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181-523: John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demjanjuk ; 3 April 1920 – 17 March 2012) was a Trawniki man and Nazi camp guard at Sobibor extermination camp , Majdanek , and Flossenbürg . Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, when he was tried and convicted in Israel after being misidentified as " Ivan the Terrible ", a notoriously cruel watchman at Treblinka extermination camp . In 1993

362-460: A Treblinka prisoner uprising . During the trial, Demjanjuk was again identified on the photo spread by Otto Horn, a former German SS guard at Treblinka. Other controversial evidence included Demjanjuk's tattoo. Demjanjuk admitted the scar under his armpit was an SS blood group tattoo , which he removed after the war, as did many SS men to avoid summary execution by the Soviets. The blood group tattoo

543-611: A naturalized citizen of the United States and legally changed his name from Ivan to John. In 1975, Michael Hanusiak, the American editor of Ukrainian News , presented US Senator Jacob Javits of New York with a list of 70 ethnic Ukrainians living in the United States who were suspected of having collaborated with Germans in World War II; Javits sent the list to US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Its investigation reduced

724-648: A 15-year-old goldsmith prodigy named Shlomo Szmajzner , who made them rings and monograms from gold extracted from the teeth of gas chamber victims. During post-war trials, SS officers from all of the Operation Reinhard camps claimed that they would have been executed if they had not participated in the murders. However, the judges in the Treblinka trial could not find any evidence of SS officers being executed for desertion, and at least one Sobibor officer ( Alfred Ittner ) successfully got himself transferred. Sobibor

905-521: A Friday evening?" On either 16 or 18 May 1942, Sobibor became fully operational and began mass gassings. Trains entered the railway siding with the unloading platform, and the Jews on board were told they were in a transit camp. They were forced to hand over their valuables, were separated by sex and told to undress. The nude women and girls, recoiling in shame, were met by the Jewish workers who cut off their hair in

1086-578: A German federal court declared that Demjanjuk could be tried for his role in the Holocaust. Some three months later, on 11 March 2009, Demjanjuk was charged with more than 29,000 counts of accessory to murder of Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor extermination camp. The German foreign ministry announced on 2 April 2009 that Demjanjuk would be transferred to Germany the following week, and would face trial beginning 30 November 2009. On 2 April 2009, Demjanjuk filed

1267-425: A US citizen in 1958. In 1977, Demjanjuk was accused of having been a Trawniki man. Based on eyewitness testimony by Holocaust survivors in Israel, he was misidentified as the notorious Ivan the Terrible from Treblinka. Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 for trial. In 1988, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death. He maintained his innocence, claiming that it was a case of mistaken identity . In 1993

1448-459: A Ukrainian guard at Treblinka, which stated that Fedorenko could not recall having seen Demjanjuk at Treblinka. Demjanjuk's citizenship was revoked in 1981 for having lied about his past, with the judge persuaded especially by the testimony of Otto Horn. In 1982, Demjanjuk was jailed for 10 days after failing to appear for a hearing. Demjanjuk subsequently requested political asylum in the United States rather than deportation. His application for asylum

1629-503: A cement base at Sobibor in the presence of SS officers Floss , Bauer , Stangl , and Barbl , and connected the engine exhaust manifold to pipes leading to the gas chamber. In mid-April 1942, the Nazis conducted experimental gassings in the nearly finished camp. Christian Wirth , the commander of Bełżec and Inspector of Operation Reinhard , visited Sobibor to witness one of these gassings, which murdered thirty to forty Jewish women brought from

1810-532: A concentration camp guard, and his citizenship was revoked in 2002. In 2009, Germany requested his extradition for over 27,900 counts of acting as an accessory to murder : one for each person killed at Sobibor during the time when he was alleged to have served there as a guard. He was deported from the US to Germany in that same year. In 2011, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. According to legal scholar Lawrence Douglas , in spite of serious missteps along

1991-527: A cover story. OSI was unable to establish Demjanjuk's whereabouts from December 1944 to the end of the war. After the end of the war, Demjanjuk spent time in several displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany. Initially, Demjanjuk hoped to emigrate to Argentina or Canada; however, under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 , he applied to move to the United States. His application stated that he had worked as

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2172-463: A daily allowance of 18 ℛℳ, and special bonuses including a Judenmordzulage (Jew murder supplement). In all, an officer at Sobibor could earn 600 ℛℳ per month in pay. In addition to the official compensation, a job at Sobibor offered endless opportunities for the SS officers to covertly enrich themselves by exploiting the labour and stealing the possessions of their victims. In one case, the SS officers enslaved

2353-445: A deposition that such cards were standard issue at Trawniki. Five Holocaust survivors from Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka and having been "Ivan the Terrible." Additionally, OSI submitted the testimony of former SS guard Horn identifying Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka. Although Demjanjuk's Trawniki card only documented that he had been at Sobibor, the prosecution argued that he could have shuttled between

2534-426: A driver in the town of Sobibór in eastern Poland. (The nearby Sobibor extermination camp was named after the village.) Demjanjuk later claimed this was a coincidence, and said that he picked the name "Sobibor" from an atlas owned by a fellow applicant because it had a large Soviet population. Historian Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg noted in regard to Demjanjuk that Nazi war criminals sometimes tried to evade prosecution after

2715-401: A few months. In total, some 170,000 to 250,000 people were murdered at Sobibor, making it the fourth-deadliest Nazi camp after Auschwitz , Treblinka , and Belzec . The camp ceased operation after a prisoner revolt which took place on 14 October 1943. The plan for the revolt involved two phases. In the first phase, teams of prisoners were to discreetly assassinate each of the SS officers. In

2896-602: A guard at Sobibor. Demjanjuk was tried without any connection to a concrete act of murder or cruelty, but rather on the theory that as a guard at Sobibor he was per se guilty of murder, a novelty in the German justice system that was seen as risky for the prosecution. Some 35 plaintiffs were admitted to file in the case, including four survivors of the Sobibor concentration camp and 26 relatives of victims. The indictment made almost no mention of Demjanjuk's service at Majdanek or Flossenbürg, as these were not extermination camps. Demjanjuk

3077-440: A guard. When asked to identify Demjanjuk in the courtroom, however, Nagorny was unable to, stating "That's definitely not him – no resemblance." As Nagorny had previously identified Demjanjuk from his US visa application photo, his inability to recognize Demjanjuk in the courtroom was seen as incongruous. Demjanjuk declined to testify or make a final statement during the trial. He would, however, deliver three written declarations to

3258-454: A hair salon and a canteen. The Nazis paid great attention to the appearance of the Vorlager . It was neatly landscaped, with lawns and gardens, outdoor terraces, gravel-lined paths, and professionally painted signs. This idyllic appearance helped hide the nature of the camp from prisoners, who would arrive on the adjacent ramp. Survivor Jules Schelvis recalled feeling reassured upon arrival by

3439-546: A hearing on 8 July 1985, Demjanjuk's defense attorneys claimed that the evidence against him had been manufactured by the KGB , that Demjanjuk was never at Treblinka, and that the court had no authority to consider Israel's request for extradition. The appeals court found probable cause that Demjanjuk "committed murders of uncounted numbers of prisoners" and allowed the extradition to take place. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Demjanjuk's appeal on 25 February 1986, allowing

3620-516: A high-ranking position in Odilo Globočnik 's construction department. Having previously overseen the construction of Bełżec extermination camp , he applied lessons learned there to Sobibor. Thomalla allotted a much larger area for Sobibor than he had for Bełżec, allowing more room to maneuver as well as providing space for all of the camp's facilities to be constructed within its perimeter. The camp incorporated several pre-war buildings including

3801-673: A letter from the OSI. His son Edwin said he'd been terrified of being put through the same ordeal as Demjanjuk. The prosecution team consisted of Israeli State Attorney Yonah Blatman, lead attorney Michael Shaked of the Jerusalem District Attorney's Office, and the attorneys Michael Horovitz and Dennis Gouldman of the International Section of the State Attorney's Office. According to prosecutors, Demjanjuk had been recruited into

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3982-404: A lower ranking kapo named Herbert Naftaniel. Naftaniel, nicknamed "Berliner", was promoted to Oberkapo and became a notorious figure in the camp. He viewed himself as German rather than Jewish, and began a reign of terror which came to an end shortly before the revolt, when a group of prisoners beat him to death with SS-Oberscharfuhrer Karl Frenzel 's permission. Despite these divisions in

4163-686: A major part in Operation Reinhard , the Nazi plan to exterminate Jews . They also served at extermination camps and played an important role in the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (see the Stroop Report ), among others. In 1941 Himmler instructed SS officer Odilo Globocnik to start recruiting mainly Ukrainian auxiliaries among the Soviet POWs, due to ongoing close relations with

