RIP: JOHN DEMJANUK

RIP: “John” Ivan Mykolaiovych Demianiuk (April 3, 1920 ~ March 12, 2012) 

I remember Demjanjuk's show trial in Israel where "eye witnesses" shouted they "I remember his eyes!!!" only to find the Israeli high court dismiss the death sentence and found he was never at that camp.

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So the Holocaust industry got their show trial and world media exposure and taught a new generation of the horrors of the Holocaust, but at what cost?  The truth.

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His trial and death sentence was on TV for all of Israel to see.  Children were let out of school to see the trial, all to make them remember the Holocaust.

Was Demjanjuk's death sentence dismissal also handled with the same state wide publicity as his trial?  Of course not.

To this day those "eye witnesses" still say he was the one.  Why weren't they brought on charges of perjury?

Blaming just anyone, withholding evidence, committing perjury all for vengeance for the heinous crimes of the Nazis isn't the way to remember those who lost their lives.

Now he is dead and gone to the ultimate judge, who isn't pressured by certain groups to withhold evidence or bend to the will of others for political expediency.

If it is now a crime to be a guard at a camp, then the Germans had better line up by the thousands and quite a few Jewish kapos for their time in court.


Previous posts regarding John Demjanuk:

THE SHOAH MUST GO ON

JOHN DEMJANJUK ~ REFLECTIONS ON HIS UPCOMING TRIAL IN GERMANY

JOHN DEMJANJUK CHARGED WITH 28,000 JEW DEATHS

JAMES TRAFICANT ~ AMERICAN HERO OR AMERICAN DISGRACE?

 

Mr. Demjanuk during trial

FORMER NAZI GUARD JOHN DEMJANJUK TO BE BURIED IN THE UNITED STATES

Haaretz

Demjanjuk died in Germany last Saturday at age of 91; Jewish groups fear his grave would become a neo-Nazi shrine.Former Nazi guard John Demjanjuk, who died in Germany over the weekend after being convicted last year of killings in a Nazi death camp, is to be buried in the United States, a German undertaker and U.S. officials said Wednesday. The funeral home in Bavaria, which has been hired by the Demjanjuk family, said the body of the 91-year-old would be flown next week to Cleveland, Ohio

"He's going back, that's for sure," said a funeral home spokesman.

Ukraine-born Demjanjuk, who entered the United States in 1952, had been stripped of U.S. citizenship in 2004 and was stateless.

The U.S .consulate in Munich said it was "providing consular assistance to Mr. Demjanjuk's family."

The United States extradited Demjanjuk to Germany in 2009 to face trial.

A Munich court sentenced him in May to five years' jail for being an accessory to 27,900 murders at Sobibor, a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland, while he was in a guard squad there in 1943. However shortly afterward he was released from custody to live in a German old people's home while his appeal was being processed.

Meanwhile, Jewish advocates fear that Demjanjuk's grave would become a neo-Nazi shrine.

Efraim Zuroff, who leads the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, said that a Demjanjuk funeral in his adopted hometown would turn into a spectacle.

ED: OK, Wiesenthal, you must now MILK IT FOR ALL YOU CAN! HE IS DEAD NOW and you cannot use him anymore to propagate more faux tales to garner more press and propaganda time.

"I have no doubt that a funeral in Seven Hills would turn into a demonstration of solidarity and support for Demjanjuk, who's the last person on earth who deserves any sympathy, frankly," Zuroff said in a telephone interview.

Demjanjuk Jr. said in an email yesterday that any suggestion of his father's burial or grave site turning into a spectacle was unwarranted.

"Over the past 35-plus years our family has had no association with any part of the neo-Nazi groups, ever. We have condemned Nazi crimes as my father is himself a victim of the Nazis regardless of whose version of the case you believe," he said. 

  WORLD WAR II CRIMES: 

THE LEGAL AFTERLIFE OF JOHN DEMJANJUK

By Christopher Johnston

TIME US

March 22, 2012

John Demjanjuk died Saturday as he had lived much of the last 35 years of his life ~ in the shadow of the courts. And his legal afterlife is likely to see his friends and lawyers trying to wrest him from judicial limbo.

At his death, the accused Nazi war criminal from Seven Hills, Ohio, still had two appeals pending. One is in the German court that on May 12, 2011 convicted him of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews in the Sobibor concentration camp. It sentenced him to five years in prison with credit for approximately two years already served. Just shy of 92, Demjanjuk succumbed to bone marrow disease, chronic kidney disease, and old age, while residing in a Bavarian nursing facility where the court placed him due to his ailments and pending further proceedings.

As of now, he is both guilty and innocent, it seems. "The verdict exists ~ it is not voided. It was pronounced and based in fact," said Munich state court spokeswoman Margarete Noetzel, of the judgment last year. Yet, under German law, because Demjanjuk died before his final appeal could be heard and because a person is presumed innocent until ultimately proven guilty, he is still technically presumed innocent.

(MORE: NAZI CRIMINAL JOHN DEMJANJUK DIES)

In the U.S., Demjanjuk's attorneys continue to pursue an appeal based on their claim the FBI defrauded the courts by withholding classified information since the early 1980s. Additionally, Demjanjuk's defense attorneys say they were never allowed to cross-examine FBI witnesses who had given depositions about that evidence.

