My English is not so good. But I presume, that my English is still better than your good German. So I decided, not to torture you with my good German, but to bother you with my bad English. Anyway you are lucky, that I do not try my Ukrainian. It would be a poor speech: Tscho, tscho? Ja ne rosumiyu. Pohano. Dobre. Pa, Pa.

I congratulate Vera on having the honor of being “Ukrainian of the Year”. She really earned it. Vera put a lot of energy into her project of humanitarian help for Ukraine.

I am the best wittness for that, because I enjoyed supporting her in most of her activities.

Of course, sometimes it was not so easy. For example: it was difficult for me and my clients, when  my office was changed into a storage house for 2000 care packages for Rohatyn and the village school children of Jesupil. The smell of the excellent garlic kobasa in the packages from Aldi supermarket was still in the office after weeks and my clients really believed, that I produce my own sausage.

Vera always said, “We have to help. It is the first time in Ukrainian history, that the country has a fair chance.”

I am very proud of Vera and her excellent results, supporting the development of a free and independent Ukraine, especially by bringing help to the future of the country, the children. I never regret, that I have to share her love with Ukraine.

And now the bad news:

John Demjanjuk will be tried by a German court in Munich, beginning the 30th of November 2009. He is accused of assisting the Nazis in cruelly killing about 27,000 Jews, by working in the death factory in Sobibor, Poland in 1943, sixty six years ago.

John’s fate, John’s life, is a human tragedy:

Holodomor, World War II, Red Army soldier, war injury, POW in a Nazi POW camp, loss of US citizenship, extradition to Israel, death sentence in Jerusalem, seven and a half years in prison, 5 years in a death cell, deportation to Germany, trial in Germany.

Each of these events means massive illegal and inhuman treatment. For example: In the German POW camps for Red Army soldiers 3.5 million men out of 5.3 million died from starvation, cannibalism and epidemics. Among them there were many more than a million victims of Ukrainian descent. The POW camps were nothing else than death camps, the Red Army soldiers were criminals in the eyes of the SS and the Wehrmacht, the German Army.

The latest terrible and inhuman treatment is the deportation of John to Germany and the trial in Munich. I will tell you why:

The deportation was chosen by the United States and Germany to avoid the principle of double jeopardy. An extradition, the legal way, was forbidden by Israelian, German and American law. Only the illegal deportation opened the possibility to reopen the Israelian trial and to overrule the decision of the Supreme Court to drop the case, as far as Sobibor was concerned and also as far as Sobibor was a part of the indictment.

The deportation itself is already a conviction, a life sentence: John has to stay in Germany until death under complete isolation and welfare conditions. He has no rights and no way to return to his wife and children. For John there will be no difference between a small cell in a nursery home and a prison cell. The deportation already destroyed his life completely.

John’s legal situation after the deportation: already a life punishment, before the trial starts. Guilty, if innocent or not.

And his personal situation:

I say it in  his words:

“I lost everything and all my hopes. They took my little future away. I never gonna make it.”

For the first time in his life he is no longer fit to fight and defend himself:

Physically: Deadly sick, precancer, beginning leukemia, pain all over, gout, serious kidney problems, back and knee problems.

Mentally: Without any hope, depressed, sad, crying, desperate.

Germany against John: An unfair and inhuman trial of a government against a man, who has a life expectation of months, not years.

Let’s assume John would still be fit for trial: Is the trial then a fair one?

Let’s go to Moscow, back in 1979:

It was the KGB, which offered copies of so called evidence, which was produced in secret trials and under torture of their victims. The “Dienstausweis”, the service card, was declared a fake of the KGB by the world’s most famous expert, Dr. Grant. The German head office for criminal research, “Bundeskriminalamt”, estimated the service card as a very simple falsification of the KGB. We all know, that the Soviet law and court system and all the KGB activities never intended to achieve justice, they only served and supported the ruling dictator and mass murderer Stalin and his successors. The prosecutors and courts were political instruments, used to liquidate opponents and the freedom of people in subjugated sattelite states like Ukraine.

Let’s go to Jerusalem, back in 1986 -1993:

What do you think is the most remarkable event in the Israel trial against John Demjanjuk? I am sure, you all will say the aquittal of John by the Supreme Court from being Ivan the Terrible. What a great court! Excellent judges!! Hosianna!