4344-491: A mere half a minute. Among the Friseur (barbers) was Toivi Blatt (age 15). The condemned prisoners, formed into groups, were led along the 100-metre (330 ft) long "Road to Heaven" ( Himmelstrasse ) to the gas chambers, where they were murdered using carbon monoxide released from the exhaust pipes of a tank engine. During his trial, SS- Oberscharführer Kurt Bolender described the killing operations as follows: Before

4525-787: A motion in an immigration trial court in Virginia . The motion sought to reopen the matter of the removal order against him; that order of removal had been originally issued by an immigration court in 2005, had been upheld by the BIA on administrative appeal in late 2006, and was further upheld by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals; after these two appeals, the US Supreme Court had, as noted above, denied any review. On 3 April 2009, US Immigration Judge Wayne Iskra temporarily stayed Demjanjuk's deportation, but reversed himself three days later, on 6 April. As

4706-717: A motion in the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit asking that the deportation be stayed, which was subsequently granted. The Government argued that the Court of Appeals has no jurisdiction to review the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which denied the stay. Demjanjuk later won a last-minute stay of deportation, shortly after US immigration agents carried him from his home in a wheelchair to face trial in Germany. The BIA denied Demjanjuk's motion to reopen his deportation case. On 1 May 2009,

4887-504: A pharmacy, whose contents were also taken from victims' luggage. On the farm, Jewish prisoners raised chickens, pigs, geese, fruits and vegetables for consumption by the SS men. Outside the Erbhof , Lager II contained facilities where new arrivals were prepared before being murdered. It contained the sorting barracks and other buildings used for storing items taken from the victims, including clothes, food, hair, gold, and other valuables. At

5068-427: A post office, a forester's lodge, a forestry tower, and a chapel. The forester's lodge became the camp administration building, while the post office was used as lodging for the SS (though not, as commonly reported, for the commandant). The former post office, located near the railroad tracks, still stands today. The SS adapted the preexisting railroad infrastructure, adding an 800-meter railroad spur that ended inside

5249-675: A prison interview with Kazimierz Moczarski , published in his original Polish edition of the Conversations with an Executioner : Trawniki personnel was also used in the August 1943 suppression of the Białystok Ghetto Uprising , as well as the lesser-known Mizocz Ghetto uprising of October 1942 among similar others. In other locations, the lists compiled by the local Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung enabled them to quickly and precisely identify their Jewish targets. The Trawniki training camp

5430-461: A special unit of Jewish prisoners was forced to assist in the extermination process. Its tasks included removing bodies, searching cavities for valuables, scrubbing blood and excrement from the gas chambers, and cremating the corpses. Because the prisoners who belonged to this unit were direct witnesses to genocide , they were strictly isolated from other prisoners and the SS would periodically liquidate those unit members who had not already succumbed to

5611-556: A study of the Trawniki men serving at death camps, claimed that there was little sign of any attraction to National Socialism among them. He claimed that most of the guards volunteered in order to leave the POW camps and/or because of self-interest. On the other hand, the Holocaust historian Christopher R. Browning wrote that Hiwis "were screened on the basis of their anti-Communist and hence almost invariably anti-Semitic sentiments ." Despite

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5792-575: A variety of other jobs. Many worked in the Lager II sorting barracks, where they were forced to comb through luggage left behind by gas chamber victims, repackaging valuable items as "charity gifts" for German civilians. These workers could also be called on to serve in the railway brigade which greeted new prisoners. The railway brigade was considered a relatively appealing job, since it gave famished workers access to luggage which often contained food. Younger prisoners commonly worked as putzers , cleaning for

5973-437: A water-filled trench. Lager II was a larger multi-purpose compound. One subsection called the " Erbhof " contained the administration building, as well as a small farm. The administration building was a pre-war structure previously used by the local Polish forestry service. As part of the camp, this building was adapted to provide accommodation for some SS officers, storage for goods stolen from victims' luggage, as well as

6154-554: A week before he was scheduled to testify at his trial. In his place, Demjanjuk hired Israeli trial lawyer Yoram Sheftel whom O'Connor had hired as co-counsel. Sheftel focused the defense largely on the claim that Demjanjuk's Trawniki card was a KGB forgery. Most significantly, Sheftel called Dr. Julius Grant , who had proven that the Hitler diaries were forged. Grant testified that the document had been forged. He also called Dutch psychologist Willem Albert Wagenaar , who testified to flaws in

6335-421: Is Ivan from Treblinka, from the gas chambers, the man I am looking at now." "I saw his eyes, I saw those murderous eyes", Rosenberg told the court, glaring at Demjanjuk. Rosenberg then exclaimed directly to Demjanjuk: "How dare you put out your hand, murderer that you are!" It was later learned that Eliyahu Rosenberg had previously testified in a 1947 deposition that "Ivan the Terrible" had been killed in 1943 during

6516-465: Is known for certain about the early planning for Sobibor in particular. Some historians have speculated that planning began as early as 1940, on the basis of a railway map from that year which omits several major cities but includes Sobibór and Bełżec . The earliest hard evidence for Nazi interest in the site comes from the testimony of local Poles, who noticed in Autumn 1941 that SS officers were surveying

6697-483: Is unknown to what extent these were Polish or Jewish forced labourers. After Thomalla's arrival, the Jewish council in nearby Włodawa was ordered to send 150 Jews to assist in the construction of the camp. These workers were constantly harassed as they worked, and were shot if they showed signs of exhaustion. Most were murdered upon completion of construction, but two escaped back to Włodawa , where they attempted to warn

6878-661: The Hiwis , saw the Christian Poles as equal opportunity offenders. When they got too drunk to show up in Aleksandrów , Major Wilhelm Trapp ordered the release of prisoners rounded up for mass execution. The SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop who was in charge of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the methodical destruction of the Ghetto itself – responsible for the massacre of over 50,000 Polish Jews – later remarked in

7059-455: The Jewish council about the camp and its purpose. Their warnings were met with disbelief. The first gas chambers at Sobibor were built following the model of those at Belzec, but without any furnaces. To provide the carbon monoxide gas, SS-Scharführer Erich Fuchs acquired a heavy gasoline engine in Lemberg , disassembled from an armoured vehicle or a tractor. Fuchs installed the engine on

7240-580: The Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland shooting everyone unable to move or attempting to flee, while the Trawnikis conducted large-scale civilian massacres in the same locations. Auxiliaries were not allowed to wear German uniforms or insignia, carry German weapons, or use German ranks. This was mostly for political reasons. The racial policies of Nazi Germany regarded Slavs as subhuman and not deserving to be treated as German soldiers. There

7421-628: The Justice Department filed a complaint against Demjanjuk to seek his denaturalization. The complaint alleged that Demjanjuk served as a guard at the Sobibór and Majdanek camps in Poland under German occupation and as a member of an SS death's head battalion at Flossenbürg. The complaint relied on evidence compiled by historians Charles W. Sydnor, Jr. and Todd Huebner, who compared Demjanjuk's Trawniki card to 40 other known cards and found that issues on

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7602-603: The Ku Klux Klan . Even before his acquittal by the Israeli Supreme Court, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had opened an investigation into whether OSI had withheld evidence from the defense. The investigation charged that OSI had ignored evidence indicating that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, and uncovered an internal OSI memo that questioned the case against Demjanjuk. After Demjanjuk's acquittal in Israel,

7783-474: The Operation Reinhard extermination camps Trawniki Hiwi men served as the Sonderkommando guard units (between 70 and 120 depending on location) and were selected to act as the gas chambers operators. They came under the jurisdiction of the relevant camp commandant. Almost all of the Trawniki guards were involved in shooting, beating, and terrorizing Jews. The Russian historian Sergei Kudryashov, who made

7964-666: The Russian Liberation Army (Vlasov Army), funded by the Nazi German government, until the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies in 1945. Following closing statements, the defense also submitted the statement of Ignat Danilchenko, information which had been obtained through the US Freedom of Information but had not previously been made available to the defense by OSI. Danilchenko was a former guard at Sobibor and had been deposed by

8145-582: The Sonderkommando prisoners who worked there. Lager IV (also called the Nordlager ) was added in July 1943, and was still under construction at the time of the revolt. Located in a heavily wooded area to the north of the other camps, it was being developed as a munitions depot for processing arms taken from Red Army soldiers. Because Sobibor was an extermination camp , the only prisoners who lived there were

8326-537: The USS ; General W. G. Haan on 9 February 1952. They moved to Indiana , and later settled in the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, Ohio . There he became a United Auto Workers (UAW) diesel engine mechanic at the nearby Ford automobile factory, where a friend from Regensburg had found work. His wife found work at a General Electric facility, and the two had two more children. On 14 November 1958, Demjanjuk became

8507-588: The United Nations Relief Administration to list a place in Poland or Czechoslovakia in order to avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union, after which another Soviet refugee waiting with him suggested Demjanjuk list Sobibor. Demjanjuk also said, "Your Honors, if I had really been in that terrible place, would I have been stupid enough to say so?" Demjanjuk further claimed that in 1944 he was drafted into an anti-Soviet Russian military organization,

