Anti-Neocons

Holocaust expert testifies in Demjanjuk trial
By DAVID RISING (AP) – Feb 23, 2010

MUNICH — Being sent to the Nazi's Sobibor camp was a death sentence for all but a handful of Jews, a Holocaust expert testified Tuesday at the trial of John Demjanjuk.

Johannes Houwink ten Cate, a professor at the University of Amsterdam's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, told the Munich state court that aside from the few Jews chosen to work, the thousands of others who boarded trains for the death camp had no chance of escape or survival.

"In my 25 years of research, I don't know of a single case in which someone who was said to have been murdered in Sobibor actually died elsewhere," he testified.

Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old retired Ohio autoworker, was deported from the United States in May and is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor. Prosecutors arrived at that figure after tallying transport lists of Jews sent there during the months Demjanjuk is alleged to have been a guard at the camp.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk rejects the charges, saying he has been mistaken for someone else. He maintains he was a Soviet soldier captured by the Germans and spent most of the war in prison camps.

During the proceedings Tuesday he showed no reaction to the testimony, lying on a bed wearing sunglasses and a green parka with blankets pulled up around him. During breaks, however, he talked with his attorney and his Ukrainian interpreter.

Houwink ten Cate was called as an expert witness to testify about the 1943 transports of Jews from the Netherlands to Sobibor, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland.

He testified over the objections of Demjanjuk's defense attorney Ulrich Busch, who said Houwink ten Cate was prejudiced against his client. He cited a 2009 interview in which the professor told Dutch radio that Demjanjuk was "beyond a shadow of a doubt" an accomplice to mass murder.

"The witness prejudged the defendant in the worst possible way," Busch said.

Presiding Judge Ralph Alt allowed the witness but said his testimony would be limited to facts, not conclusions.

Houwink ten Cate told the court about 19 trains from Holland to Sobibor that went weekly starting in March 1943. Each carried between 1,000 to 3,000 men, women and children to be killed.

The Jews were told by the Nazis that they were being resettled in the east and did not know they were going to their deaths.

"Those being deported did not know before their trip where they were going," he testified.

The prosecution argues that a Nazi ID document proves that Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor, and that the transport lists prove how many people died at that time.

Busch argued again, however, that the ID document was a Soviet-era fake. He asked the court to call as a witness Alexej Weizen, a Sobibor survivor who lives in Russia. Weizen told Czech radio earlier this month that he recognized Demjanjuk as a guard from the camp from an old picture published in a Russian newspaper.

Weizen, however, had given statements previously to Soviet investigators and had never mentioned Demjanjuk in the roughly 30 years that Demjanjuk has faced investigations of his past.

A top investigator has said Weizen's statement was not credible, and trial prosecutor Hans-Joachim Lutz told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he has no plans to call Weizen as a witness.

Busch said, however, that he believed authorities in Russia had persuaded Weizen to fabricate his story and that he should be examined as a witness to shed light on those tactics.

Aside from Weizen's claim, there are no known Sobibor survivors who can identify Demjanjuk from the camp.

The trial resumes Wednesday.

In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel, accused of being the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp. He was convicted, sentenced to death — then freed when an Israeli court found that he was a victim of mistaken identity.

Former guard says Demjanjuk was at Nazi camp
By DAVID RISING (AP) – Feb 24, 2010

MUNICH — John Demjanjuk served as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp in Bavaria during World War II, a former Soviet soldier who was taken prisoner by the Germans testified at the retired Ohio autoworker's trial Wednesday.

But witness Alex Nagorny, who agreed to serve the Nazis after his capture, raised doubts about the case against Demjanjuk, telling the court the man on trial in Munich state court didn't look like his fellow guard at the Flossenbuerg camp.

Prosecutors allege that, like Nagorny, Demjanjuk agreed to serve the Germans and was trained at the Trawniki SS camp before being sent to work as a camp guard.

Demjanjuk, 89, is accused of serving as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland, and charged as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews there.

