The Nazis Next Door (36 page)

Demjanjuk insisted they had the wrong man: he was a German prisoner of war, not Ivan the Terrible. He had never worked in a concentration camp, he insisted; Rosenberg and the other survivors were liars. The Israeli judges did not believe him. In the spring of 1988, the court found him guilty of crimes against humanity; the reading of the verdict aloud from the bench took ten full hours. A week later, the court sentenced him to death by hanging. “What punishment must be given this Ivan the Terrible?” one judge asked. “A man who killed both tens of thousands and individuals, who tortured and treated sadistically those taken to death in their last hour, what is his sentence? A thousand deaths cannot compensate
for what happened, but at least we have judged one of the angels of death. The human hand is unable to measure a punishment equal to the charges.” Israelis gathered around TVs at restaurants to listen, erupting in songs and cheers in the streets when the sentence came down.

Twelve years after he first identified Demjanjuk from the photo lineup at his warehouse, Eliyahu Rosenberg choked back tears when he heard the verdict. There was a measure of satisfaction in seeing Demjanjuk sentenced to death, he said, but “there is no verdict that can erase the crimes and murders he committed.”

The story could have ended there, with the man known as Ivan the Terrible—a living symbol of Nazi brutality—doomed to death in a moment of retribution for Israel and the world. America’s long tolerance of Nazis in its midst would have been rectified, on a triumphant note, with one of history’s worst killers finally receiving the ultimate punishment after living a quiet life in Cleveland for a quarter century. Eliyahu Rosenberg would have been vindicated, and justice would finally have been served.

But the story did not end there. Because John Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible.

Just as Justice Department prosecutor George Parker had warned eight years earlier, Demjanjuk had never even been at Treblinka. The evidence was clear that he was a Nazi guard at other German camps—at Sobibor, at Flossenbürg, and at Majdanek—but not at Treblinka. Just as Parker had foreshadowed, prosecutors had “the right man for the wrong crime.” Demjanjuk was indeed a small cog in the Nazis’ killing machine, but not its savage operator.

That such a grievous mistake was acknowledged at all was an unlikely testament to the ebbing of the Cold War. With relations between Russia and the West thawing under glasnost, Israeli lawyers were allowed to travel to Moscow to look at archival war records, even as Demjanjuk appealed his death sentence. There, the KGB turned over some eighty files that had been found in the basement of a secret police building in Kiev, including interviews the Russians conducted immediately after the war with more than thirty Nazi guards at Treblinka. The testimony from the guards—many of them later executed by the Russians for war crimes—identified the brutal gas-chamber operator known as Ivan the Terrible as a Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko, the same name that had surfaced years earlier in the case. American prosecutors had always thought that Ivan Marchenko and John “Ivan” Demjanjuk were the same man; Demjanjuk, after all, had even listed his mother’s maiden name as Marchenko. But the KGB files provided all sorts of details on this Ivan Marchenko that did not match Demjanjuk—his hometown, his birthdate, his military record, his family life, and more. The files even included a photo of this Ivan Marchenko; there was some resemblance in the photo to Demjanjuk, but Marchenko had a scar on his cheek, and darker hair. This man, last seen by his fellow Nazis leaving a brothel in Croatia months before the war ended in 1945, was clearly not John Demjanjuk.

Handed the new evidence, the Israeli judges saw no choice. Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, they concluded. He did appear to have served as an anonymous Nazi guard at other camps—an “accomplice to the Holocaust,” the judges called him—but there was no real indication of what he had done at any of the camps, and the court was not about to keep him in prison for it. That was not why he had been put on trial, the judges said. The United States had extradited him, and Israel had put him on death row, because he was thought to be Ivan the Terrible.

And so, in the summer of 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court threw out his conviction and declared John Demjanjuk a free man. He would soon be on his way home to Cleveland after nearly eight years in prison, much of it in isolation in a barren cell in Jerusalem.

Few could have predicted an ending like this, with one ironic turn after another. It was, after all, the Soviets—accused by Pat Buchanan of forging Demjanjuk’s Nazi identification card to implicate Demjanjuk—who had produced the long-buried documents that ultimately cleared him. It was the Israelis, so anxious to bring another big war crimes case, who had ultimately set Demjanjuk free after his own country declared him Ivan the Terrible. And it was the Americans, sluggish for so long in pursuing suspected Nazis, who were shown to have gone after this one too aggressively.