8688-419: The Vorlager's "Tyrolean cottage-like barracks with their bright little curtains and geraniums on the windowsills". Lager I contained barracks and workshops for the prisoners. These workshops included a tailor's shop, a carpenter's shop, a mechanic's shop, a sign-painter's shop, and a bakery. Lager I was accessible only through the adjacent Vorlager , and its western boundary was made escape-proof with

8869-477: The denaturalization trial was accompanied by a protest of 150 Ukrainian-Americans who called the trial "a Soviet trial in an American court" and burned a Soviet flag. Demjanjuk also attracted the support of conservative political figures such as Pat Buchanan and Ohio congressman James Traficant . Others, particularly American Jews, were outraged by the presence of Demjanjuk in the United States and vocally supported his deportation. Writer Lawrence Douglas has called

9050-733: The invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Germans began implementing the Nisko Plan in which Jews were deported from ghettos across Europe to the forced labour camps which comprised the Lublin Reservation . Lublin District region was chosen in particular for its inhospitable conditions. The Nisko Plan was abandoned in 1940, but many forced labour camps continued operations in the area, including Trawniki , Lipowa 7 , and Dorohucza . In 1941,

9231-552: The occupied territory . From there, the Hiwi shooters were deployed to all major killing sites of the Final Solution . It was their primary purpose of training. They took an active role in the extermination of Jews at Belzec , Sobibor , Treblinka II , Warsaw (three times), Częstochowa , Lublin , Lvov , Radom , Kraków , Białystok (twice), Majdanek as well as Auschwitz , not to mention Trawniki concentration camp itself, and

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9412-448: The 14 year old goldsmith Shlomo Szmajzner and regarded his post-war trial testimony as a personal betrayal. Stangl particularly objected to the implication that his habit of bringing Smajzner sausages on the sabbath had been a deliberate attempt to torment the starving teenager. Szmajzner himself was not sure of Stangl's intentions: "it's perfectly true that he seemed to like me... still, it was funny, wasn't it, that he always brought it on

9593-464: The BIA. On 10 April, the BIA found there was "little likelihood of success that [Demjanjuk's] pending motion to re-open the case will be granted" and accordingly denied his motion for a stay pending the disposition of his motion to reopen. This removed any obstacles to federal agents seizing him for deportation to Germany. On 14 April 2009, immigration agents removed Demjanjuk from his home in preparation for deportation. The same day, Demjanjuk's son filed

9774-579: The Eastern Front. The officer's compound in the camp had a canteen, a bowling alley, and a barber shop. The "officers' country club" was a short distance away, on nearby Perepsza Lake. Each SS man was allowed three weeks of leave every three months, which they could spend at Haus Schoberstein , an SS-owned resort in the Austrian town of Weissenbach on Lake Attersee . Moreover, the job could be lucrative: each officer received base pay of 58 ℛℳ per month, plus

9955-613: The Germans and the foreign SS troops". In Saurel's account Ukrainians are not mentioned at all, and probably fall under the category of "and so on". The Trawniki-men were assembled at a training facility adjacent to the Trawniki concentration camp built for the Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto . The complex (serving dual purpose in 1941–43) was set up in the industrialized village of Trawniki about 40 kilometres (25 mi) southeast of Lublin with rail lines in all directions in

10136-468: The Germans dealt with unruly crowds of thousands of ghetto inhabitants: as in Międzyrzec , Łuków , Radzyń , Parczew , Końskowola , Komarówka and all other locations. The Trawniki men shot so fast and so wildly that the German policemen "frequently had to take cover to avoid being hit." Ukrainian Hiwis were perceived as indispensable. In Łomazy , the Germans were "overjoyed" to see them coming after

10317-510: The Germans was guard duty or forced labor, not death, secondly that the Trawniki guards were a privileged group that was essential to the Holocaust, and finally that Demjanjuk's failure to desert, something many Trawniki guards did, showed that he had been at Sobibor voluntarily. On 24 February 2010, a witness for the prosecution, Alex Nagorny, who agreed to serve the Nazi Germans after his capture, testified that he knew Demjanjuk from his time as

10498-564: The Government noted, a motion to reopen, such as Demjanjuk's, could only properly be filed with the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) in Washington, D.C., and not an immigration trial court. The issuance of the stay by the immigration trial court was therefore improper, as that court had no jurisdiction over the matter. Accordingly, Demjanjuk re-filed his motion to reopen, and for an attendant stay, with

10679-578: The Holocaust in the manner of the earlier trial of Adolf Eichmann . It was the first televised trial in Israeli history. Despite initially attracting minimal attention, once survivor testimony began the trial became a "national obsession" and was followed widely throughout Israel and the United States. On 6 April 1987, John Stolz (or Stoltz), a 65-year-old German SS officer who'd worked at a concentration camp in Poland, hanged himself in his basement in Ohio after receiving

10860-492: The Holocaust, based on Jewish and Polish survivor-testimonies, memoirs, and archives. The long list of at least 234 names of camp guards written out phonetically can be attributed to more than a dozen sources in which they appear. They often feature arbitrary spellings in English and Polish translation (or transliteration from Cyrillic ) based on memory alone, by which the perpetrators could not be legally identified. The following are

11041-523: The ID cards could be forgeries and that there was no point comparing them. The prosecution also produced orders to a man identified as Demjanjuk to go to Sobibor and other records to show that Demjanjuk had served as a guard there. Demjanjuk's defense team argued that these documents were Soviet forgeries. As part of the prosecution's case, historian Dieter Pohl of the University of Klagenfurt testified that Sobibor

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11222-430: The Jews undressed, SS-Oberscharführer Hermann Michel made a speech to them. On these occasions, he used to wear a white coat to give the impression he was a physician . Michel announced to the Jews that they would be sent to work. But before this they would have to take baths and undergo disinfection , so as to prevent the spread of diseases. After undressing, the Jews were taken through the "Tube", by an SS man leading

11403-741: The Justice Department had presented "clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence" of Demjanjuk's service in Nazi death camps. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in November 2004. On 28 December 2005, an immigration judge ordered Demjanjuk deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine. In an attempt to avoid deportation, Demjanjuk sought protection under the United Nations Convention against Torture , claiming that he would be prosecuted and tortured if he were deported to Ukraine. Chief US Immigration Judge Michael Creppy ruled there

11584-448: The Nazis and the watchmen and attending to their needs. A particularly horrifying job was that of the "barbers" who cut the hair of women on their way to the gas chamber. This job was often forced upon young male prisoners in an attempt to humiliate both them and the naked women whose hair they were cutting. Armed watchmen supervised the process in order to ensure that barbers did not respond to victims' questions or pleas. In Lager III ,

11765-406: The Nazis as auxiliary forces during the war. Most of the guards were executed after the war by the Soviets, and their written statements were not obtained by Israeli authorities until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed . Central to the new evidence was a photograph of Ivan the Terrible and a description that did not match the 1942 appearance of Demjanjuk. The accounts of 21 guards who were tried in

11946-554: The Nazis began experimenting with gassing Jews. In December 1941, SS officials at Chełmno conducted experiments using gas vans and the first mass gassings were conducted at Auschwitz concentration camp in January. At the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich announced a plan for systematically murdering the Jews through a network of extermination camps. This plan was realized as Operation Reinhard . Nothing

12127-521: The Nazis' canteen: "We spit in it and washed our hands in it... Don't ask me what else we did to that soup... And they ate it." Prisoners found it difficult to forge personal relationships. This was in part due to the constant turnover in the camp population, but also to an atmosphere of mutual distrust which was often exacerbated by national or linguistic divisions. Dutch Jews were particularly subject to derision and suspicion because of their assimilated manners and limited Yiddish . German Jews faced

12308-405: The SS officers, Unterscharführer Johann Klier was known to be relatively humane, and several survivors testified on his behalf at his trial. In an interview with Richard Rashke , Esther Terner commented "I don't even know why he was in Sobibor ... even the other Nazis picked on him." Prisoners regarded the watchmen as the most dangerous among the Sobibor staff, their cruelty surpassing that of

12489-552: The SS officers. In the words of historian Marek Bem, "It can be said that the Ukrainian guards' cynicism was in no way inferior to the SS men's premeditation." However, some individual watchmen were sympathetic to the Jews, doing the minimum possible while on duty and even assisting with prisoners' escape attempts. In one documented instance, two watchmen named Victor Kisiljow and Wasyl Zischer escaped with six Jewish prisoners, but were betrayed and killed. Prisoners developed complex relationships with their tormenters. In order to avoid