Demjanjuk denies ever serving as a camp guard anywhere, saying he has been mistaken for someone else.

However, Nagorny told the Munich state court that he knew Demjanjuk from the Flossenbuerg camp.

"We were brought there and Ivan was already there," the 92-year-old testified, referring to Demjanjuk by his birth name. "He was a guard there. He did the same thing I did. I did not know him before Flossenbuerg."

Nagorny has previously told investigators he arrived at Flossenbuerg with Demjanjuk.

Nagorny testified he lived with Demjanjuk in a barracks room in Flossenbuerg and then shared an apartment with him in Landshut, Germany, after the war.

But when asked to identify Demjanjuk in the courtroom, he could not.

Nagorny walked over to the bed where Demjanjuk lay and looked at him closely. When Demjanjuk removed the sunglasses that he was wearing, Nagorny said quickly: "That's definitely not him — no resemblance."

Demjanjuk has already been the victim of mistaken identify once, when he was tried in the 1980s in Israel on accusations he was the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp.

His conviction and death sentence were overturned when it was determined someone else was that guard.

Nagorny did not recognize a picture of Demjanjuk from the Israel trial.

He also called into question a key piece of evidence — a Trawniki identity card that prosecutors say has a picture of Demjanjuk on it, and indicates he worked at Sobibor.

Nagorny testified that in the final days of the war he was with Demjanjuk and other Trawniki guards, and that they destroyed their cards before being taken prisoner by the Americans.

"Some burned them and some threw them away," he told the court. "I burned my ID card."

The defense has claimed the card is a postwar forgery by the Soviets.

Nagorny's testimony shows that "it couldn't have been found by the Russians in Trawniki" as has been claimed, defense attorney Ulrich Busch told the AP.

Although Demjanjuk isn't charged with any crimes at Flossenbuerg, Nagorny's statement that they were guards there is important, said Thomas Walther, who led the investigation that prompted Germany to prosecute Demjanjuk.

"Here is a living witness who can say, 'I was a Trawniki man and with me was Demjanjuk who was also a Trawniki man,'" Walther told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the trial. "That's important here because Demjanjuk says he was not a Trawniki (man)."

Demjanjuk maintains he was a Soviet soldier who was captured by the Germans and spent most of the rest of the war in prison camps.

Millions of Soviet prisoners died in German captivity and, while denying that Demjanjuk ever served as a guard, the defense has argued those who agreed to serve the Nazis had no choice.

Nagorny, another Ukrainian native, testified that didn't know he would be used as a camp guard when he agreed to work for the Nazis.

"I was simply asked if I wanted to work and I was hungry," he testified. "That was all."

The special German prosecutors' office responsible for investigating Nazi-era crimes is investigating Nagorny himself to see whether he might have served at the Treblinka death camp.

There is evidence implicating a "Nagorny" as having served as a Treblinka guard, but investigators have said it is unclear whether it is the same person.

Prosecutors argue that to have served at one of the Nazi death camps in occupied Poland — whose sole purpose was extermination — is enough to accuse someone of accessory to murder.

The argument does not extend to those who served at concentration camps like Flossenbuerg where, though scores were killed or died through inhumane treatment, people were not necessarily sent simply to be murdered.

Demjanjuk lawyer rejects testimony of expert witness

By DPA

The defense team at the trial of war crimes suspect John Demjanjuk sought to stop a Dutch historian from giving evidence yesterday, citing suspicion of bias.

Lawyer Ulrich Busch told the court that Professor Johannes Houwink ten Cate had said in radio interviews before and during the trial that he was convinced the former Nazi concentration camp guard was guilty.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, 89, is being tried in Munich on charges of being an accessory to 27,900 murders at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943.

The court reserved its decision on the lawyer's motion and allowed the Amsterdam-based professor on the Holocaust and genocide to present his testimony. To back up his claim, Busch produced excerpts from an interview given by Houwink ten Cate in which the professor said he "does not have the slightest doubt" that Demjanjuk was involved in the "industrial murder" of Jews. Busch said Houwink ten Cate had voiced a "conviction that Demjanjuk will be found guilty" in Munich.