Furthermore, no matter what the courts have found, the Court of Public Opinion remains divided on Demjanjuk's convoluted legal odyssey. Ed Nishnic, who scoured Europe, Ukraine, and Russia in the 1980s and '90s to find evidence that would clear his former father-in-law, says:

"I hope all of the issues will be resolved in the courts, but this battle won't end until the truth is completely exposed."

Nishnic married Demjanjuk's daughter Irene in 1983, but the couple divorced in 2005 after she fell out with her father. Incensed by what he considered a travesty of justice, Nishnic continued to support Demjanjuk.

Nishnic remains committed to proving Demjanjuk's innocence however possible. "If it doesn't happen in the courts, then I will do what I can to publicize the truth behind this case," he says of his plans to write a book that will lay out the defense of Demjanjuk and all of Nishnic's exploits chasing down what he believes is the truth, including the time he says he discovered dozens of garbage bags filled with evidence that the FBI tried to throw out. The authorities, he says,

"knew John was not guilty before they started the circus against him in 1977. So people need to know the whole story, not just the incomplete versions they've read in the paper or seen on television."

(MORE: WAS EVIDENCE AGAINST ACCUSED NAZI CRIMINAL JOHN DEMJANJUK FAKED?)

Helen Sawchak, a first generation Ukrainian in Cleveland, says many Ukrainian-Americans believe the government's zealous pursuit of Demjanjuk was excessive.

"If he did do it, he sure didn't do it on his own, but was forced by the Nazis. It was a waste of money to put this man and his family through all of this, and what have they really proven?"

The latest U.S. appeal was filed in response to a letter dated March 4, 1985 from the Cleveland office of the FBI to the Bureau's director. A copy of the once-secret letter was later redacted and placed in the National Archives, where AP reporters discovered it and published an article in April 2011 during closing arguments of Demjanjuk's last trial.

The recently declassified version reveals the FBI's suspicions about the KGB's motives for forging key documents such as concentration camp ID cards that the Government had submitted as evidence to prove Demjanjuk worked at those camps. On December 20, 2011, Federal District Court Judge Dan Aaron Polster denied the appeal because he felt the internal FBI documents were speculative and not exculpatory or to the benefit of the defendant.

Dennis Terez, Federal Public Defender, Northern District, Ohio, then appealed that ruling with the Sixth Circuit Court.

"We want the court to recognize that by at least 1985 the FBI was alerting a variety of parties to the fact that they had concerns that this case was based on fraudulent evidence from the KGB," he says.

Terez is scheduled to submit appeal briefs to the Sixth Circuit Court on April 12. However, he is unsure whether the court will continue or dismiss the case.

Born Iwan Demjanjuk in Ukraine in 1920, he and his family endured the brutal conditions caused by Soviet collectivization. He was drafted into the Soviet Army in 1940 and captured by German soldiers two years later. There is inconclusive and conflicting evidence about where he spent the next three years, but much of it was in various concentration camps, where he said he was forced to work as a guard. Following Germany's surrender in 1945, he was taken by American forces to several displaced persons camps. In 1952, he obtained a visa and moved to the U.S., eventually ending up in Cleveland, where he worked at the Ford Motor Plant until he retired 30 years later. He became a naturalized citizen in 1958.

Demjanjuk's legal troubles began in 1977, when the Government initiated a proceeding to denaturalize him. They charged that he illegally obtained his citizenship by denying he had served as a guard in the camps between 1942 and 1945.

Evidence presented by the Office of Special Investigations (US Department of Justice) alleged he was "Ivan the Terrible," a gas chamber operator at Treblinka feared for his savage cruelty. The trial resulted in his denaturalization in 1981 and subsequent extradition to Israel for trial. In April 1988, the court sentenced him to death by hanging. However, the Israeli Supreme Court chose to give greater weight to evidence from the Soviet Union and from purported eyewitness testimony by Ukrainian guards at Treblinka that another man was Ivan. Demjanjuk was acquitted in July 1993. A subsequent U.S. court ruling that the Government had failed to disclose important evidence enabled him to return home.

(MORE: DEMJANJUK'S TRIAL: THE LAST NAZI WAR-CRIMES DEFENDANT)

In 1998, Demjanjuk regained his citizenship, when the Sixth Circuit Court found that prosecutors had "acted with reckless disregard" in failing to disclose exculpatory evidence. A year later, however, the Government filed a second denaturalization proceeding against Demjanjuk, alleging he had persecuted civilian prisoners at the Trawniki, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Flossenburg concentration camps, but not Treblinka. The trial led to his second denaturalization in 2002 and deportation in 2009, this time to Germany.

On Monday, his attorney Ulrich Busch appealed to German authorities to arrange for his body to be returned to Ohio for burial. The deceased's son, John Demjanjuk, Jr. responded to concerns from Jewish groups and others that his father's gravesite might turn into an extremist shrine by telling the Associated Press:

"Over the past 35 plus years our family has had no association with any part of the neo-Nazi groups, ever. We have condemned Nazi crimes as my father is himself a victim of the Nazis regardless of whose version of the case you believe."

MORE: TWO-MINUTE BIO: ACCUSED NAZI GUARD JOHN DEMJANJUK