12670-409: The SS was not unwavering. They played an active role in Sobibor's underground barter economy, and drank copiously despite being prohibited from doing so. The SS officers were wary of the watchmen, and limited their access to ammunition. Watchmen were also transferred frequently between different camps in order to prevent them from building up local contacts or knowledge of the surrounding area. After

12851-475: The SS, with their arms tied behind their backs. Others recount being forced to sing demeaning songs such as "I am a Jew with a big nose". Female prisoners were sexually abused on several occasions. For instance, at a postwar trial, Erich Bauer testified that two Austrian Jewish actresses, named Ruth and Gisela, were confined in an SS barracks and gang raped by SS-Oberscharfuhrer Kurt Bolender and SS-Oberscharfuhrer Gustav Wagner , among others. Unique among

13032-480: The Sixth Circuit lifted the stay that it had imposed against Demjanjuk's deportation order. On Thursday 7 May 2009, the United States Supreme Court , via Justice John Paul Stevens , declined to consider Demjanjuk's case for review, thereby denying Demjanjuk any further stay of deportation. Demjanjuk sued Germany on 30 April 2009, to try to block the German government's agreement to accept Demjanjuk from

13213-539: The Soviet Union generally refused to cooperate with the Israeli prosecutions, this ID card was obtained from the USSR and provided to Israel by American industrialist Armand Hammer , a close associate of several Kremlin leaders, whose help had been requested by the personal appeal of Israeli president Shimon Peres . The defense claimed that the card was forged by Soviet authorities to discredit Demjanjuk. The card had Demjanjuk's photograph, which he identified as his picture at

13394-474: The Soviet Union in 1979 at the request of the OSI (US Office of Special Investigations). Danilchenko identified Demjanjuk from three separate photo spreads as having been an "experienced and reliable" guard at Sobibor and that Demjanjuk had been transferred to Flossenbürg, where he had received an SS blood-type tattoo; Danilchenko did not mention Treblinka. Through Baltic émigré supporters living in Washington DC,

13575-444: The Soviet Union on war crimes gave details that differentiate Demjanjuk from Ivan the Terrible ‍ — in particular that the surname of 'Ivan the Terrible' was 'Marchenko', not 'Demjanjuk'. One described Ivan the Terrible as having brown hair, hazel eyes and a large scar down to his neck; Demjanjuk was blond with grayish-blue eyes and no such scar. US officials had originally been aware, without informing Demjanjuk's attorneys, of

13756-546: The Soviet Union was that the former claimed lack of awareness and left no live witnesses who could testify against them, while the latter were charged with treason and therefore were doomed from the start. In the U.S. some 16 former Hiwi guards were denaturalized. The notoriety of crimes committed by Trawnikis at the extermination camps of Belzec [ Be ] , Sobibor [ So ] , and Treblinka [ Tr ] during Operation Reinhard have led to many specific names being publicized in postwar literature and by museums of

13937-565: The Soviet Union were convicted and some were executed. Most were sentenced to a Gulag , and released under the Khrushchev amnesty of 1955. The number of Hiwis tried in the West was very small by comparison. Six defendants were acquitted on all charges and set free by a West German court in Hamburg in 1976 including commandant Streibel. The main difference between them and the Trawnikis apprehended in

14118-521: The Soviet advance, they were reorganized into combat units. This is when they introduced the Rotten ( Rotte ["Chain"] > "File" or "Fire Team") level of organization at a time when the depleted German Army was consolidating into Halbzüge ("half-platoons" or "Sections"). This was perhaps adopted to deter desertion, a big problem towards the end of the war. The guards initially wore their Soviet Army uniforms. In

14299-431: The Soviet archives ‍ — in addition to German documents that mentioned "Wachmann" Demjanjuk with his date and place of birth. The Trawniki certificate also implied that Demjanjuk had served at Sobibor, as did the German orders of March 1943 posting his Trawniki unit to the area. The court declined to find him guilty on this basis because the prosecution had built its entire case around Demjanjuk's identity with Ivan

14480-555: The Soviet army in 1940, and had fought until he was captured by German troops in Eastern Crimea in May 1942. He was then brought to a German prisoner of war camp in Chełm in July 1942. Prosecutors claimed that Demjanjuk volunteered to collaborate with the Germans and was sent to the camp at Trawniki , where he was trained to guard prisoners as part of Operation Reinhard . The principal allegation

14661-496: The Terrible" over a protracted period of time. They also gained an additional identification of the visa photo as Demjanjuk by Otto Horn, a former SS guard at Treblinka. In August 1977, the Justice Department submitted a request to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio to revoke Demjanjuk's citizenship, based on his concealment on his 1951 immigration application of having worked at Nazi death camps. While

14842-441: The Terrible, and Demjanjuk had not been given a chance to defend himself from charges of being a guard at Sobibor. The judge's acquittal of Demjanjuk for being Ivan the Terrible was based on the written statements of 37 former guards at Treblinka that identified Ivan the Terrible as " Ivan Marchenko ". The former guards' statements were obtained after World War II by the Soviets, who prosecuted USSR citizens who had assisted

15023-451: The Trawniki card and the falsity of Demjanjuk's alibi but ruled that reasonable doubt existed that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. The judges agreed that Demjanjuk most likely served as a Nazi Wachmann (guard) in the Trawniki unit and had been posted at Sobibor extermination camp and two other camps. Evidence to assist this claim included an identification card from Trawniki bearing Demjanjuk's picture and personal information⁠— found in

15204-465: The Trawniki card was affirmed by US government experts who examined the original document as well as by Wolfgang Scheffler of the Free University of Berlin during the hearing, Scheffler also testified to the crimes committed by Trawniki men and that it was possible that Demjanjuk had been moved between Sobibor and Treblinka. Additionally, the former paymaster at Trawniki, Heinrich Schaefer, stated in

15385-482: The US. The German Administrative Court rejected Demjanjuk's claim on 6 May. Demjanjuk was deported to Germany, leaving Cleveland, Ohio, on 11 May 2009, to arrive in Munich on 12 May. Upon his arrival, he was arrested and sent to Munich's Stadelheim prison . On 3 July 2009, prosecutors deemed Demjanjuk fit to stand trial. On 13 July 2009, prosecutors charged him with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder for his time as

15566-485: The United States, first referring to Chelm during his denaturalization trial in 1981. As Chelm was Demjanjuk's alibi, he was questioned about this omission during the trial by both the prosecutors and the judges; Demjanjuk blamed the trauma of his POW experience and said he had simply forgotten. Demjanjuk also denied having known how to drive a truck in 1943, despite having stated this on his application for refugee assistance in 1948; Demjanjuk alleged that he had not filled out

15747-429: The alleged health problems of the defendant and his defense attorney Busch's use of many legal motions, the trial eventually stretched to eighteen months. On 14 April 2010, Anton Dallmeyer, an expert witness , testified that the typeset and handwriting on an ID card being used as key evidence matched four other ID cards believed to have been issued at the SS training camp at Trawniki. Demjanjuk's lawyer argued that all of

15928-440: The autumn of 1941 they were given the dyed-black Polish Army uniforms worn by the former Selbstschutz forces. In the summer of 1942 they were issued brown Belgian Army uniforms for warm weather wear. The guardsmen tended to wear a mixture of the two. They were usually issued captured enemy weapons but sometimes received German Mauser Kar-98 carbines. Automatic rifles and pistols were issued when on special assignment. At each of

16109-510: The camp on occasion. When Sobibor first opened, prisoners were regarded as expendable and shot at the first sign of illness or injury. After a few months, the SS grew concerned that the enormous death rate was limiting the camp's efficiency. In order to increase the continuity of its labour force and alleviate the need to constantly train new workers, the SS instituted a new policy allowing incapacitated prisoners three days to recover. Those still unable to work after three days were shot. Food in

16290-524: The camp personnel. The SS officers lived in cottages with colorful names such as Lustiger Floh (the Merry Flea), Schwalbennest (the Swallow's Nest), and Gottes Heimat (God's Own Home). They also had a canteen, a bowling alley, a hairdresser, and a dentist, all staffed by Jewish prisoners. The watchmen , drawn from Soviet POWs, had separate barracks, and their own separate recreational buildings, including

16471-497: The camp was extremely limited. As at other Lublin district camps, prisoners were given about 200 grams of bread for breakfast along with Ersatz coffee. Lunch was typically a thin soup sometimes with some potatoes or horse meat. Dinner could be once again simply coffee. Prisoners forced to live on these rations found their personalities changing due to hunger. Others supplemented these rations surreptitiously, for instance by helping themselves to food from victims' luggage while working in

16652-445: The camp, prisoners found ways to support each other. Sick and injured prisoners were given clandestine food as well as medicine and sanitary supplies stolen from the camp pharmacy. Healthy prisoners were expected to cover for sick prisoners who would otherwise be killed. The camp nurse Kurt Ticho developed a method of falsifying his records so that sick prisoners could take more than the allotted three day recovery period. Members of