Someone who had formed such a judgment should not be allowed to testify as an expert witness in a trial in which the question of guilt is being decided, Busch said.

Demjanjuk stands accused of being one of the guards who herded Jews into Sobibor's makeshift gas chambers out in the woods during his stint at the camp. Prosecutors say he did not act under duress, as he volunteered to be a guard and remain one. Demjanjuk, who was deported to Germany from the United States, where he had been living, could be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

The court case is expected to be one of the last major war crimes trials from the Nazi period.

Demjanjuk’s Long Road to Justice Nears a Murky End


By A.J. Goldmann | Forward
Published November 10, 2010 - issue of November 19, 2010


EXCERPT: "In a moment that was almost contemptible, he (Demjanjuk’s defense attorney) asked whether, in addition to the lists of Jews put on the trains bound for Sobibor, there were lists confirming that these Jews ever actually arrived at the camp. The question met with groans of disbelief."


The day I arrive in Munich is dismal and gray. One of the jewels in Germany’s crown, the Bavarian capital does not impress on a day like this. Rather, the Glockenspiel at Marienplatz, and the elegant shopping boulevard Maximilianstrasse seem dull and lifeless. Inside, the beer halls are bustling. No wonder — they are the only islands of cheer on this October day.

For the past 27 years, justice has pursued John Demjanjuk. Now, in Munich, German prosecutors are having a last go at the 90-year-old retired American autoworker and alleged guard at Nazi death camps during World War II.

This is a prosecution that features something unprecedented. Over three decades, Demjanjuk has undergone two long denationalization and deportation proceedings in the United States and a lengthy trial in Israel. But the man once pegged as the notorious Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka — a sadistic perpetrator of mass atrocities — has never been tied beyond reasonable doubt to any specific criminal act. And so, in what is almost surely one of the last Nazi war crimes trials that will take place on German soil, prosecutors are seeking to persuade the current court of a simpler allegation: that Demjanjuk was a prison guard at Sobibor death camp — one of many in concentration camps throughout Europe — and that this constituted a war crime independent of any specific criminal act Demjanjuk may or may not have committed — in essence, that Demjanjuk is guilty of being in the wrongest of places at the wrongest of times.

“It is really something new about the Munich trial,” wrote Michael Koch, one of Demjanjuk’s prosecutors, in an e-mail to the Forward. “The prosecution in former days always looked for specific actions in order to bring Nazi criminals to justice.”

The trial, which started last November and is expected to last until spring 2011, has been delayed time and again by Demjanjuk’s health issues, some possibly fabricated to gain the court’s sympathy. This trial offers nothing like the concision of a “Law & Order” episode.

Still, I had a genuine shock when I entered the Munich regional court the day of the 50th session. I was expecting John Grisham, and I got Samuel Beckett. Absurdities, oddities and complexities abound in this case, and one feels a palpable sense of disconnect between the laudable goal of bringing an alleged Nazi criminal to justice and the humdrum grind of a long trial that itself comes only after a much longer and very cloudy legal trail now sputtering and slouching to an uncertain endpoint.

Demjanjuk was born Ivan Mykolayovych Demianiuk in Ukraine in 1920. He served as a soldier in the Red Army during World War II, and in 1942 he became a German prisoner of war. On these things, all agree. It is also uncontested that in 1952, Demjanjuk arrived in America with his wife and child, settling first in Indiana and then in Ohio. Twenty-five years later, the Justice Department initiated proceedings to strip him of his citizenship, citing his alleged concealment of his involvement in war crimes at the Nazi death camps at Majdanek, Sobibor and Flossenbürg. Relying on eyewitnesses and on identity documents supplied by the Soviet Union, the federal prosecutors contended that Demjanjuk was, in fact, “Ivan the Terrible,” a kapo, or notorious prisoner-turned-guard, at the Treblinka and Sobibor camps, a man known to have committed numerous murders and acts of savage violence against camp prisoners during 1942 and 1943.