I contradict: For me the most remarkable event in Israel was the death sentence of the District Court against an innocent man. This result shows clear evidence of the weakness, of the mistakes and the errors of human court systems and their judges. The judges in Israel wanted to believe in the guilt of John as Ivan the Terrible. The world’s mass media asked hysterically for a death sentence and there was only John, his son, his son in law and his lawyer, Sheftel, who believed in John’s innocence.

And there was the criminal and fraudulent misleading of the American and Israelian courts. Since 1979 the Office of Special Investigation from the US Department of Justice, called OSI,  and the Israelian prosecutor withheld the existing evidence, that John was not Ivan the Terrible. OSI wanted the death sentence against a man, of whom they definitely knew, that he was innocent and not Ivan Grosny.

And it worked. They got, what they strictly wanted, the death sentence, by withholding the so called Danilchenko statements. Danilchenko was a Trawniki man, who was forced by the Nazis to be a guard in Sobibor. After the war he was repatriated to the Soviet Union and was there convicted as a traitor of his motherland and sentenced to 25 years in the Gulag.

After the manipulation was discovered, after it was established, that there was more material in the archives of the Russian KGB, the defense was able to find 36 statements of Treblinka guards, that Ivan Marschenko and not John Demjanjuk, was Ivan Grosny. The discovery of the manipulation was the reason for finding so much exculpatory material, that John had to be aquitted from being Ivan the Terrible. But for 5 years there was only an inch between John and the gallows.

Now let’s go to Munich:

The world and German mass media have already convicted John: The Nazi monster, the top of the list Nazi criminal, the mass murderer, Hitler, Eichmann, Demjanjuk, all the same.

The German prosecutor is now using the contents of the Danilchenko statement. For the prosecutor it is the most important piece of evidence, that John was serving in the death factory, that John was part and member of the joint criminal enterprise called Sobibor.

But the statement is only a piece of paper. Danilchenko and all the witnesses on behalf of Sobibor are dead. Danilchenko’s statement is the only one, which somehow brings John to Sobibor. All the survivors, all the other private guards, gave statements, that they never saw John in the death camp of Sobibor.

A piece of paper is no evidence of the truth of its content. You need the man, who gave the statement in the witness stand, to find out, if it is true what he said in the paper. If a man lies or not, if his statement was produced under torture in the KGB cellars or not, you can only find out, if you see the person, his face and his eyes, if you hear, what he has to say.

Danilchenko died in 1985. Twenty four years ago.

It is the fundamental and essential principle in all western criminal codes, that evidence from a simple statement on a piece of paper is not a legal possibility to prove guilt, if the accused and his lawyers did not have the chance to cross examine the witness. And that is exactly the case here.

It takes us back to the OSI manipulation, to withhold the Danilchenko statements for years. John’s lawyers would have had the right and the chance from 1979 until 1985, to cross examine Danilchenko, if OSI would not have withheld the statements from the defense and the courts. Because of the OSI manipulation John and his defense never had the chance, to prove, what was right and what was wrong in Danilchenko’s statements. For that the OSI is forever responsible and guilty. On purpose OSI destroyed the right of the defense to prove, that Danilchenko’s statement is not true or is a fake or was produced under torture of the KGB.

The withholding of the Danilchenko statement for more than 6 years - the same manipulation of OSI, which brought John into a death cell in Jerusalem for 5 years, now works in the German trial and is misused by the German prosecutor. The Danilchenko statements are the foundation for the indictment and the basis of John’s imprisonment, whose cell in Munich is probably his final, his second death cell...

The manipulation leads directly to the loss of the guarantee of a fair trial, protected in Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Let me come to a conclusion:

Germany against John Demjanjuk is not a fair trial at all. It is a political show, in which John is the victim. OSI wants the trial to show that John was not Ivan the Terrible, but a terrible Ivan.

Germany has already been trying for a long time to share the guilt for the Holocaust with other nations and Europe. Demjanjuk is their last possibility, the last face and the last name to make other nations, especially Ukraine, responsible for the incredible crimes of German Nazis and the Holocaust.

And the trial should satisfy those Jewish organizations which always wanted to see John -- if found guilty or not -- on the gallows.

My claim:

America and Germany: Stop this unfair trial. Bring John home. Let him die in peace in the bosom of his family.

Thank you for supporting John and the defense so strongly on this day.

Dr. Ulrich Busch
Attorney-at-Law
November 1, 2009