16833-630: The camp. Because of the expectation of imminent death, prisoners adopted a day-at-a-time outlook. Crying was rare and evenings were often spent enjoying whatever of life was left. As revolt organizer Leon Feldhendler recounted after the war, “The Jews only had one goal: carpe diem , and in this they simply went wild.” Prisoners sang and danced in the evenings and sexual or romantic relations were frequent. Some of these affairs were likely transactional or coerced, especially those between female prisoners and kapos , but others were driven by genuine bonds. Two couples that met in Sobibor were married after

17014-586: The camp. This third set of tracks allowed regular rail traffic to continue uninterrupted while the camp unloaded transports of new prisoners. Some building materials were supplied by the SS Central Construction Office in Lublin, while others were procured from local sawmills and brickworks, as well as from the remains of demolished houses of Jews. The first group of workers who built the camp were primarily locals from neighbouring villages and towns. It

17195-432: The camps and that Treblinka had been omitted due to administrative sloppiness. During the trial, Demjanjuk admitted to having lied on his US visa application but claimed that it was out of fear of being returned to the Soviet Union and denied having been a concentration camp guard. Demjanjuk instead claimed to have been a German prisoner who completed forced labor. The defense also submitted the statement of Feodor Fedorenko ,

17376-552: The card that had fueled suspicions of fraud were in fact typical of Trawniki's poor record keeping. In February 2002, Judge Matia revoked Demjanjuk's US citizenship. Matia ruled that Demjanjuk had not produced any credible evidence of his whereabouts during the war and that the Justice Department had proved its case against him. Demjanjuk appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit , which on 30 April 2004 ruled that Demjanjuk could be again stripped of his US citizenship because

17557-563: The case "the most highly publicized denaturalization proceeding in American history." In October 1983, Israel issued an extradition request for Demjanjuk to stand trial on Israeli soil under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950 for crimes allegedly committed at Treblinka. In April 1985, he was detained and held at United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri . Demjanjuk appealed his extradition; in

17738-497: The completion of their task by the end of 1943. The Soviets entered the completely empty training facility on July 23, 1944. After the war, the Soviet authorities arrested and prosecuted hundreds, possibly as many as one thousand Hiwis who returned home to USSR. The more conservative number of trials given by Kudryashov is over 140 between 1944 and 1987. Those brought to trial in the Soviet Union were tried before both civilian courts and military tribunals. Almost all of those tried in

17919-484: The construction of a munitions depot known as Lager IV. Sobibor was surrounded by double barbed wire fences which were thatched with pine branches in order to block the view inside. At its southeast corner, it had two side-by-side gates; one for trains and another for foot traffic and vehicles. The site was divided into five compounds: the Vorlager and four Lagers numbered I–IV . The Vorlager (front compound) contained living quarters and recreational buildings for

18100-643: The court that alleged that his prosecution was caused by a conspiracy between the OSI, the World Jewish Congress , and the Simon Wiesenthal Center , while continuing to allege that the KGB had forged the documents used. In his third declaration Demjanjuk demanded access to a secret KGB file numbered 1627 and declared a hunger strike until he got it. On 15 January 2011, Spain requested a European arrest warrant be issued for Nazi war crimes against Spaniards;

18281-413: The dead, observing Jewish religious rites, and singing songs of resistance. However, some prisoners found small ways of materially fighting back. While working in the sorting shed, Saartje Wijnberg would surreptitiously damage fine items of clothing to prevent them from being sent to Germany. After the war, Esther Terner recounted what she and Zelda Metz did when they found an unattended pot of soup in

18462-514: The decision were made to the Supreme Court. On 18 August 1993, the court rejected the petitions on the grounds that During the trial, the prosecution argued that Demjanjuk should be tried for crimes at Sobibor; however, Justice Aharon Barak was not convinced, stating, "We know nothing about him at Sobibor". Demjanjuk was released to return to the United States. His return was met by protests and counter-protests, with supporters including members of

18643-530: The defense was also able to acquire internal OSI notes that had been thrown in a dumpster without shredding that showed that Otto Horn had in fact had difficulty identifying Demjanjuk and had been prompted to make the identification. On 18 April 1988, the Jerusalem District Court found Demjanjuk "unhesitatingly and with utter conviction" guilty of all charges and of being 'Ivan the Terrible'. One week later it sentenced him to death by hanging . Demjanjuk

18824-756: The deportation order. The Supreme Court's denial of review meant that the order of removal was final; no other appeal was possible. One month after the US Supreme Court's refusal to hear Demjanjuk's case, on 19 June 2008, Germany announced it would seek the extradition of Demjanjuk to Germany. The file on Demjanjuk was compiled by the German Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes . On 10 November 2008, German federal prosecutor Kurt Schrimm directed prosecutors to file in Munich for extradition, since Demjanjuk once lived there. On 9 December 2008,

19005-614: The east end was a yard where new arrivals had their luggage taken from them and were forced to undress. This area was beautified with flower beds to hide the camp's purpose from newcomers. This yard led into the narrow enclosed path called the Himmelstrasse (road to heaven) or the Schlauch (tube), which led straight to the gas chambers in Lager III . The Himmelstrasse was covered on both sides by fences woven with pine branches. Lager III

19186-542: The expendable "drones" whose lives were entirely at the mercy of the SS, the privileged workers whose special jobs provided some relative comforts, and finally the artisans whose specialized knowledge made them indispensable and earned them preferential treatment. Moreover, as at other camps, the Nazis appointed kapos to keep their fellow prisoners in line. Kapos carried out a variety of supervisory duties and enforced their commands with whips. Kapos were involuntary appointees, and they varied widely in how they responded to

19367-426: The extermination process, unloading transports and escorting the victims into the gas chambers. Watchmen dressed in mixed-and-matched pieces of Nazi, Soviet, and Polish uniforms, often dyed black (giving rise to the term "blackies"). They received pay and rations similar to those of Waffen-SS, as well as a family allowance and holiday leave. Although the watchmen inspired terror among the prisoners, their loyalty to

19548-470: The extradition to move forward. Demjanjuk was deported to Israel on 28 February 1986. Demjanjuk's trial took place in the Jerusalem District Court between 26 November 1986 and 18 April 1988, before a special tribunal comprising Israeli Supreme Court Judge Dov Levin and Jerusalem District Court Judges Zvi Tal and Dalia Dorner . The prosecution conceived of the trial as a didactic trial on

19729-473: The form himself and the clerk must have misunderstood him. Demjanjuk's denial related both to the supposed operation of a truck's diesel engine by "Ivan the Terrible" for the gas chamber at Treblinka and to the SS's singling out of Ukrainians with experience driving trucks as Trawniki men. Demjanjuk also changed his testimony as to why he had listed Sobibor as his place of domicile from his earlier trials: he now claimed to have been advised to do so by an official of

19910-480: The generally apathetic views of the Trawniki guards, the vast majority faithfully carried out the SS expectations in the mistreatment of Jews. Most Trawniki men had executed Jews already as part of their job training. Similarly to Christopher Browning 's 1992 book Ordinary Men , Kudryashov argued that the Trawniki men were examples of how ordinary people could become willing killers. The Trawniki shooters were assigned to

20091-459: The government was preparing for trial, Hanusiak published pictures of an ID card identifying Demjanjuk as having been a Trawniki man and guard at Sobibor in News from Ukraine . Given that eyewitnesses attested to Demjanjuk having been Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka, decades before, whereas documentary evidence seemed to indicate that he had served at Sobibor with little notoriety, OSI considered dropping

20272-470: The influx of POW was dramatically reduced, so Streibel's personnel from the summer of 1942 started to conscript civilians of Ukrainian nationality, generally young males, from Western Ukraine (Galicia, Volhynia, Podolia and Lublin). Petro Mirchuk , who himself was a political prisoner in the Auschwitz camp, relates in his memoirs that he engaged in conversation with members of an auxiliary guard detachment in

20453-430: The labour camp at Krychów . The initial construction of Sobibor was finished by summer 1942, and a steady stream of prisoners began thereafter. However, the SS camp was continuously expanded and renovated throughout its existence. After only a few months of operation, the wooden walls of the gas chambers had absorbed too much sweat, urine, blood, and excrement to be cleanable. Thus, the gas chambers were demolished in

20634-498: The land opposite the train station. When a worker at the station cafeteria asked one of the SS men what was being built, he replied that she would soon see and that it would be "a good laugh." In March 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Richard Thomalla took over construction work at Sobibor, which had begun at an unknown earlier date. Thomalla was a former building contractor and committed Nazi whose service as an auxiliary police commander and adviser on Jewish forced labour had earned him

20815-615: The list to nine individuals, including Demjanjuk. Hanusiak claimed that Soviet newspapers and archives had provided the names during his visit to Kyiv in 1974; however, INS suspected that Hanusiak, a member of the Communist Party USA , had received the list from the KGB . It chose to investigate the names as leads. Hanusiak claimed that Demjanjuk had been a guard at Sobibor concentration and death camp. INS quickly discovered that Demjanjuk had listed his place of domicile from 1937 to 1943 as Sobibor on his US visa application of 1951. This