Between 1977 and 1988, Demanjuk was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and extradited to Israel, where he was tried and found guilty of war crimes as Ivan, the Treblinka kapo.

During his trial, several former camp prisoners identified Demjanjuk as “Ivan” of Treblinka. Demjanjuk claimed he was never anything other than a prisoner of war after his capture. But he also admitted that the scar under his armpit that had denoted his blood type was a n SS marking that he removed after the war.

Then, during Demjanjuk’s appeals process, the Soviet Union fell, and suddenly Soviet archives brought forth new evidence: the written statements of 37 former guards at Treblinka who identified Ivan the Terrible as one Ivan Marchenko, not Ivan Demjanjuk.

American officials, it turned out, had originally been aware of the testimony of two of these German guards but had never informed the defense — a fact that later led a U.S. appeals court to rule that Demjanjuk had been a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, even as it also found the evidence was convincing that Demjanjuk had been a lesser SS figure or camp guard.

After the emergence of these archival statements, the Israeli Supreme Court reversed Demjanjuk’s conviction, citing the “gnawing” new evidence of mistaken identity. But the Supreme Court judges also found other facts “proved the appellant’s participation in the extermination process” as a guard.
“The matter is closed — but not complete, the complete truth is not the prerogative of the human judge,” the court wrote.

Demjanjuk was returned to the United States, and his citizenship was restored until 1999, when the Justice Department initiated a new effort to denationalize and deport him. This time, federal prosecutors alleged simply that he had entered the country while concealing his service as a guard at Sobibor and Majdanek. Demjanjuk lost his last appeal in 2008, and in 2009 Germany sought his extradition from the U.S. to stand trial in Munich.

In the Munich trial, Demjanjuk has been indicted for being an accessory to 28,060 counts of murder. The prosecution is putting together a case that describes the Sobibor killings as a single project that collectively implicated everyone employed there — even low-ranking guards and auxiliaries, the cogs in the Nazi killing machine — in the exclusive purpose of mass extermination. To do this, however, requires proving that Sobibor, during the time Demjanjuk is said to have worked there, was strictly and solely a factory for death. Once that is shown, it needs to be established beyond reasonable doubt that Demjanjuk in fact served there. Demjanjuk continues to deny having ever been a guard anywhere.

The sessions I saw were sparsely attended. Demjanjuk was wheeled into court in a hospital bed. He wore sunglasses and a baseball cap and was partially covered by a green blanket. Throughout the session, he barely moved or made a sound. During rare moments of silence in the courtroom, his low moans could be heard. It was difficult to determine whether the defendant could even follow the proceedings.

Among the co-plaintiffs are four survivors of Sobibor and 23 Dutch first-degree relatives of victims from the camp. Two of the Dutch co-plaintiffs were present during my dates in court. For them, this trial is about both fulfilling an ethical obligation and achieving personal catharsis.

Psychologist Robert Wurms, one-time chairman of the Central Jewish Board of the Netherlands, said that there is an obligation to mete out justice regardless of the accused’s age: “He committed crimes in this system and took lives on an industrial scale. We can’t be indifferent to that.”

Robert Fransman, a former salesman, who, like Wurms, lost multiple family members during the war, added a personal reflection. “The Holocaust is about big numbers, but the names of Rachel Fransman and Isaac Fransman are never named. When I heard the judge call the names of my sister, whom I never knew, or my parents, whom I never knew, it was like Kaddish,” said Fransman, who is blogging the trial for a Dutch radio station’s website.

But at the start of the session on October 25, Ulrich Busch, Demjanjuk’s defense lawyer, frantically waved in the air an article discussing a just released report on the German Foreign Ministry’s role in the Holocaust. “Why are you prosecuting a 90-year-old man who’s near to death when you still have Nazis right here in Germany?” he shouted at the presiding judge, Ralph Alt, with whom he sparred often and loudly during the morning session.

