Original subtitles

From Israel tonight, we report on a battle in the courts

which is sure to arouse American interest.

It is several years now since a man named John Demjanjuk

was forced to leave the United States

so as to be put on trial in Israel

after he was identified as a man commonly called Ivan the Terrible.

Ivan the Terrible was responsible for mass murder during World War II.

While Demjanjuk waits to be executed,

there is new evidence to suggest that Israel may have the wrong man.

He's either Ivan the Terrible,

or it was all a terrible mistake.

I am innocent man.

That's a bullshit bum theory.

Now, the new evidence from the recently opened files

of the Soviet KGB raises serious doubts about Demjanjuk's guilt.

Today, Israel's Supreme Court was given evidence

that strongly suggests Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible after all.

The files include 21 testimonies taken from guards

who served at Treblinka, called Wachmanns.

The Wachmanns were interrogated by the KGB,

then shot dead for treason.

Yet, their signed testimonies identify Ivan the Terrible not as Demjanjuk,

but as a man by the name of Ivan Marchenko.

Oh! Here it is.

Here it is. Now, this is a very, very interesting photograph.

Um, it's in a statement of this Wachmann from Treblinka.

And he says that in this photograph,

you see myself

and Ivan Marchenko,

the operator of the gas chambers in Treblinka.

And sometimes, one photograph is more powerful

than thousands of words.

When we got the entire material about Ivan Marchenko,

we had 80 altogether,

Treblinka Wachmanns,

which all characterized the eyes of Ivan the Terrible

as dark brown, and so does his ID card.

"Dunkelbraun."

Now, the eyes of Demjanjuk are light blue to gray.

Light blue to gray.

These were not the eyes of Ivan the Terrible.

They were among the most dramatic courtroom confrontations

in history.

Look at me.

I saw his eyes.

I saw those murderous eyes.

I saw that face of his.

The eyes Eliahu Rosenberg was looking at were light blue,

sitting under hair once dirty blond,

perched over unmarked cheeks and thin lips.

But a photograph

and testimony by former Treblinka guards

that accompanied it seemed to describe a different man.

When you take the photo of Ivan Marchenko

and you take the photo of Demjanjuk,

you can't make a mistake between these two people.

They are so different.

Demjanjuk is round, has blue eyes.

Marchenko is dark with dark eyes.

He even had a scar on his, uh, cheek.

You can't make a mistake.

I see Ivan here, in front of me,

as I remember him, as he lives in my mind.

There he is, as he stands here!

There is no chance of misidentification.

They knew him.

They simply knew him.

Ivan Demjanjuk, as claimed by the Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem?

Or Ivan Marchenko, as claimed by guards in Russia?

And will the new evidence from Russia

secure Demjanjuk's release on reasonable doubt?

What do you want from me? Shall I dance?

I was definitely eager to prove

that everyone,

including five...

legal establishment,

which were busy...

for, uh, decades

in lies and deception...

all of them are wrong,

and me alone is right all of the way.

All of the way, in everything that was disputed.

I was right, and they were wrong.

Soviet documents.

He was forever screaming that Soviet documents are fraudulent,

and yet, the first opportunity that he gets,

he waves Soviet testimony of Wachmann

and says, "This is the truth: Marchenko was the guard."

When you enter into all the testimonies of the Wachmanns from Treblinka

about Marchenko the operator, you have everything.

You have tall, you have short, you have fat, you have thin.

You have black hair.

You have descriptions that correspond to Demjanjuk.

I mean, you have a lot of it.

These were Wachmann who were questioned

and then summarily killed.

The weight that is to be given to those testimonies

is very little.

But the big surprise, of course,

is the following:

After the war, when Demjanjuk wanted to enter the United States,

he declared that he's Ivan,

the son of Nikolai Demjanjuk

and of Olga...

née, born Marchenko.

Now, this is too much of a coincidence.

Demjanjuk had used the name Marchenko before,

because it was his mother's maiden name.

We all know that there are people who use the mother's maiden name

as a way of sort of hiding their true identity

because it's close enough and yet far enough.

It is even more complicated,

because the defense rushed to the Ukraine

and brought from there proof that the maiden name of his mother

was not at all Marchenko, but another name.

That, again, looked very suspicious.

It's like, how does that...

How does he just coincidentally list

the guard of the gas chamber as his mother's maiden name?

Doesn't that seem to offer powerful corroborating evidence

of the fact that he was Ivan the Terrible?

This is, of course, something we raised in the Supreme Court.

It is a very strong incriminating aspect

of the whole...

uh... assemblage of evidence.

The decision on what to do with him will be made

by the Supreme Court.