20996-547: The local Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung . Globocnik had selected Karl Streibel from Operation Reinhard as the key person for this new secret project. Streibel, with the assistance of his officers, visited all POW camps for the Soviets behind the lines of the advancing Wehrmacht , and after individual screening recruited Ukrainian as well as Latvian and Lithuanian volunteers as ordered. Due to successful adaptation of Soviet army's strategy and tactics against German forces, as well as Nazi policy of Soviet war prisoners' extermination,

21177-755: The majority of Trawniki men or Hiwis came from among the prisoners of war, there were also Volksdeutsche from Eastern Europe among them, valued because of their ability to speak Russian, Ukrainian and other languages of the occupied territories. All the officers at the Trawniki camp were Reichsdeutsche (citizens of the German Reich), and most of the squad commanders were Volksdeutsche (people whose language and culture had German origins but who did not hold German citizenship). The conscripted civilians and former Soviet POWs included Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Belarusians, Estonians, Georgians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Russians, Tatars, and Ukrainians. The Trawnikis took

21358-652: The messy Józefów massacre which permanently traumatized the untrained executioners. The wave of mass killings of Jews from the Międzyrzec Podlaski Ghetto lasting non-stop for several days were conducted by the Trawniki battalion of about 350 to 400 men, same as in Parczew, or the Izbica Ghetto . Some German police officers felt uneasy about killing non-Jewish Poles. Their unit shot 4,600 Jews by September 1942, but disproportionately only 78 ethnic Poles. In contrast,

21539-639: The method by which Treblinka survivors had identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. Additionally, Sheftel alleged that the trial was a show trial , and referred to the trial as "the Demjanjuk affair," alluding to the famous antisemitic Dreyfus Affair . Demjanjuk testified during the trial that he was imprisoned in a camp in Chełm until 1944, when he was transferred to another camp in Austria, where he remained until he joined an anti-Soviet Ukrainian army group. Demjanjuk had not mentioned Chelm in his initial depositions in

21720-447: The middle. Sundays were designated as half days, but this policy was not always observed. The prisoner population included many labourers with specialized skills such as goldsmithing, painting, gardening, or tailoring. While such prisoners were officially spared death only to support the camp's primary operations, much of their labour was in fact diverted for the SS officers' personal enrichment. Renowned Dutch Jewish painter Max van Dam

21901-530: The most extreme cruelties, many tried to ingratiate themselves with the SS officers, for instance by choosing maudlin German folk songs when ordered to sing. In other cases, prisoners found themselves unwillingly favored. SS-Oberscharfuhrer Karl Frenzel took a liking to Saartje Wijnberg , constantly smiling at her and teasingly referring to her and Chaim Engel as "bride and groom". He was protective towards her, excusing her from torturous work inflicted on other Dutch prisoners and sparing her when he liquidated

22082-456: The most notable of them, confirmed by the courts, and arranged in alphabetical order. 51°08′21″N 22°59′35″E  /  51.139267°N 22.993140°E  / 51.139267; 22.993140 Sobibor concentration camp Sobibor ( / ˈ s oʊ b ɪ b ɔːr / SOH -bi-bor ; Polish : Sobibór [sɔˈbibur] ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard . It

22263-525: The name Ivan Demjanjuk, and no survivors of Sobibor identified his photograph, nine survivors of Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as " Ivan the Terrible ", so named because of his cruelty as a guard operating the gas chamber at Treblinka. Lawyers at the US Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Department of Justice valued the identifications made by these survivors, as they had interacted with and seen "Ivan

22444-576: The obsolete black M32 SS tunic or field-grey M37 tunic with blue facings. This was to mark them out from the men they commanded, but at the same time denoted them as auxiliaries rather than regular troops. Units were initially organized in Gruppen ( Gruppe ["Group"] > "squad") of about 50 men and Züge ( Zug ["Procession"] > "platoon") of around 90 to 120 men. These were further assigned to companies and battalions, under German officers and higher-level NCOs. After they abandoned Trawniki in 1944 ahead of

22625-982: The panel of judges on the Sixth Circuit ruled against OSI for having committed fraud on the court and having failed to provide exculpatory evidence to Demjanjuk's defense. On 20 February 1998, Judge Paul Matia of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio vacated Demjanjuk's denaturalization "without prejudice," meaning that OSI could seek to strip Demjanjuk of citizenship a second time. OSI continued to investigate Demjanjuk, relying solely on documentary evidence rather than eye-witnesses. These documents were found in former Soviet archives in Moscow and in Lithuania, which placed Demjanjuk at Sobibor on 26 March 1943, at Flossenbürg on 1 October 1943, and at Majdanek from November 1942 through early March 1943; administrative documents from Flossenbürg referencing Demjanjuk's name and Trawniki card number were also uncovered. On 19 May 1999,

22806-447: The previous trial in Israel. Doctors restricted the time Demjanjuk could be tried in court each day to two sessions of 90 minutes each, according to Munich State Prosecutor Anton Winkler. On 30 November 2009, Demjanjuk's trial, expected to last for several months, began in Munich . Demjanjuk arrived in the courtroom in a wheelchair pushed by a German police officer. Because of the long pauses between trial dates and cancellations caused by

22987-442: The prisoner uprising, the SS feared that the watchmen would themselves revolt, and sent them all back to Trawniki under armed guard. Their fears proved correct, as the watchmen killed their SS escort and fled. Prisoners lived in constant fear of their captors. They were punished for transgressions as inconsequential as smoking a cigarette, resting while working, and showing insufficient enthusiasm when forced to sing. Punishment

23168-462: The prisoners, with the exception of Shlomo Szmajzner who recalled Stangl as a vain man who stood out for "his obvious pleasure in his work and his situation. None of the others—although they were, in different ways, so much worse than he—showed this to such an extent. He had this perpetual smile on his face." Stangl was transferred to Treblinka in August 1942, and his job at Sobibor was filled by SS-Obersturmführer Franz Reichleitner . Reichleitner

23349-423: The proceeding against Demjanjuk to focus on higher profile cases. But OSI's new director Allan Ryan chose to go ahead with the prosecution of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. In 1979, three guards from Sobibor gave sworn depositions that they knew Demjanjuk to have been a guard there, and two identified his photograph. OSI did not submit these deposits into evidence and took them as a further indication that Demjanjuk

23530-453: The prosecution if he recognized Demjanjuk, Rosenberg asked that the defendant remove his glasses "so I can see his eyes." Rosenberg approached and peered closely at Demjanjuk's face. When Demjanjuk smiled and offered his hand, Rosenberg recoiled and shouted "Grozny!" meaning "Terrible" in Polish and Russian. "Ivan", Rosenberg said. "I say it unhesitatingly, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. It

23711-418: The psychological pressures of their position. Oberkapo Moses Sturm was nicknamed "Mad Moisz" for his mercurial temperament. He would beat prisoners horrifically without provocation and then later apologize hysterically. He talked constantly of escape, sometimes merely berating the other prisoners for their passivity, other times attempting to formulate actionable plans. Sturm was executed after being betrayed by

23892-531: The railway brigade attempted to warn new arrivals of their impending murder but were met with incredulity. The most successful act of solidarity in the camp was the revolt on 14 October 1943, which was expressly planned so that all of the prisoners in the camp would have at least some chance of escape. Prisoners suffered from sleep deprivation, malnourishment, and the physical and emotional toll of grueling labour and constant beatings. Lice, skin infections, and respiratory infections were common, and typhoid swept

24073-535: The remaining subcamps of KL Lublin/Majdanek camp complex including Poniatowa , Budzyn, Kraśnik, Puławy, Lipowa , and also during massacres in Łomazy , Międzyrzec , Łuków , Radzyń , Parczew , Końskowola , Komarówka and all other locations, augmented by the SS and Schupo , as well as the Reserve Police Battalion 101 , part of over two dozen Order Police battalions deployed to the occupied territories. The German Order Police performed roundups inside

24254-545: The request was refused for a lack of evidence. Trawniki man Between September 1941 and September 1942, the German SS and police trained 2,500 Trawniki men known as Hiwi Wachmänner (guards) at the special training camp at Trawniki outside of Lublin ; by the end of 1944, 5,082 men were on active duty. Trawnikimänner were organized by Streibel into two SS Sonderdienst battalions . Some 1,000 Hiwis are known to have run away during field operations. Although

24435-480: The revolt, the Nazis demolished most of the camp in order to hide their crimes from the advancing Red Army . In the first decades after World War II , the site was neglected and the camp had little presence in either popular or scholarly accounts of the Holocaust. It became better known after it was portrayed in the TV miniseries Holocaust (1978) and the film Escape from Sobibor (1987). The Sobibor Museum now stands at

