Teicholz - Ivan of the Extermination Camp

Ivan of the Extermination Camp

How the Trials and Denials of Nazi Collaborator John Demjanjuk

Added to Our Understanding of the Holocaust

By Tom Teicholz

Ivan of the Extermination Camp

How the Trials and Denials of Nazi Collaborator John Demjanjuk

Added to Our Understanding of the Holocaust

Praise for THE TRIAL OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE (St. Martins Press, 1990):

The media mangling of the trial of John- Demjanjuk has madeTom Teicholz's painstakingly thorough and accurate chronicle of that case a most necessary and important book."

Philip Roth

"A playwright who is now the head of a European state has declared thata moral position maintained over a long period of time can become a clich. Yet in Tom Teicholz's account of the Demjanjuk casea meticulously fair trial in one of the most meticulous systems of due

process anywhere on earthevery possibility of clich is dismantledand annulled. The Trial of Ivan the Terriblejournalism with the impact of a documentary filmrenews and restores moral consciousness by means of a psychological truthfulness and a living immediacy

that are as compelling as justice itself."

Cynthia Ozick

Terror permeates every page of this book.... In the Bible it is said that man was made in the image of G-d; men like Demjanjuk make a mockery of this statement."

Simon Wiesenthal

About the Author:

Tom Teichol z is an award-winning journalist and author, most recently of 9/12: The Epic Battle of Ground Zero Responders by William Groner and Tom Teicholz (Potomac Books, 2019), His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Forbes.com, Los Angeles Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Yorkers Talk of the Town. His first book, The Trial of Ivan the Terrible, State of Israel vs. John Demjanjuk (St. Martins Press, 1990) was favorably reviewed in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Time Magazine and The Chicago Tribune among others. He was extensively interviewed for The Devil Next Door, the Netflix multi-part documentary series on the Demjanjuk case.

Justice, justice shall ye pursue.

-DEUTERONOMY 16:20

Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.

-JUSTICE DOV LEVIN, QUOTING A
TALMUDIC SAYING.

Outside: Jerusalem and the moaning of the Lord's trees, cut down by her enemies in every generation; clouds heavy with thunders that, for me, on this night of rain, are tidings from the mouth of the God of Might to endless generations.

-URI ZVI GREENBERG

Parts of this book originally appeared in an earlier account of the Israeli District Court trial of John Demjanjuk as The Trial of Ivan the Terrible: State of Israel vs. John Demjanjuk, published by St. Martins Press in 1990. Thanks to Los Angeles Times where my Op-Ed, The Pariah Loophole, urging Germany to try Demjanjuk originally appeared (on 6/13/08), as well as the Huffington Post where my Demjanjuks Just Epitaph, also appeared (on 3/27/12).

Table of Contents

I n August 1943, after a failed revolt at the Nazi Extermination Camp at Treblinka, in Nazi-occupied Poland, the remaining Jewish inmates were either shot or transferred to the Sobibor Death Camp. The buildings were demolished. A farmhouse was built from the bricks of the gas chamber and the ground was seeded with lupine grass and pine trees. A farmer was installed there.

At the Sobibor death camp, some 130 miles west of Treblinka, a similar occurrence had taken place. There, too, a revolt had taken place on October 14, 1943 -- after which, there too, the ground was bulldozed, and the earth planted over with pine trees to conceal its murderous history.

The Nazis intended that there be no evidence of the crimes committed at Treblinka, where in little more than a year, more than 870, 000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered in a brutal factory of death where on many days more than 15,000 persons were killed in gas chambers, their possessions collected, their hair shorn, the gold from their teeth extracted from their mouths post-mortem, their bodies incinerated, and their remains dumped in large pits. Nor any trace left at Sobibor where, according to historians, as many as 350,000 innocent Jewish men, women and children were murdered.

There were so few Jewish survivors of Treblinka and Sobibor, perhaps fifty or more at each. Even fewer survived who had worked in the gas chamber and incineration area where the murders took place. It seemed unlikely that the world would ever know what took place in that nightmare world. If survivors lived to tell the tale, it was not evident that they would be believed, or even that the world would care.

Nonetheless, as early as 1945 survivors of the Treblinka death camp gave their testimonies and in 1947, a Polish commission arrived to investigate the Treblinka site. The ground had been looted by locals looking for valuables of the murdered buried in the earth. Bone parts were strewn about the field.There was little to no physical evidence to be gathered from Treblinka, no photos or film, almost no military or official records found there of who served at Treblinka and carried out its genocidal program.

Sobibor kept many of its secrets until September 2014, when the area was excavated by archaeologists who unearthed remains of the gas chamber. In the blood-soaked earth of Sobibor, they found wedding rings, jewelry and personal items of the Jews murdered there.

However, in the more than 75 years since Treblinka and Sobibor were dismantled, our knowledge of those hells has steadily accrued. Today, we know so much more about Treblinka, Sobibor and the other related extermination camps. We know more about other concentration camps such as Flossenburg where some 30,000 persons were murdered; and so much more about the German officers who served there, some of whom were tried in the 1960s in Germany; so much more about the auxiliary guards, the Wachmann, who were the enthusiastic foot-soldiers in the murderous program to exterminate the Jewish race how and where they were recruited, how they were trained at the Trawniki Training Camp, where they were posted and what their duties were at those camps as well as more about who was murdered there and when.

The extensive and detailed record of these crimes, and of these criminals, has become greater known to the world, I would argue, because of Ivan Demjanjuk.

Demjanjuk, that same Cleveland autoworker who, as John Demjanjuk, was first accused in 1975 of being a Nazi death camp guard, and who over the years was tried in the United States, in Israel, and in Germany. In 2011, Germany convicted Demjanjuk of the murder of 29,000 Jewish men, women and children at Sobibor. Ten months later, he died at age 91 in a nursing home in Germany, while awaiting his appeal.

We dont know all this because Demjanjuk told us so, To the contrary, throughout his long and twisted legal odyssey, he repeatedly denied each and every accusation with fabrications, evasions and lies. His denials and lies continued even when he was proved irrefutably to have been an experienced and accomplished helper in the Nazis murderous machine and at its death factories whose goal was nothing less than genocide the final solution, as it was called the attempted extermination of the Jewish people.

Strangely enough, it is because Demjanjuk would not admit what he had done, and because he denied any involvement whatsoever, that decades of research, and the testimony of expert witnesses had to prove otherwise. And because Demjanjuks series of trials, appeals, and re-trials in the United States, Israel and Germany were spread out over almost forty years, archives once inaccessible (such as in the former Soviet Union), yielded more evidence; and a new generation of prosecutors arose in Germany that set out to re-interpret German law so as to apply it to Nazi collaborators such as Demjanjuk.

Next page