Their verdict's due shortly.

It will be very difficult for them

because if they decide that this is not Ivan the Terrible,

then they really have to look into the eyes of the Holocaust survivors,

the eyewitnesses,

and tell them, "Your testimony is not good enough."

The appeal court judges may well decide

that John Demjanjuk is not Ivan the Terrible.

That will be a desperately painful verdict

for many people in Israel to accept

because this has been so much more than a trial of one man's guilt.

This has been a hearing of history.

The appellant

John Ivan Demjanjuk was extradited over seven years ago

from the United States to Israel.

Evidence was presented to prove the appellant was a Wachmann

of the Trawniki unit,

which was established to teach its members

how to eradicate, kill, exterminate,

and bring about the final solution to the "Jewish problem."

Evidence also showed

that he was stationed at Sobibor, one of three death camps

in addition to serving as an SS guard in the concentration camps

at Flossenburg and Regensburg.

Several survivors of the Treblinka inferno

identified the appellant as Ivan the Terrible,

chief among the murderers and abusers of Jews who were led to Treblinka

to be choked in the gas chambers.

For these crimes he was convicted by the district court.

Following the appeal, this court received

several testimonies by different Wachmanns

which pointed to another man as being Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka.

And they served to insert doubt into our judicial deliberations...

that perhaps the appellant was not Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka.

Our verdict is unanimous.

We find the Wachmann Ivan Demjanjuk...

innocent...

on the grounds of reasonable doubt,

of the horrific charges attributed to Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka.

Over and not done with.

Perfection is not the purview of any human judge.

Issued today, July 29, 1993.

Today, five Israeli judges ruled

that while John Demjanjuk very likely did serve as a guard

at a camp devoted to exterminating Jews,

he was not the infamous guard known to his victims as Ivan the Terrible,

and for technical reasons,

would not be tried by Israel for any other war crimes.

Survivors who identified Demjanjuk believe strongly

the court is wrong.

Their eyewitness testimony originally convinced the court,

which gave Demjanjuk the death penalty.

Then, the Supreme Court overruled that verdict,

in effect saying the survivors were wrong.

How can you release a vicious killer?

When the court ruled

he was a murderer at Sobibor?

This is a trial in the State of Israel?

We should perform a Keriah. We should be sitting Shiva.

Demjanjuk is a murderer and he should get what he deserves.

I do not accept it!

He's a murderer and he killed. We paid with six million Jews!

We mustn't forget!

How could you, in Jerusalem, sitting in a court of law,

say that the survivors' testimony is less than...

beyond a reasonable doubt?

To say to that survivor,

"The man you saw outside of the gas chamber"

for months on end, killing your family...

We don't believe you.

"We just don't believe you that that's him."

How could that happen?

I believe it all was a sham

and the judges know that I recognized him

as Ivan the Terrible, for sure.

Other camp survivors simply could not believe the verdict.

Some emerged speechless from the court.

We have no right not to believe these people...

over the testimonies of dead Ukrainians

who were put on trial for participating in the death camps.

Who elevates these guards,

all who participated in the killing machine,

to be greater than the survivors?

I'm shocked.

Complete shock.

The judges are wrong.

They committed an injustice to the million dead.

He is a Nazi archcriminal.

A million Jews stand behind me.

When they ask me: Yosef Cherney, what did you do?

What will I tell them?

I did what I could in the state of Israel.

That's all I could do.

Of course it's hard emotionally.

I fully believe he was that terrible murderer

who pushed the Jews into the gas chambers at knifepoint.

I had no doubts. I still don't.

In my heart, there's no doubt...

that he was identified correctly.

Demjanjuk was at Treblinka as well. He worked there

and committed his horrific crimes there.

It's a wound that will never heal.

As for me, I feel sorrow.

I didn't speak to Epstein,

I didn't speak to Rosenberg,

or the other survivors.

It was very tough for them.

And... I didn't...

I think that I didn't want to make it even worse.

For me, it is very difficult

that if we go into trial

and if we strive for justice,

our expectation is

that the same will go for the courts.

There is, here in Israel,

a war criminal

who did crimes against humanity and against the Jewish people,

and you let him go

with arguments that,

in my opinion, do not hold water.

I'll tell you the very truth.

On the whole, I enjoyed every second of it.

On Friday, as the Demjanjuk acquittal

sent the world media into a frenzy,

Yoram Sheftel was seen relaxing in a corner of the hotel dining room,

biting into his buttered bread

and listening to John Demjanjuk Jr.'s report on recent headlines.

Yoram Sheftel, how much did you make on this trial?