From the opening of the trial last November, Busch has claimed that Germany has handpicked Demjanjuk as a scapegoat for its own crimes. “Germany still gives to all Germans who were in lower ranks and took part in the extermination of Jews de facto amnesty. They only pick out Mr. Demjanjuk from the States, and they persecute only him. First, they have to clear the situation with their own people before they start bringing people from other nations to court in Germany,” he told me in the hallway during a break from the session. His vehemence impressed me, but it also seemed a continuation of his earlier performance in court.

Angelika Benz, a 29-year-old doctoral candidate at the Technical University of Berlin who is writing her dissertation on Trawniki, the camp at which Demjanjuk allegedly trained, finds some truth to Busch’s claim. “If you think about the German perpetrators, they were well integrated in the after-war society. So if you now try to get them, you will find well-honored people. If you go in a little village near Munich, for example, maybe it would be [a retired] mayor. And then if you try to get that person in front of a trial, you would have a problem with the whole society. He would be a neighbor, a friend, a father,” she said.

For Wurms, however, the trial is a sign of the long way Germany has come in the past 65 years. “You have to compare this trial to the trials from after the war. I think this generation of judges and lawyers is totally different from the generation after the war. And you can feel and hear from them how ashamed they are of how Germany dealt with those criminals and didn’t convict them, or gave slight punishments. This is also a revolution of the new generation against the old generation. It must have a base in society and general feeling,” he explained.

On my second day in court, Demjanjuk failed to show up on time, claiming physical distress. When court doctor Albrecht Stein reported that he couldn’t find anything wrong with him, Judge Alt ordered Demjanjuk to present himself for the afternoon session.

While waiting for Demjanjuk to arrive, I ran over to the Altstadt to meet with Aaron Buck, the press officer for Munich’s Jewish community. As I entered, Buck handed me a photo from a German tabloid, which showed Demjanjuk in his hospital bed. “These pictures don’t help us to talk about the real important things,” he said, adding that such images resonate with those who are fed up with discussions of Germany’s wartime crimes. The situation would be even worse, he felt, if Demjanjuk himself were German. “If he was presenting his testimony in German, and people saw that this German grandfather was on trial, I think that many Germans would sympathize more with him,” he explained.

Buck suggested that the trial might be more significant for Germany as a whole than for the Jewish community. “It’s a good end of the story. It’s not that you can run away and live in Argentina or whatever. So I think it’s important for Germany, but for the Jews, he’s just one of thousands who finally were found,” Buck said, adding that Munich’s 9,000 Jews are more concerned with contemporary issues than with digging into the past.

Demjanjuk eventually arrived from Stadelheim Prison at 1 p.m. The day’s witness was a lawyer from The Hague, Regina Grüter, who testified about the Westerbork database, a compendium of information on the transports of Dutch Jews to Sobibor. Busch seemed intent on wasting as much time as possible on irrelevant questions. By now, everyone in court seemed to be fed up with his stalling techniques, and Alt forcibly shut him up at several points.

Since it is crucial for the prosecution to show that all the Jews delivered to Sobibor in the summer of 1943 were marked for death, Busch tried any tack he could to dispute the relevance of these transport lists. In a moment that was almost contemptible, he asked whether, in addition to the lists of Jews put on the trains bound for Sobibor, there were lists confirming that these Jews ever actually arrived at the camp. The question met with groans of disbelief. Periodically, Dr. Stein — who with his handlebar mustache, ratty hair and blazer-with-jeans combo looked like he just wandered out of a Fassbinder film — administered painkillers to his patient.

“The best thing that could happen to him, in my opinion, is that he could stay in prison, because he’s very well taken care of,” Fransman said. “In the absolutely unthinkable case that he’s acquitted, it would be a disaster for him, because no country wants him. There’s no place for him on earth.”

