“The Nazi criminal Demjanjuk died,” were the headlines in the world media. It is no wonder. The trial has been held. When it was still in progress in Munich I warned our readers: if Demjanjuk suffering from cancer does not live until its end, it will be still possible to loudly declare that the “Nazi criminal did not live until the fair verdict.” The verdict has been given. Back then BBC presented this news under the headline “John Demjanjuk has been convicted for the Nazi death camp.” It means that he organized that camp and ran it. It will be no wonder if in 10 years he will be called “the main Nazi criminal.” Now Poland is asking the US institutions not to use the expression “Polish death camps” saying that the Americans, not burdened with knowledge, (who make the majority, to be quite frank) take it as the Polish crime and not as the German one.
As for the sentence to Demjanjuk, he was convicted “for complicity in murders of 28,060 prisoners from Sobibor camp.” The simple calculation shows that from the day he came to the camp to the last day the camp existed Demjanjuk participated in the murders of two prisoners per hour without any breaks. The faultless “killing machine”! However, the German justice was not guided by arithmetic. It invented the new judicial doctrine for conviction: “failure of evidence that he committed specific crimes.” It means that if he was a guard in the camp he is guilty for everything that was done there. The German justice worked hard to get this formula. Two former prisoners of Sobibor did not recognize Demjanjuk as the guard of the camp, 23 other witnesses of the prosecution died before the trial. The main witness Ignat Danylchenko declared by the German prosecution as “a new witness” had died long ago and had witnessed during Demjanjuk’s trial in Israel. It should be recalled that in 1993 Demjanjuk was discharged though sentenced to death by hanging as “Ivan the Terrible” from Treblinka camp. Then Demjanjuk came back to the US and his citizenship was renewed and he brought an action against the ministry of justice for the unfair accusation. In 2001 the ministry stroke back and started the second tour of prosecution.
Demjanjuk always insisted that he had never been to Treblinka, Sobibor or Trawniki; after being taken prisoner in 1942 he spent the rest of the war in the camp for the Soviet prisoners of war. By the way, the Sobibor guards were tried back in 1966. Five accused and the head guard Erich Lichman were released since the German court decided that he had told them to kill and they had killed on pain of death!
I emphasize the ethnic origin of the accused since it played an important role during the Munich process. It turned out that the witness called Blatt did not remember the German guards and insisted that “there were a lot of Ukrainians there and that the ‘death factory’ could not exist without them.” There is all reason to assume that Blatt based his testimony on the popular American movie Escape from Sobibor of 1987, in which the camp guards were presented as Ukrainians wearing furry hats. By the way, I have seen two versions of this film: one for the American audience and another one for the foreign audience with the Ukrainian guards. However, in the American version they are presented as “Russian Cossacks.” Probably, it was done because the Americans were afraid of the then influential Ukrainian lobby in the US: try to slander the Ukrainians and you will get the demonstrations of hundred thousand people, congressmen’s speeches and goods boycott. Formerly it was so. However, the Ukrainian lobby has sunk into oblivion.
Demjanjuk’s advocate Ulrich Busch commented that attack against the Ukrainians: “The Germans killed 3 million of Slavs. It was a holocaust. Demjanjuk has also become a victim of genocide. We can also recall Jewish’s collaborationism in concentration camps. However, this issue is a taboo!”