I'm afraid I only reveal the exact sum on my tax reports,

but I will tell you and the viewers that it is

a six-figure sum in greens.

The lawyer who defeated this potential miscarriage of justice

has written the book.

It's called The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show Trial.

This is the title of a book by attorney Yoram Sheftel.

Which I should mention is a best seller barely a week after its publication.

See, here's an example of the transformation.

- Well? - I'm approached by people I don't know...

- We heard he was here. - They heard I was here

- and wanted to congratulate me. - Congratulations.

- That these people are shaking his hand? - Yes.

- I don't believe my eyes. - Neither do I.

But I think it's because it's television.

Yes, people go after cheap celebrity.

At the day that Demjanjuk was exonerated,

my mother admitted, uh,

the first time in her life, definitely during my lifetime,

that she was wrong, and I was right.

And I never heard such a sentence from her

in my entire life.

Yoram Sheftel shows his mother what he achieved.

My decision to join the case of Demjanjuk

was the most important, clever, and rightful decision

I ever made in my life.

And all my life, I would be proud of that decision

and of my conduct in this case.

John Demjanjuk,

the man cleared of being the concentration camp guard

Ivan the Terrible, has arrived back in America

after a flight from Israel.

Mr. Demjanjuk was still in handcuffs

when he was taken from prison and put on board a flight to New York.

I believe it was very hard for him,

but he just remained thankful

throughout the whole period of time that I got involved.

I'm glad Mr. D's name was cleared,

and he deserves some peace.

John Demjanjuk is home,

and this ruling sure looks like he can count on staying home.

I'm very happy he is acquitted. I grew up as a child with him,

and I know he could never have done anything that they said he did.

- Ah... - Never. No one would ever...

The whole time, whole 17 years,

no one would ever convince me that he was Ivan the Terrible

or did anything bad.

Good thing he's free.

Don't you think that still, you know, the, uh...

crimes that maybe he committed in Sobibor should be...

Sobibor, who know?

Who know? That so many year passing.

- Yeah. - And I don't believe that he was there.

Same thing, like Treblinka.

Because that's Ukraine.

I don't know why they are against Ukraine.

The most significant first memory of him is the day he came home.

Everybody in the family was excited and talking.

I didn't get a chance to really talk to him that much that day.

But I just remember sitting there and kind of looking over at him

and thinking, "Huh. This is, you know, the guy that..."

I've, uh, you know, got to know through... through the TV."

John Demjanjuk came back to Cleveland to live a quiet life.

We didn't see him much.

He would go to church, to the Ukrainian Church.

Few people said they saw him go to the supermarket,

the grocery store.

You'd see him around the parks...

uh, presumably with his grandkids.

But he stayed out of the limelight,

but seemed to return to a quiet life, finally.

Which wasn't to be.

There is some doubt on whether Demjanjuk

was Ivan the Terrible.

But there is no doubt

he was a guard taking part in the mass murder process

at the Sobibor death camp.

To allow such a person to go unprosecuted

would be to say, in effect, that...

the crimes don't matter, they're not important.

I became Acting Director of OSI the year after Demjanjuk came back.

And then, suddenly, I inherited this case.

The judge told us, "If you have sufficient evidence,"

you can come back to court

"and ask me to cancel his citizenship."

Clearly, the documents established

that Demjanjuk took part in the mass annihilation process.

There is no question.

Absolutely no question that the Trawniki card is authentic.

Demjanjuk was a specialist in the annihilation of Jews.

We know that because he served at a series of Nazi camps,

starting with the Trawniki forced labor camp,

Then, he served at the Sobibor extermination camp.

He also served, possibly, at Treblinka.

He served later at the Flossenburg concentration camp.

Also at the Majdanek concentration camp.

And there is direct evidence

that John Demjanjuk beat Jews

on the way to the gas chambers.

The United States had a moral obligation

to the survivors

to see that he was brought to justice.

We didn't have criminal jurisdiction under American law

because the Nazi crimes didn't occur here.

Germany, of course, was the logical destination.

Federal immigration agents went in,

and they picked him up in a wheelchair.

They took him out.

He just looked so bad.

People were stunned that the government continued to go after geriatric men

for what they did years earlier.

What kind of a threat did you see on that old man?

What harm to society did he pose to anybody?

I was talking to a federal prosecutor.

And I said, "The Holocaust was 50 years ago.

When will the government ultimately stop?"

He looked me right in the eye and he said,

"When these men take their last dying breaths."

Demjanjuk's lawyers rushed to court

claiming that putting a man in this terrible medical condition

on a plane to Germany would amount to torture.

Right this very moment,

there's a motion before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Uh, it is a CAT claim,

which means Convention Against Torture,

and a stay on his deportation.

