Accused ‘Ivan the Terrible’ to Learn His Fate Today : Israel: Court could confirm Demjanjuk death sentence. Or it could free him as case of mistaken identity.

JERUSALEM —  John Demjanjuk, convicted five years ago of murdering thousands of Jews at the Nazi death camp at Treblinka during World War II, could be set free today by the Israeli Supreme Court.

Or, he could hear his original sentence of death by hanging confirmed as Treblinka’s “Ivan the Terrible,” the hated guard who packed Jews into the camp’s gas chamber and delighted in tormenting them as he did.

The basic issue before the court, in a case that has brought back the Holocaust with all its horrifying memories for many survivors, is whether Demjanjuk is, in fact, “Ivan the Terrible.”

Despite a dramatic identification of Demjanjuk during his trial by five Treblinka survivors, evidence emerged later from files of the Soviet Union that the real “Ivan” was probably Ivan Marchenko, last seen in Yugoslavia at the end of World War II.

“This is a tragic case of mistaken identity, as we have contended all along,” said Yoram Sheftel, Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer. “Think what you want of John Demjanjuk, but he is not Ivan the Terrible. The Supreme Court, thus, has no option but to throw out, at long last, all charges against him.”

John Demjanjuk Jr., 28, visited his father in Ayalon Prison outside Tel Aviv this week and said that Demjanjuk is in high spirits, convinced he will be freed and even optimistic that he will soon be back in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife, three children and grandchildren.

But much of the new evidence also placed Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, now 73, as a guard at Sobibor, another Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, and at the training base where the Nazis turned war prisoners into guards for Treblinka and Sobibor.

“I am persuaded that John Demjanjuk is not Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, but most probably he is Ivan the Terrible of Sobibor,” Israeli author Tom Segev, a specialist on the Holocaust, said before the court ruling.

“In that sense, he is the right man convicted of the wrong crime.”

Under Israeli law, the court may still find Demjanjuk guilty of “crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes against persecuted people,” all charges brought against him as the Treblinka “Ivan,” but now for activities at Sobibor.

The court has a range of options, including complete exoneration, acquittal based on a reasonable doubt about his identity, conviction on alternative charges or confirmation of his conviction and the sentence.

The one option regarded as least likely, most Israeli legal commentators say, would be exoneration on the Treblinka charges but a completely new trial for Sobibor-related crimes.

“The court and the country as a whole want to be done with this case,” Segev said. “It has gone on long enough.”

Israeli legal commentators say that, based on new evidence heard during the appeal, the deliberations over the past year and a decision that reportedly runs more than 500 pages, the five Supreme Court judges may have found him guilty on the alternative, Sobibor charges. “The impulse will be to do justice,” Segev said, “and there must be justice for both history and for Demjanjuk. We know now that he was not at Treblinka, but we also have learned he was at Sobibor.”

But Zeev Segal, a law lecturer at Tel Aviv University, cautioned that such a conviction would raise serious legal questions: Did Demjanjuk have a “reasonable opportunity” to defend himself against the Sobibor charges, which were not at the center of his trial, and would such a conviction violate the terms of his 1986 extradition from the United States?

Sheftel argued that the terms of Demjanjuk’s extradition prohibited trial or conviction on any basis except the charge that he was “Ivan the Terrible.” In convicting Demjanjuk, a special Israeli court had found that, as “Ivan the Terrible,” he “filled a central role in the Treblinka death camp. He participated with his own hands in the mass murder of human beings, and he did so willingly displaying initiative beyond that required by his superiors.”

The case began when Demjanjuk’s name was included on a list--given to several senators in October, 1975--of suspected Nazi war criminals living in the United States. An investigation by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service led to a review of Demjanjuk’s original application for an immigrant visa.

It broadened into an investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and Israel’s war crimes bureau. That grew into the first of a series of legal actions, the 1981 revocation of his U.S. citizenship.

To the surprise of Israeli investigators, who had assumed Demjanjuk to have been an ordinary concentration or death camp guard, Treblinka survivors had identified him as “Ivan the Terrible,” the operator of the gas chamber at Treblinka where 850,000 Jews were killed. The nickname recalled the notoriously brutal 16th-Century Russian ruler, Ivan IV.

“For us, Ivan the Terrible was worse than Adolf Eichmann in many ways,” Segev said. “To Eichmann, Jews were paper, a plan, a program, but this Ivan was someone who actually killed Jews, who did it with his hands and who did it by the thousands.”

When Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker, was extradited to Israel in February, 1986, Israeli officials declared him the biggest war criminal to be brought to trial since Eichmann was tried, convicted and executed here in 1962 for his role in planning and carrying out the Nazis’ program of genocide.

Through most of the trial, burly, bald Demjanjuk sat impassively listening to testimony. He and his lawyers did not dispute the crimes of “Ivan,” but they insisted--and still do--that he was a German prisoner during most of the war and not Ivan.

The appeal brought surprises. Israeli prosecutors obtained new, unexpected evidence from the Soviet Union suggesting that Ivan Marchenko was the Ivan of Treblinka. Sworn statements by 37 Treblinka guards captured by the Red Army and interrogated by the KGB, the Soviet security and intelligence agency, contradicted camp survivors’ testimony.

Demjanjuk’s lawyers argued that, since the entire case against him was built on his being “Ivan” and that this was the basis of his conviction, any doubts about his identity required his acquittal.

New evidence also emerged in the appeal hearings showing, prosecutors said, that he had, indeed, been recruited as a Nazi SS guard after his capture while fighting in the Red Army in 1941, and these documents appeared to place him at Sobibor, where 250,000 Jews were killed.

Over a year and a half, the prosecution and defense introduced 467 exhibits and the testimony ran to 10,684 pages in Hebrew.

Key Dates in the Case Against Demjanjuk

Who is the man accused as “Ivan the Terrible,” the reputed operator of the gas chambers at Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in eastern Poland during World War II? John Demjanjuk was once simply a retired Cleveland auto worker. But according to an elaborate case constructed against him, he was born Ivan Nikolaievich Demyanjuk in Dub Makrenzy, Ukraine, in April, 1920. He was convicted in Israel five years ago of “crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against a persecuted people and war crimes” after a long trial. Here are key events and dates, many disputed, in the case:

* 1941: Demjanjuk, a tractor driver on a collective farm, is conscripted at age 21 into the Red Army after the German attack on the Soviet Union.

* May, 1942: Demjanjuk is captured by Germans in the Crimea at Battle of Kerch. He claims to have been a prisoner of war first in Rovno, Ukraine, and later in Chelm, Poland, for most of war. But according to trial evidence, denied by Demjanjuk, he was trained as a guard for Nazi SS prison camps at Trawniki, Poland; in fall, 1942, he was assigned to guard duty at Treblinka.

* July, 1942-August, 1943: About 850,000 Jews and thousands of others were put to death in Treblinka. A guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” ran the gas chambers, beating and mutilating men, women and children as they went to their deaths. Israel says Demjanjuk was sent to another death camp, Sobibor, also in Poland, in March, 1943.

* November, 1944-May, 1945: Demjanjuk says he went from the Chelm POW camp to join the Ukrainian Division, then the Russian Liberation Army, both formed by the Nazi anti-Communists to fight the Soviet armed forces. Unit surrenders to U.S. Army at end of war.

* May, 1945: Demjanjuk becomes a driver for postwar relief organizations and then the U.S. Army in Germany.

* October, 1950: Applies to emigrate to the United States claiming he was a farmer in Sobibor from 1936 to 1943. He later said he lied to avoid repatriation to Soviet Union.

* Feb. 9, 1952: Demjanjuk enters the United States.

* 1958-77: Lives in the Cleveland area, raises a family and works at Ford Motor Co.

* Aug. 25, 1977: U.S. Justice Department seeks to revoke his citizenship, alleging he hid a past as a Nazi SS death camp guard.

* June 23, 1981: U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti revokes Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship.

* Feb. 28, 1986: Secretary of State George Shultz authorizes Demjanjuk’s extradition to Israel on murder charges.

* April 25, 1988: A week after finding Demjanjuk guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, an Israeli court sentences him to death.

* June 30, 1988: Demjanjuk appeals conviction, contending that another Ukrainian, named Ivan Marchenko, was “Ivan the Terrible” and that Demjanjuk is the victim of mistaken identity.

* June 5, 1992: The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati reopens Demjanjuk’s extradition case, saying extradition warrant may have been based on erroneous information.

* Aug. 17, 1992: 6th Circuit appoints U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Wiseman “special master” to investigate Justice Department actions during Demjanjuk’s extradition hearings.

* June 30, 1993: Wiseman upholds Demjanjuk’s 1986 deportation to Israel but says evidence from the former Soviet Union casts doubt on whether he is “Ivan the Terrible.” While Demjanjuk served at Trawniki, former guards at Treblinka and others identified Marchenko, not Demjanjuk, as “Ivan the Terrible.”

Source: Times staff