In the United States, Neal Sher and prosecutors in his Nazi office were smarting from the setback, but still unwilling to let the case go. They were determined to see if Demjanjuk could be prosecuted for serving as a guard at Sobibor and other Nazi camps. But first, they had to deal with the fallout from the collapse of the Israeli case. The postmortems into what went wrong began even before Israel sent Demjanjuk back to America. Judge Merritt and his fellow judges on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ordered a full investigation into whether the Justice Department’s Nazi office had misled the courts in stripping Demjanjuk of his citizenship. Six separate ethics investigations into the prosecutors’ conduct were opened. A jubilant Buchanan took aim
at the Nazi hunters at the Justice Department, who he said “were desperate to prove [Demjanjuk] was ‘Ivan the Terrible’” and “are responsible for the destruction of this man’s life and career.”

George Parker’s 1980 memo figured prominently in assessing the wreckage of the case. It suggested that higher-ups had ignored early warning signs that Demjanjuk might not be Ivan the Terrible. Then there were clues found in the trash that the Justice Department’s adversaries pilfered years earlier from the dumpster behind the building. At the trial, one key piece of evidence came from the positive identification of a German worker, who reportedly said “that is him” with confidence when shown a photo of Demjanjuk. But the raw notes taken during the photo lineup—retrieved from the trash—indicated that the witness was not nearly so certain as prosecutors made him out to be, and actually seemed unable to pick out Demjanjuk
the first time as a guard at Treblinka.

A federal judge in Tennessee, Thomas Wiseman Jr., spent six months reviewing hundreds of pieces of evidence in the case and interviewing witnesses to determine what had gone so wrong. The ultimate findings were damning for the Justice Department. Judge Wiseman concluded that prosecutors played “hardball” in keeping evidence from Demjanjuk’s lawyers and “were blinded
to what we may now perceive to be the truth”—not willfully so, he said, but blind nonetheless.

At the appeals court in Cincinnati, Judge Merritt and the two other judges who reviewed Wiseman’s findings were far less forgiving. They concluded that Justice Department prosecutors “acted with reckless disregard for the truth” by assuming Demjanjuk’s guilt even in the face of evidence that pointed to another man as Ivan the Terrible. The government’s failure to turn over evidence that might have exonerated Demjanjuk, the judges concluded, amounted to “fraud on the court.”

Even worse for the Justice Department, the judges said in their blistering ruling that they believed political pressure from Jewish groups and others was partly to blame for the department’s “reckless” prosecution. As evidence, the judges cited a memo that Allan Ryan had written about how his Nazi office had secured “support from Jewish organizations,” and they also pointed to a ten-day trip Ryan had taken to Israel for a lecture tour paid for by the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish group. “It is obvious from the record,” the appeals court said, “that the prevailing mindset at [the Nazi office] was that the office must try to please and maintain very close relationships with various interest groups because their continued existence depended upon it.” Privately, Judge Merritt was appalled. He had never seen a prosecution that, in his view, was so tainted by outside politics. When Neal Sher left the Nazi office the very next year to become executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of Washington’s most influential lobbying groups, the move only confirmed in the judge’s mind that the Justice Department had indeed become too close to Jewish groups.

The court’s suggestion of undue political influence by Jewish groups hit prosecutors in their most vulnerable spot. Justice Department officials had always been acutely aware of the perception in some quarters—unjust though they thought it was—that they were essentially an arm of Jewish advocacy groups, with a common agenda and a revolving door between them. Now here was a federal appeals court charging not only that prosecutors had botched the landmark case, but that they had done so recklessly because of Jewish pressure. Prosecutors were furious over the charge. The ruling, Jewish leaders said, perpetuated hurtful stereotypes about Jewish influence and “offered fodder
to the anti-Semites among us.” So raw were the emotions that Sher would go on to accuse Judge Merritt of “an obsession with Jews”; the court’s comments on Jewish pressure, Sher charged, reflected ideas usually heard only among “hate mongerers and neo-Nazis.”
In the midst of the Demjanjuk fallout, the Clinton administration floated Judge Merritt’s name as a possible Supreme Court nominee. Jewish groups howled, in no small part because of his handling of the Demjanjuk case, and the idea stalled. Things had indeed gotten personal. What had started years earlier as the high-profile prosecution of a Nazi guard had now become something much different: an ugly battle over dueling charges of zealotry at the Justice Department and anti-Semitism at the courts.