24616-413: The roughly 600 slave labourers forced to assist in the operation of the camp. While survivors of Auschwitz use the term "selected" to mean being selected for murder, at Sobibor being "selected" meant being selected to live, at least temporarily. The harsh conditions in the camp took the lives of most new arrivals within a few months. Prisoners worked from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm, with a short lunch break in

24797-612: The same suspicion as the Dutch, with the added implication that they might identify more with their captors than with their fellow prisoners. When social groups did form, they were generally based on family ties or shared nationality, and were completely closed off to outsiders. Chaim Engel even found himself shunned by fellow Polish Jews after he began a romantic relationship with Dutch-born Saartje Wijnberg . These divisions had dire consequences for many prisoners from Western Europe, who were not trusted with crucial information about goings-on in

24978-556: The second half of 1943: "To the extent of that I could determine, it was a unit comprised of representatives of various so called "Eastern peoples"-primarily Russians, Belorussians, Caucasians and others, and least of all Ukrainians, although for some reason the unit was officially called 'Ukrainian'." French publicist Louis Saurel, in an analogous book about the death camps, wrote: "Part of the SS soldiers were not Germans. There were many Romanians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Croats and so on… Interpreters were required to convey explanations between

25159-403: The second phase, all 600 prisoners would assemble for evening roll call and walk to freedom out the front gate. However, the plan was disrupted after only eleven SS men had been killed. The prisoners had to escape by climbing over barbed wire fences and running through a mine field under heavy machine gun fire. About 300 prisoners made it out of the camp, of whom roughly 60 survived the war. After

25340-402: The sick barracks on 11 October 1943. She struggled with this attention and felt angry at herself when she noticed herself feeling grateful to him. At his trial, Frenzel declared "I actually do believe the Jews even liked me!" though both prisoners and other SS officers regarded him as exceptionally cruel and brutal. Similarly, camp commandant SS-Obersturmführer Franz Stangl "made a pet" of

25521-576: The site, which continues to be investigated by archaeologists. Photographs of the camp in operation were published in 2020 as part of the Sobibor perpetrator album . Sobibor was one of four extermination camps established as part of Operation Reinhard , the deadliest phase of the Holocaust . The extermination of Europe's Jews did not originate as a single top-down decision, but was rather a patchwork of decisions made regarding particular occupied areas. Following

25702-487: The sorting barracks or in the railway brigade. A barter system developed in the camp, which included not only prisoners but also the watchmen , who would serve as intermediaries between the Jews and local peasants, exchanging jewels and cash from the sorting barracks for food and liquor in exchange for a large cut. Most prisoners had little or no access to hygiene and sanitation. There were no showers in Lager I and clean water

25883-405: The stand. Four of the survivors who had originally identified Demjanjuk's photograph had died before the trial began. The testimony of one of these witnesses, Pinhas Epstein, had been barred as unreliable in US denaturalization trial of former camp guard Feodor Fedorenko, while another, Gustav Boraks, sometimes appeared confused on the stand. The most important of these was Eliyahu Rosenberg. Asked by

26064-416: The summer of 1942, and new larger ones were built made out of brick. Later that summer, the SS also embarked on a beautification project, instituting a more regular cleaning schedule for the barracks and stables, and expanding and landscaping the Vorlager to give it the appearance of a " Tyrolean village" much noted by later prisoners. When Sobibor ceased operations in mid-1943, the SS were part way through

26245-580: The summer of 1943, SS-Oberscharfuhrer Gustav Wagner and SS-Oberscharfuhrer Hubert Gomerski formed a penal brigade, consisting of prisoners who were forced to work while running. Prisoners were assigned to the penal brigade for a period of three days, but most died before their time was up. The SS exercised absolute authority over the prisoners and treated them as a source of entertainment. They forced prisoners to sing while working, while marching, and even during public executions. Some survivor testimonies recount prisoners performing mock cockfights for

26426-538: The testimony of two of these German guards. However the Israeli justices noted that Demjanjuk had incorrectly listed his mother's maiden name as "Marchenko" in his 1951 application for US visa. Demjanjuk said he just wrote a common Ukrainian surname after he forgot his mother's real name (Tabachyk). Demjanjuk's acquittal was met with outrage in Israel, including threats against the justices' lives. Simon Wiesenthal , an iconic figure in Nazi-hunting, first believed Demjanjuk

26607-461: The time. The prosecution called expert witnesses to testify on the authenticity of the card including its signatures by various Nazi officers, paper, and ink. The defense used some evidence supplied by the Soviets to support their case while calling other pieces of evidence supplied by the Soviets "forgeries". The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Holocaust survivors to establish that Demjanjuk had been at Treblinka, five of whom were put on

26788-482: The verdict was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court , based on new evidence that cast reasonable doubt over his identity as Ivan the Terrible. Although the judges agreed that there was sufficient evidence to show that Demjanjuk had served at Sobibor, Israel declined to prosecute. In September 1993 Demjanjuk was allowed to return to Ohio. In 1999, US prosecutors again sought to deport Demjanjuk for having been

26969-621: The verdict was overturned. Shortly before his death, he was tried and convicted in the Federal Republic of Germany as an accessory to the 28,060 murders that occurred during his service at Sobibor. Born in Soviet Ukraine , Demjanjuk survived the Holodomor as a child and was conscripted into the Red Army in 1940. He fought in World War II and was taken prisoner by the Germans in spring 1942. He

27150-614: The war by presenting themselves as victims of Nazi persecution, rather than as the perpetrators. Demjanjuk found a job as a driver in a displaced persons camp in the Bavarian city of Landshut , and was subsequently transferred to camps in other southern German cities, until ending up in Feldafing near Munich in May 1951. There he met Vera Kowlowa, another DP, and they married. Demjanjuk, his wife and daughter arrived in New York City aboard

27331-447: The war. The Nazis allowed and even encouraged an atmosphere of merriment, going so far as to recruit prisoners for a choir at gunpoint. Many prisoners interpreted these efforts as attempts by the Nazis to keep the prisoners docile and to prevent them from thinking about escape. Prisoners had a pecking order largely determined by one's usefulness to the Germans. As survivor Toivi Blatt observed, there were three categories of prisoners:

27512-441: The way to the gas chambers. Before beginning work at Sobibor, they had met with Odilo Globočnik in Lublin and signed a confidentiality agreement. Over the course of its operation, roughly 100 SS officers served at Sobibor. When Sobibor first opened, its commandant was SS-Obersturmführer Franz Stangl , a meticulous organizer who worked to increase the efficiency of the extermination process. Stangl had little interaction with

27693-460: The way, the German verdict brought the case "to a worthy and just conclusion." After the conviction, Demjanjuk was released pending appeal. He lived at a German nursing home in Bad Feilnbach , where he died in 2012. Having died before a final judgment on his appeal could be issued, under German law, Demjanjuk remains technically innocent. In 2020, a photograph album by Sobibor guard Johann Niemann

27874-537: The way, with five or six Ukrainians at the back hastening the Jews along. After the Jews entered the gas chambers, the Ukrainians closed the doors. The motor was switched on by the former Soviet soldier Emil Kostenko and by the German driver Erich Bauer from Berlin . After the gassing, the doors were opened, and the corpses were removed by the Sonderkommando members. Local Jews were delivered in absolute terror, many amongst them screaming and pounding. Foreign Jews, on

28055-593: The work's physical and psychological toll. Since no workers from Lager III survived, nothing is known about their lives or experiences. When construction of Lager IV began in the summer of 1943, the Nazis assembled a forest commando who worked there cutting timber for heat, cooking, as well as cremation pyres. Prisoners struggled with the fact that their labour made them complicit in mass murder , albeit indirectly and unwillingly. Many committed suicide. Others endured, finding ways to resist, if only symbolically. Common symbolic forms of resistance included praying for

28236-525: The worst of the "on-the-spot dirty work" by Hauptsturmführer Karl Streibel (wrote Browning), so the Germans from the parallel Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the Order Police from Hamburg "would not go crazy" from the horror of hands-on killing for hours or days on end. The Trawnikis used to arrive in squads numbering around 50 at the killing site, and start by sitting down to a sandwich and bottles of vodka from their knapsacks behaving like guests, while

28417-477: Was SS-Oberscharfuhrer Karl Frenzel , who oversaw Lager I and acted as the camp's "judicial authority". Kurt Bolender and Hubert Gomerski  [ de ] oversaw Lager III , the extermination area, while SS-Oberscharfuhrer Erich Bauer and SS-Scharführer Josef Vallaster typically directed the gassing procedure itself. The SS men considered their job appealing. At Sobibor, they could enjoy creature comforts not available to soldiers fighting on