If that's the case,

you'll all be back here when they bring him back today.

The Court of Appeals issued an order

temporarily barring us from removing Demjanjuk.

Of course, Demjanjuk's lawyers were saying he was in such terrible medical shape.

It was all faked.

We had surveillance video shot

just before Demjanjuk had been taken out,

showing him walking around,

going to an appointment, getting out of a car,

opening the door, getting back into the car.

It was a ruse.

Once we made it public,

immediately the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the order.

I remember watching a live video feed

of that plane taking off,

and I remember saying to my deputy,

"Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. And so..."

there's going to be some reason for it to come back.

"I just feel it."

Within hours,

an official of the US Consulate there sent me an e-mail.

And if you remember the first words

when the United States landed on the moon:

"Houston, the Eagle has landed."

The title of the e-mail was "The Albatross Has Landed."

I appreciated that.

The plaza was filled with TV vans and reporters

and people lining up, waiting to get in.

They had to turn thousands away.

When the door opened,

everybody in the courtroom went...

He looked dead.

His eyes were closed.

His hands were crossed on his chest like he was in a coffin.

Photographers went crazy, took him at all different angles.

He never blinked.

They read the charges against him. He never blinked.

Once in a while, during the trial, he may twitch a little bit.

And most people concluded

he was playing the sympathy card.

He was playing a game.

He was a good actor.

He had 30 years of experience.

Demjanjuk...

played the part.

And he was prepared to stay the course to the end.

If he'd have gone to the gallows, he'd have said no.

There would have been no deathbed confession.

I guarantee it.

This was the final act.

The trial in Israel was filled with so much pain.

Some members of the prosecution team never recovered.

But in my opinion,

it was ordained that he should be released from Jerusalem

so that he would show up in Munich, Germany,

where Hitler stood and delivered his speeches.

And here, John Ivan Demjanjuk,

the man who pushed and shoved Jewish men

and women and children into the gas chambers,

who participated in one of the biggest killing machines humanity has ever seen,

60 years later,

be convicted as being a participant to the murder of millions of Jews.

A court in Germany, this morning, convicted former US citizen

and accused Nazi death camp guard, John Demjanjuk.

A judge in Munich, Germany, handed down the sentence

to the 91-year-old former Ohio autoworker today.

Demjanjuk, who is now 91 years old,

was charged with more than 28,000 counts of accessory to murder.

It's taken more than 30 years to convict John Demjanjuk,

a cog in the Nazi war machine.

In the 1980s, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled

that it was a case of mistaken identity.

This time, the judge was in no such doubt.

Am I prepared to say...

that they were right?

I wasn't in the trial.

I accept the justice system in Germany, okay?

All right? In this case, that's all I can say.

The Demjanjuk trial, or trials,

are the last great trial of any Nazi war criminal.

The victims are dying out, and so are the murderers.

Some were caught over the years, others escaped.

Some walk freely even today.

There is no revenge, there is no perfect justice,

but a partial justice, a late trial,

are better than injustice or no trial at all.

There is a clear-cut proof

that the German Court didn't believe for a second

the truth of his guilty sentence.

How do I know it?

What the judge does,

from his own initiative,

he asked the defense lawyer,

"Are you going to appeal?"

Defense lawyer says, "Yes," so he released Demjanjuk.

So... And he was released...

to be a free man, on the spot,

when they found him guilty of murdering 29,000 Jews.

It's a joke. It's a joke.

People didn't appreciate

how important this trial was.

That, you know, you could say, "Ah, they convicted a 91-year-old."

They sentenced him to five years in prison.

"Big deal."

It was a big deal.

It was not a crime to aid and abet.

To be a part of the Nazi killing machine.

It was not a crime.

John Demjanjuk had set a precedent.

These foot soldiers are critical, critical instruments

for genocide's implementation and success.

Without these foot soldiers of genocide,

you don't have the Holocaust.

Any type of assistance to the machinery

was a participant to the murder and Final Solution of the Jews.

It took us 60 years and more

to be able to say that.

Well, as a line leader, I interacted with John 300 times probably.

Because I had to think about this, what could I possibly tell you about John?

So I'm not gonna tell you anything about John.

I'm going to tell you about the people that came

to work at Ford.

From Germany, the Ukraine,

all the people that, either trying to get out during the war,

or they emigrated right after the war.

They were all the same.

They went to work.

They did their job.

Hardly ever talked.

And then they disappeared into the darkness.

If you were in maintenance,

they had these huge areas in the corners.

And they sat in those areas by their toolboxes,

and they waited for the whistle to blow.