Surprisingly, I heard similar sentiments from Demjanjuk’s defense lawyer. “He would be in a terrible situation if he was acquitted,” Busch confided to me.

For Fransman, the main point is not the sentence; it’s the verdict. “I want the court to say ‘guilty’ — as far as I’m concerned, with no penalty at all,” he said, noting that “the last 27 years of his life, he has been in and out of court, and his life is so miserable.”

In the German system, three years is the minimum sentence for accessory to murder. “So he will get three years; that’s my opinion,” Fransman said. “And for him, he should hope to die in those three years.”

Contact A.J. Goldmann at feedback@forward.com

Court expert unable to confirm authenticity of Demjanjuk signature on key evidence at trial
By Andrea M. Jarach (CP) – Feb 2, 2011

MUNICH — A court-appointed expert said Wednesday that she can't confirm or reject the authenticity of John Demjanjuk's signature on a key piece of evidence at his trial on charges that he was a Nazi death camp guard.

Handwriting expert Beate Wuellbeck told the Munich state court that only three letters in Demjanjuk's alleged identity card were clearly recognizable and she could not verify the authenticity of the signature.

Prosecutors say the signature on the identity card from the Nazis' Sobibor death camp is Demjanjuk's.

Demjanjuk, 90, is standing trial on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder for allegedly having been a guard at the Sobibor death camp.

He denies the charges, and the defence maintains the picture ID card, which was once in Russian hands, is a fake made by the KGB.

Wuellbeck told the court Wednesday she could not come to a definitive conclusion after comparing the recognizable letters in the signature with ten pages allegedly written by Demjanjuk.

Defence attorney Ulrich Busch requested another opinion from a specialist in Cyrillic script. Demjanjuk's native Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic. The court did not immediately decide on the motion.

Also on Wednesday, the defence team questioned the credibility of documents from Soviet intelligence services that placed a man named Demjanjuk had served at Sobibor between March 27, 1943 and September of the same year. That is roughly the same period in which Munich prosecutors say he worked as a guard at the death camp.

Defence attorney Ulrich Busch said a German court shouldn't consider documents from the totalitarian Soviet Union's agencies.

The prosecution argues that after the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, a Soviet Red Army soldier, was captured by the Germans in 1942, he agreed to serve under the SS as a guard. Demjanjuk claims he spent most of the rest of the war in Nazi camps for prisoners of war.

Presiding Judge Ralph Alt said Wednesday that the court plans to bring the trial, which started in November 2009, to a conclusion by the end of March.

A verdict could bring an end to a decades-long case, which started in 1981 when the U.S. revoked Demjanjuk's American citizenship, alleging he was a notorious Treblinka death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible" and had hidden the information when he immigrated to the United States.

He was extradited to Israel, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1988, but the conviction was overturned five years later as a case of mistaken identity. He was later deported from the U.S. in May 2009 to face trial in Germany on charges that he was a guard at Sobibor, another death camp.

___

Juergen Baetz in Berlin contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2011 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Demjanjuk's daughter appears at trial, first family member to attend Munich proceedings
By Andrea M. Jarach (CP) – 6 days ago

MUNICH — John Demjanjuk's daughter appeared Wednesday at his trial in Munich on charges he was a guard at a Nazi death camp, the first family member to attend since it started more than a year ago.

Irene Nishnic came into court with her son, holding a white rose that she later gave to her father. Demjanjuk, 90, appeared to smile as she took her place in the viewing gallery.

At a break in testimony, Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker, motioned for the two to come over and they embraced him as he lay in a hospital bed.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, is standing trial on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder for allegedly having been a guard at the Sobibor camp. He denies the charges.

Nishnic had lunch with her father behind closed doors, and refused to answer any questions both during the break and after the day's proceedings.

During the day, the court heard statements submitted by the defence from a former Ukrainian guard at Sobibor, who is now dead.