28598-504: Was Ivan the Terrible, though none of the guards mentioned Demjanjuk having been at Treblinka. The proceeding opened with the prosecution calling historian Earl F. Ziemke , who reconstructed the situation on the Eastern Front in 1942 and showed that it would have been possible for Demjanjuk to have been captured at the Battle of Kerch and arrive in Trawniki that same year. The authenticity of

28779-448: Was a death camp, the sole purpose of which was the killing of Jews, and that all Trawniki men had been generalists involved in guarding the prisoners as well as other duties; therefore, if Demjanjuk was a Trawniki man at Sobibor, he had necessarily been involved in sending the prisoners to their deaths and was an accessory to murder. The prosecution further argued, using Pohl's testimony, firstly that Demjanjuk's choice after being captured by

28960-482: Was also a real fear of mutiny or desertion by foreigners in German uniform. To reinforce the social levels between them, guards were therefore referred to as Wachmänner ("watchmen") rather than Schützen ("riflemen") and given different uniforms and rank insignia. A practical reason for this policy was that there was a dearth of German equipment to be spared, yet piles of captured war materiel that would otherwise be unused. The German officers and senior NCOs were issued

29141-504: Was an alcoholic and a determined anti-semite who took little interest in what went on in the camp aside from the extermination process. SS- Untersturmführer Johann Niemann served as the camp's deputy commandant. Day-to-day operations were generally handled by SS-Oberscharfuhrer Gustav Wagner , the most feared and hated man in Sobibor. Prisoners regarded him as brutal, demanding, unpredictable, observant, and sadistic. They referred to him as "The Beast" and "Wolf". Reporting to Wagner

29322-521: Was applied by army medics and used by combat personnel in the Waffen-SS and its foreign volunteers and conscripts because they were likely to need blood or give transfusions. There is no evidence that POWs trained as police auxiliaries at Trawniki were required to receive such tattoos, although it was an option for those that volunteered. Demjanjuk was at first represented by attorney Mark J. O'Connor of New York State ; Demjanjuk fired him in July 1987 just

29503-444: Was considered circumstantial corroboration of Hanusiak's claims, but its agents were unable to find witnesses in the US who could identify Demjanjuk. INS sent photographs to the Israeli government of the nine persons alleged by Hanusiak to have been involved in crimes against Jews: the government's agents asked survivors of Sobibor and Treblinka if they could identify Demjanjuk based on his visa application picture. While none recognized

29684-477: Was denied on 31 May 1984. Demjanjuk's defense was supported by the Ukrainian community and various Eastern European émigré groups; Demjanjuk's supporters alleged that he was the victim of a communist conspiracy and raised over two million dollars for his defense. Much of the money was raised by a Cleveland-based Holocaust denier Jerome Brentar, who also recommended Demjanjuk's lawyer Mark O'Connor. The first day of

29865-445: Was disciplined on 18 January 1943. He was sent back to Trawniki and on 26 March 1943 he was assigned to Sobibor concentration camp . On 1 October 1943 he was transferred to Flossenbürg , where he served until at least 10 December 1944. Demjanjuk would later claim to have been drafted into the Russian Liberation Army in 1944. But an investigation conducted in the 1990s by the US Office of Special Investigations (OSI) found this to be

30046-575: Was dismantled in July 1944 because of the approaching frontline. The last 1,000 Hiwis forming the SS Battalion Streibel led by Karl Streibel himself, were transported west to still functioning death camps. The Jews of the adjacent Trawniki labor camp were massacred in November 1943 during Aktion Erntefest . Their exhumed bodies were incinerated in Sonderaktion 1005 by Sonderkommandos from Milejów who in turn were executed on site upon

30227-533: Was guarded by approximately 400 watchmen . Survivors often refer to them as blackies , Askaris , or Ukrainians (even though many were not Ukrainian). They were captured Soviet prisoners of war who had volunteered for the SS in order to escape the abominable conditions in Nazi POW camps. Watchmen were nominally guards, but they were also expected to supervise work details and perform manual labour including punishments and executions. They also took an active part in

30408-514: Was guilty, but after Demjanjuk's acquittal by the Israeli Supreme Court, said he also would have cleared him given the new evidence. In Ukraine, Demjanjuk was viewed as a national hero and received a personal invitation to return to Ukraine by then-president Leonid Kravchuk . After Demjanjuk's acquittal, the Israeli Attorney-General decided to release him rather than to pursue charges of committing crimes at Sobibor. Ten petitions against

30589-480: Was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland . As an extermination camp rather than a concentration camp , Sobibor existed for the sole purpose of murdering Jews. The vast majority of prisoners were gassed within hours of arrival. Those not killed immediately were forced to assist in the operation of the camp, and few survived more than

30770-527: Was made public; some historians have suggested that a guard who appears in two photos may have been Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk was born in Dubovi Makharyntsi, a farming village in the western part of Soviet Ukraine . He grew up during the Holodomor famine, and later worked as a tractor driver in a Soviet collective farm . In 1940, he was drafted into the Red Army . After a battle in Eastern Crimea , he

30951-473: Was no evidence to substantiate Demjanjuk's claim that he would be mistreated if he were sent to Ukraine. On 22 December 2006, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the deportation order. On 30 January 2008, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit denied Demjanjuk's request for review. On 19 May 2008, the US Supreme Court denied Demjanjuk's petition for certiorari , declining to hear his case against

31132-445: Was nominally kept as a sign painter, but the SS also forced him to paint landscapes, portraits, and hagiographic images of Hitler . Similarly, Shlomo Szmajzner was placed in charge of the machine shop in order to conceal his work making gold jewelry for SS officers. Prisoners with specialized skills were considered especially valuable and were afforded privileges not available to others. Those without specialized skills performed

31313-412: Was placed in solitary confinement during the appeals process. While there, carpenters began building the gallows that would be used to hang him if his appeals were rejected, and Demjanjuk heard the construction from his cell. On 29 July 1993, a five-judge panel of the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict on appeal. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court's rulings on the authenticity of

31494-474: Was recruited by the Germans and trained at Trawniki concentration camp , going on to serve at Sobibor extermination camp and at least two concentration camps. After the war he married a woman he met in a West German displaced persons camp, and emigrated with her and their daughter to the United States. They settled in Seven Hills, Ohio , where he worked in an auto factory and raised three children. Demjanjuk became

31675-423: Was represented by German attorneys Ulrich Busch and Günther Maul. The defense argued that Demjanjuk had never been a guard, but that, had he been one, he would have had no choice in the matter. Busch would also allege that the German justice system was prejudiced against his client, and that the entire trial was therefore illegitimate. Busch also alleged that the trial violated the principle of double jeopardy due to

31856-444: Was scarce. Although clothing could be washed or replaced from the sorting barracks, the camp was so thoroughly infested that there was little point. However, some prisoners worked in areas of the camp such as the laundry which gave them occasional access to better hygiene. The personnel at Sobibor included a small cadre of German and Austrian SS officers, and a much larger group of watchmen , generally of Soviet origin. Sobibor

32037-666: Was staffed by a rotating group of eighteen to twenty-two German and Austrian SS officers. The SS officers were generally from lower-middle-class backgrounds, having previously worked as merchants, artisans, farmhands, nurses, and policemen. Almost all the Sobibor SS officers had previously served in Aktion T4 , the Nazi forced euthanasia program. In particular, a large contingent had previously served together at Hartheim Euthanasia Centre . Many practices developed at Hartheim were continued at Sobibor, including methods for deceiving victims on

32218-470: Was taken prisoner by the Germans and was held in a camp for Soviet prisoners of war in Chełm . According to German records, Demjanjuk most likely arrived at Trawniki concentration camp to be trained as a camp guard for the Nazis on 13 June 1942. He was assigned to a manorial estate called Okzów on 22 September 1942, but returned to Trawniki on 14 October. He was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp , where he

32399-409: Was that three former prisoners identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, who operated the petrol engines sending gas to the death chamber. The prosecution alleged that Demjanjuk had listed Sobibor on his US immigration application in an attempt to cover up his presence at Treblinka. Prosecutors based part of these allegations on an ID card referred to as the "Trawniki card". Because

32580-433: Was the extermination area. It was isolated from the rest of the camp, set back in a clearing in the forest and surrounded by its own thatched fence. Prisoners from Lager I were not allowed near it, and were killed if they were suspected of having seen inside. Due to a lack of eyewitness testimony, little is known about Lager III beyond the fact that it contained gas chambers, mass graves, and special separate housing for

32761-563: Was used not only to enforce the official camp rules, but also the guards' personal whims. The most common punishment was flogging. SS officers carried 80 centimeter whips which had been specially made by slave labour prisoners using leather taken from the luggage of gas chamber victims. Even when flogging was not in itself lethal, it would prove a death sentence if it left the recipient too injured to work. Many survivors remember an unusually large and aggressive St. Bernard named Barry that Kurt Bolender and Paul Groth would sic on prisoners. In

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