At that point, they came out of the shadows,

work on the line, then they would go back.

They were truly invisible people.

If you pick that story up and equated it to John,

you'd say John was hiding.

The truth was,

that was all of them.

The US fought the Nazis in World War II.

We defeated Hitler in World War II.

How could Nazi war criminals wind up in the United States?

When I was first elected to Congress...

a man came to me in my Washington office,

and he wasn't crazy on the outside,

but his allegation was crazy.

He said to me the government has a list

of Nazi war criminals living in the United States.

I almost fell off my chair.

I said, "Okay, I want to see the files."

And I opened the first one.

"John Doe."

Murdered Jews in Latvia.

Immigration official went to visit this man.

'Are you so-and-so?' 'Yes, I'm so-and-so.'

'How you feeling?'

'I feel fine.'

"'Thank you very much. Bye.'"

What? There must be some mistake here.

I must have missed something.

So I go to the next file.

Different country, different allegation, same thing.

"Are you so and so? How are you feeling?"

"I feel fine."

"Thank you very much. Bye."

I went through file after file, and that's all they were asking.

"How do you feel?"

This is the immigration service.

This is not the public health service of the US.

And I realized that they had no intention

of ever doing anything about these cases.

I'm sure there's thousands of Nazis around.

Come on. They're here everywhere in the United States.

Americans were well aware of the fact

that we grabbed a lot of the people that were good for us,

that help us with programs and all those other things.

And they weren't Nazis.

Because we needed 'em.

American industry and US immigration law,

even American banks, play the principal role

in harboring and hiding Nazi collaborators.

The United States, in general, couldn't care less.

The basic principle in the United States was let sleeping Nazis lie.

They are some of the most anti-communistic people you can find,

and therefore, they're an asset

because they will fight communism in our country.

SS officers, Nazi scientists,

some of whom engaged in actually torturous experimentation on people...

They said they were anti-communist,

and that was the beginning and end of the conversation.

Even if they knew that they had engaged in persecution of thousands,

it didn't matter.

You know, there's a famous saying:

"The victors write history."

So you can go after John

because you thought he was Ivan the Terrible,

and if he was Ivan the Terrible, he should rot in hell.

But what I will tell you is...

the father of all of NASA,

which is right up the street,

is Wernher von Braun.

He's a celebrated hero here in this country.

You took a Nazi war criminal

and put him in charge of our rocket program.

This guy invented the rockets that were bombing England.

But he got us to the moon.

So, he was a "good Nazi."

It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it?

We don't have a statute of limitations

in this country on murder.

And we also don't have one on mass murder.

And you can't just say, "Oh, I've been a good boy, a good girl."

I only killed 100 people, 1,000 people,

"but, you know, I'm a good person now."

Well, maybe you are,

but there are plenty people today who want to commit mass murder.

And if we say, "Nazis can go free."

Fine, let's move on"...

what's the message to every would-be mass murderer today?

Well, you can get away with it.

Over the weekend, Demjanjuk died

in Germany at the age of 91.

He was convicted last year, after being deported to Germany.

He died in a nursing home there while awaiting the outcome of an appeal.

According to German law,

if a convicted felon dies during his appeal proceedings,

his guilt is revoked, and his final verdict remains unknown.

The problem is that Demjanjuk passed away

between his conviction and his appeal,

and therefore, according to the German law,

finally, when he passed away,

he passed away, again,

uh, under the presumption that he's innocent.

So, the whole story is an unfinished business

from any aspect that you look upon.

I know he wasn't a bad man, and I know he wasn't Ivan the Terrible.

I know that he did what he had to do to survive,

and that's good enough for me.

Do you ever speculate what he did?

There's no point, you know? I'm a history buff.

I read up on, you know, Flossenbürg, Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

I mean, I... like I said, I know, I did so much history and research on all that,

so I can imagine what he could have done,

but not just him, everybody in that situation.

You, me, your friends, my friends.

If you were put in that situation,

and you were given the choice between life and death,

I mean, what are you going to pick?

So, whatever he did

and wherever he was is insignificant to me.

I was walking down the street in Jerusalem several years ago,

and I saw a poster,

and it stated, "The prosecutor at Munich speaks about the Demjanjuk trial."

And I sat there, and I listened

to the systematic explanations that were made by the prosecutor

on why John Demjanjuk was convicted

in Munich by the Germans...

of being at Sobibor.

And I approached him afterwards, and I said,

"Do you believe the survivors that he was in Treblinka?"

And he kind of shied away from giving me an answer.

And then he looked at me, and he said something.

"In Germany, we have our documents."

But this is the country of the Jews.

"Your survivors are the people you believe."