Allan Ryan, for his part, had left the Justice Department a decade earlier and was now working at Harvard, but he was still furious over the appeals court’s findings, particularly the reference to his paid trip to Israel. “What the fuck are they talking about!” Ryan yelled
when he read the line. He had gone on the trip four years
after
he left the government; he was a private citizen, and the trip had nothing to do with what had happened in the case, he seethed. He demanded that Judge Merritt and the court correct the record over what he saw as an unfair attack on his character. They never did.

It was a dark time indeed for the once high-flying Nazi hunters. Before this, Eli Rosenbaum, the second-ranking official at the time, had always been proud to tell people that he was a lawyer for the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting team. For him, it was a righteous cause. He had worked to expel Nazi rocket scientist Arthur Rudolph from the country. He had sat with Holocaust survivors in Israel and heard their poignant stories. He had even kept a piece of Joseph Mengele’s scalp locked in his desk drawer to try to determine if the “Angel of Death” had really died in Brazil in 1979. (He had.) Rosenbaum had always reveled in the job. Now, however, when he told people outside the Justice Department that he worked for the Office of Special Investigations, he was often met with a look of discomfort.
“Oh, Demjanjuk?” people would ask, if they could pronounce the name. Or simply, “Ivan the Terrible?” Sometimes it was a look of sympathy, as one might reserve for the victim of a terrible accident. Other times it was a look of scorn over a case that had become so notorious. Rosenbaum was quick to tell people that he had nothing to do with the Demjanjuk prosecution himself. But the reputation of the office that he now helped lead was, by his own admission, “in the toilet.”
Dozens of successful Nazi investigations had been overshadowed by a single, massive failure. Now, when people asked Rosenbaum what he did for a living, he no longer mentioned the Nazi team. He would simply say that he worked for the Justice Department. He didn’t want to get into the rest of it.

14

The Road to Ponary

September 1993

VILNIUS, LITHUANIA

The bastard must have signed his name somewhere. A scrap of paper, a death warrant, an order rounding up the Jews—there must have been
something
with that name scrawled at the bottom:
Aleksandras Lileikis
. But if it was there, Mike MacQueen wasn’t finding it.
MacQueen, a racecar driver turned historian for the Justice Department’s Nazi team, had spent days rummaging through the dog-eared war files at the archives in Lithuania, but he was coming up empty.

This was the fourth trip to Lithuania in the last few years for MacQueen, who had taught himself Lithuanian just for the job. The secrets held in the Vilnius archives, opened up to American researchers after the fall of the Soviet Union two years earlier, had turned up plenty of grim, eye-popping details about the Nazi massacres in the Baltics, but nothing on the man MacQueen most wanted to nail: Lileikis, the onetime chief of Lithuania’s security police and a proud Massachusetts resident for the last thirty-five years.

The old man had practically dared the Justice Department’s Nazi hunters to find something on him when Eli Rosenbaum had first come knocking on his door in Boston years earlier. Sure, his men in Vilnius might have rounded up Jews, Lileikis had scoffed, but that didn’t mean he had ordered it. He knew nothing about any executions, he told Rosenbaum. “Show me something
that I signed,” he had said in that cool, defiant manner of his. He was taunting them. He knew if the prosecutors couldn’t find evidence that he played some active role in the massacres in Lithuania all those years ago, they had no case. MacQueen figured that unless he could find something on him, Lileikis would live out his days in America.

As he scoured the records, MacQueen was growing frustrated. In Vilnius, the Nazis had wiped out one of the great meccas of Jewish civilization in all of Europe, machine-gunning to death nearly all of the city’s sixty thousand Jewish men, women, and children at a notorious pit outside town. It was inconceivable to him that the chief of the special security police—the dreaded Saugumas force—wasn’t involved. Could there really be nothing with his John Hancock on it? Impossible, MacQueen thought. The Nazis wrote down everything, a macabre testament to their own brutality. He knew that the Germans had burned many of their records as they fled Vilnius, but still, there must be
something
that survived with Lileikis’s stamp of approval on it.