lived there.
66.
On 9 December 2008, a German federal court declared that John Demjanjuk could be tried for his role in the Holocaust.
67.
The German foreign ministry announced on 2 April 2009 that John Demjanjuk would be transferred to Germany the following week, and would face trial beginning 30 November 2009.
68.
On 2 April 2009, John Demjanjuk filed a motion in an immigration trial court in Virginia.
69.
Accordingly, John Demjanjuk re-filed his motion to reopen, and for an attendant stay, with the BIA.
70.
John Demjanjuk later won a last-minute stay of deportation, shortly after US immigration agents carried him from his home in a wheelchair to face trial in Germany.
71.
John Demjanjuk had sued Germany on 30 April 2009 to try to block the German government's agreement to accept John Demjanjuk from the US.
72.
John Demjanjuk was tried without any connection to a concrete act of murder or cruelty but rather on the theory that as a guard at Sobibor he was per se guilty of murder, a novelty in the German justice system that was seen as risky for the prosecution.
73.
John Demjanjuk was represented by German attorneys Ulrich Busch and Gunther Maul.
74.
The defense argued that John Demjanjuk had never been a guard but that, had he been one, he would have had no choice in the matter.
75.
On 30 November 2009, John Demjanjuk's trial, expected to last for several months, began in Munich.
76.
John Demjanjuk arrived in the courtroom in a wheelchair pushed by a German police officer.
77.
John Demjanjuk's lawyer argued that all of the ID cards could be forgeries and that there was no point comparing them.
78.
The prosecution produced orders to a man identified as John Demjanjuk to go to Sobibor and other records to show that John Demjanjuk had served as a guard there.
79.
John Demjanjuk declined to testify or make a final statement during the trial; however, he delivered three written declarations to the court that alleged that his prosecution was caused by a conspiracy between the OSI, the World Jewish Congress, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, while continuing to allege that the KGB had forged the documents used.
80.
John Demjanjuk's release pending appeal was protested by some, including Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
81.
John Demjanjuk died at a home for the elderly in Bad Feilnbach, Germany, on 17 March 2012, aged 91.
82.
In early June 2012, Ulrich Busch, John Demjanjuk's attorney, filed a complaint with Bavarian prosecutors claiming that the pain medication Novalgin that had been administered to John Demjanjuk helped lead to his death.
83.
On 31 March 2012, it was reported that John Demjanjuk was buried at an undisclosed US location.
84.
On 12 April 2012, John Demjanjuk's attorneys filed a suit to posthumously restore his US citizenship.