The guard, Ignat Danilchenko, allegedly told Soviet officials in 1949 and 1979 that he remembered Demjanjuk from the death camp. In one summary that was previously read into the record at the trial, Danilchenko said he served with Demjanjuk at Sobibor and that Demjanjuk "like all guards in the camp, participated in the mass killing of Jews."

But in the statement read aloud Wednesday, based on a 1985 interview with Soviet authorities, Danilchenko said none of the Ukrainian guards were able to go in to the areas where Jews were stripped of their clothes and remaining possessions, and then gassed.

"The watchmen had no access to the second or third zones," Danilchenko said, according to the transcript. "Exclusively, Germans carried out the guard duty" in those areas.

After the statement was read, however, Presiding Judge Ralph Alt noted that Danilchenko had also said that he had learned about the killing of the Jews from his fellow watchmen.

"Such descriptions would not have been possible if watchmen had no access to these areas of the camp," Alt said. "It could be that the witness Danilchenko wanted to downplay his own role and the role of the other watchmen at the Sobibor death camp."

Demjanjuk's defence attorney, Ulrich Busch, has asked that another alleged statement given by Danilchenko to Soviet authorities in 1983-4 be tracked down by the court. The court has not yet ruled on that request.

The trial does not resume until Feb. 22, but Busch said Nishnic is planning to stay in Munich for several days and visit Demjanjuk in the prison hospital where he is being held.

Copyright © 2011 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

John Demjanjuk Jr. is a fine young man, a son any father would be proud of. His demeanor was that of a troubled and worried young man. He was accompanied by his brother-in-law Ed Nishnic and basically let Ed Nishnic explain their plight.

Ed Nishnic is also a remarkable man. Like John Demjanjuk Jr. he's very intelligent and was very determined to prove the innocence of his father-in-law. I stated emphatically, that "I've decided to meet with you for one reason and one reason only: No American should ever be turned away when seeking help from our government." I then said, "Your dad has been convicted of mass murder, the extermination of one million Jewish prisoners. He has been sentenced to death. I want you to know up front, that if he is really guilty I could personally pull the switch at his execution."

I then told them I would hear their concerns. (Be advised that the mainstream media wrote that "Jim Traficant supports Nazi mass murderer" as soon as word spread that I had met with the "Demjanjuk" family.)

Nishnic handed me two report summaries of OSI investigators (Office of Special Investigations, the group within the Justice Department created by Congress to apprehend and prosecute Nazi war criminals). They had interrogated one Otto Horn in Berlin, Germany. Horn was a former SS Nazi guard who had assisted "Ivan Grozny" (Ivan the Terrible), at the Treblinka, Poland concentration camps.

These two reports were originals, not copies, and were signed by agents Garand and Daugherty, and were witnessed by prosecutor Moscovitz, who handled the denaturalization trial of John Demjanjuk in Cleveland. The reports were stamped as received by the Justice Department and signed by unit chief Eli Rosenbaum.

I read the documents very carefully without input from John Demjanjuk Jr. or Ed Nishnic. I could not believe my eyes. I could not believe what I was reading. The Justice Department had committed a great crime. Moscovitz, Garand, and Daugherty suborned the perjury of Otto Horn in order to convict an American citizen wrongfully-an American now denaturalized, stripped of his citizenship and waiting to be executed. (The authenticity of these two documents cannot be denied.)

At trial, Horn stated that "John Demjanjuk was Ivan Grozny." But in these two early reports, two years before the trial, Horn could not identify Demjanjuk from the photographs displayed before him.

I had a problem. A big problem. I knew without a doubt that John Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible. John Demjanjuk was in fact another victim, soon to be known as one of the most vicious and infamous mass murderers in world history. John Demjanjuk was awaiting execution as the infamous Ivan of Treblinka, Ivan the Terrible.

I would be defamed and ostracized because I would be compelled to prove the innocence of John Demjanjuk on the strength of these two Justice Department documents. John Demjanjuk was innocent-convicted of mass murder, sentenced to death and awaiting execution-and no one seemed to care.


http://www.truedemocracy.net/hj33/17.html