Ynet News | 06Dec2009 | Eldad Beck
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3815715,00.html
In the name of the father
John Demjanjuk Jr.
refuses to lose hope that his father's innocence will be proven. To
this day, he says, prosecution has failed to produce one shred of
evidence to show his father harmed anyone
BERLIN - John Demjanjuk Jr. remembers well every moment of the day his
life was turned upside down. It was in the mid 1970s and he was 11
years old, the son of immigrant parents living in Ohio.
His father would go to work in a Ford factory every day, come home and
tend the garden. The family would visit the local Ukrainian church
every Sunday.
The blissful family routine came to an abrupt end when the Demjanjuk
home came under siege by a slew of reporters and camera crews wondering
about his father John Ivan Demjanjuk's Nazi past.
John Jr. refused to believe the allegations against his father and has
dedicated the past three decades to proving his father is not the man
accused of forcing 27,900 Jews into gas chambers at Sobibor camp in
1943.
John Jr. was by his father's side during his first trial, which was
held in Jerusalem, and lived in Israel for 18 months. So far, he has
been unable to arrive at the Munich court trying his 89-year-old father
for Nazi crimes. According to Demjanjuk Sr.'s German lawyer, the family
lacks the financial means to be by his client's side.
Wheels of injustice
John Jr., now 44, told Yedioth Ahronoth -- in his first interview with
an Israeli media outlet since his father's extradition to Germany in
May -- that now, being a father himself with a family to support, he
"prefers to navigate the legal battle from home."
"The trial is being held in Germany and I don't understand it anyway,"
he said.
The fight for his father's innocence has not been fruitless: In the
early 1990s he was able to uncover documents proving the US extradited
Demjanjuk to Israel based on misleading evidence.
The discovery led to Demjanjuk's return to the US in 1993, after the
Supreme Court reversed the findings that branded him "Ivan the
Terrible" of the Treblinka death camp.
Despite the new ruling, the US Justice Department is still determined
to prove Demjanjuk Sr.'s involvement in Nazi war crimes. His son is
equally determined to prove his innocence.
"I don't want to talk about me. I'm not the important one here -- the
person suffering in a Munich prison is," he said.
"This is a false trial which isn’t based on evidence. The German
prosecutor has lured the secondary plaintiffs (relatives of the Dutch
Jews who were murdered in Sobibor) into the case, while real Nazi
Germans, ones that the prosecution has evidence against, are sitting at
home, watching my father's trial on television."
Common denominator
Demjanjuk Jr. stresses that he is not resentful of the witnesses, who
are Holocaust survivors. "We all feel for the plaintiffs, Holocaust
survivors or their relatives. No one doubts what happened in the
Holocaust -- we certainly never did -- but the Germans are using this
trial to push their own interests.
"All they want right now is to convict the Ukrainian and by that to
exempt themselves from responsibility. They've done little to punish
German criminals.
"The secondary plaintiffs," he continued," were brought on the case in
order to support the German prosecution, while it clandestinely plans
to put Nazi murderers on the stand. I'm sure the survivors have no idea
that these people are going to be witnesses alongside them."
Demjanjuk Jr. is especially critical of one of the prosecution's star
witnesses -- Samuel Kunz -- a "graduate" of the SS Trawniki training
camp. Kunz, also in his late 80s, is currently under investigation for
being accessory to the murder of nearly 500,000 people in Nazi death
camps.
Kunz has reportedly admitted his crimes to the German authorities, in
order to frame Demjanjuk.
Demjanjuk's son has in his possession documentation implicating Kunz in
the murder of at least eight people.
Demjanjuk Jr. fails to understand the uproar his father's lawyer Ulrich
Busch caused when he claimed the prisoners of war held in Trawniki
suffered the same fate as the Jews in death camps -- a supposition
scornfully dismissed by survivors.
"For soviet prisoners of war, the situation back then wasn’t much
different," he said. "There were 5.7 million POWs like my father and
3.3 million died in the German camps. That's half as many as Holocaust
victims, but still, any comparison between the victims evokes such
anger, but one that is based on ignorance."
He is aware of evidence suggesting that there were "volunteers" in
Trawniki -- guards recruited under threat of harm to their families.
"There were also prisoners of war who were selected… The Germans chose
the strongest and when the POWs boarded the trucks they didn’t know
where they were going. There is ample evidence suggesting prisoners
sent to Trawniki were shot trying to escape.
"They were living under constant threat of death. They were not part of
the German army -- the Germans treated them like subhumans, just like
they treated the Jews."
The devil's advocate?
Demjanjuk Jr. insists the prosecution hasn’t a shred of evidence to
show his father harmed even one Jewish prisoner. "All they have is the
testimony of one man, a former guard in Sobibor who has since died,
taken by the KGB, and even that doesn’t state that my father committed
any murder.
"This man is dead. We can't cross examine him. The Office of Special
Investigations(OSI) in the US Justice Department had this evidence when
he was still alive and they never even gave it to the Israeli
prosecution. They agreed to let us have it only after we took them to
court. Now this man is dead, and the German prosecution plans to use
his testimony to claim my father was involved in murder."
According to Demjanjuk, the defense plans to use and internal OSI memo
claiming the guard was an unreliable witness to refute his affidavit.
The OSI, he added, continuously buried exculpatory evidence in the
case. "The OSI has the most comprehensive file there is on Trawniki.
Even before the trial in Israel, the Americans had evidence that Ivan
the Terrible, who worked the gas chambers in Treblinka, was in fact
Ivan Marchenko, not my father. They chose to keep that evidence locked
in a safe.
"They were willing to let the Israelis hang an innocent man in the name
of the Holocaust. Even now, they don't care of Germany convicts an
innocent man -- a dying 89-year-old man -- if it means it can exonerate
itself."
"It's the same thing now as it was back then in Israel -- everyone
wants to believe my father is Ivan the Terrible. Some people, who don't
know the case, still believe that. The same thing is happening in
Germany now."
Germany's proceedings against his father, he insists, have nothing to
do with justice, "and everything to do with wanting to dilute their
responsibility for what happened in the Holocaust -- it's easier to
blame a Ukrainian prisoner of war."
Demjanjuk added he is not allowed to contact his father. "He can call
home every two weeks and we have five-minute conversations. He is not
allowed to speak about the trial and there is a Ukrainian interpreter
monitoring the call.
"He was treated much better when he was held in Israel," he concludes.
"In Israel I could see him as much as I wanted and he could call home
every week."