It is true that collaborationism and complicity in murders had no national limits. Starting from 1960s the book by the former Oswiecim prisoner Vadym Boiko The Word after Execution was repeatedly republished. During the occupation he, an adolescent, was taken from Skvyra to Germany as a slave. For several attempts to escape he was imprisoned in Oswiecim where he became the active participant of the clandestine activity and revolt. In his book Boiko refuted the arguments of those who suggested being indulgent towards volunteers who worked as Sonderkommandos to survive. He wrote: “Nearly 700 of the former Oswiecim Sonderkommandos are still free. Of course, they do not tell anybody what they did in Oswiecim, how they smothered people with gas, burnt down the whole echelons of people, how they tore out golden teeth and cut women’s hair…” The former prisoner gave concrete names and indicated where to find them: The “head dentist” Feldman was charged to tear out golden teeth from alive and dead. If some “were capricious” and did not want to say goodbye to their golden teeth Feldman knocked the teeth out with one skilful hit. They feared Feldman like death since he had special powers. Even when Oswiecim was in the critical situation and the Germans were covering their tracks they did not liquidate him… He surfaced under another surname in South Africa where he opened a private prosthodontic clinic in Salisbury. However, the omnipresent journalists found him there. Having sold his clinic for a song, Feldman disappeared. Finally, he found a shelter in Israel just like most of his colleagues Sonderkommandos.
The main documentary evidence against Demjanjuk during the trials in Israel and Munich was his supposed guard’s certificate proving that he had undergone a corresponding training in Trawniki camp with a photo but without date and place where it had been issued. However, the Israeli experts proved that the certificate was forged. The former camp commandant Karl Streibel told Demjanjuk’s advocates that he could not have signed the certificate without date and place. Demjanjuk’s personal file was never found. However, the Munich court ignored it.
In this context Russia’s positive reaction to Demjanjuk’s trial in Munich was natural. The Russian foreign ministry called the process “a significant event” and praised the court for the “objective investigation of Demjanjuk’s crimes” spitting upon the presumption of innocence. Moscow boasted of having given to Germany “the copies of documents concerning Demjanjuk’s case” that nobody ever saw. The explanation of this is quite simple: Moscow had repeatedly blamed Ukraine and Baltic countries for “discharging the Nazi accomplices and heroizing them.” The propagandist campaign was carried out skillfully with the complete helplessness of the Ukrainian authorities. Only on June 22, 2011, according to PACE’s information, the Ukrainian MP Yulia Liovochkina rebutted her Russian counterpart Aleksandr Pochinok who tried to push through another resolution mentioning Ukraine among the countries where “the Nazi war criminals have not been prosecuted and their crimes have not been investigated because of legal or ideological reasons.” She managed to exclude Ukraine from this resolution.
During the trial and after the sentence the Ukrainian officials kept silent. Only one of them, when asked by a journalist, started praising the German trial saying that it was a European court. The piety of that “European integrator” towards the German court is understandable. However, the German court is not the same that the European court. There is the European Court for Human Rights where the Europeans complain about the unjust decisions of their national courts, and the German court in particular. There are plenty of decisions of the European Court cancelling the decisions of the national courts, the German court among them. In particular, for violating the right for the fair trial. Demjanjuk did not have this possibility because of his advanced age.
When Demjanjuk was deprived of the US citizenship and prepared for deportation neither Ukraine, nor Poland (where the crimes he was accused for had happened) wanted to hold a trial. Instead, Germany got unexpectedly interested (asked by the American Department of Justice?) and the prosecutor moved Demjanjuk’s “crime scene” from the concentration camp Treblinka to Sobibor. Such persistence gives rise to questions since the FRG’s experience of prosecuting Nazi crimes is far from being ideal. Back in 1953 they amnestied those who had ordered to execute their compatriots who had refused fighting against the anti-Hitler coalition. When in 1960 during the trial in Israel notorious Eichmann mentioned his 387 accomplices it turned out that many of them were at executive positions in FRG. Then the FRG government took care that Eichmann could not compromise the officials. The special representative of the FRG government met the then Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion who promised to present all the materials to the FRG government first. Moreover, the Israeli government agreed that Eichmann was protected by the West German advocate Servatius who had been a trustee of the most known Nazis if FRG. In 1965 FRG stopped bringing actions because of the time limitation. In 1969 there was an amnesty. It looks like Pat Buchanan was right when he wrote the following: “Demjanjuk has to serve as a scapegoat whose blood has to wash off Germany’s sins.” The member of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, publisher of his father’s diary written during the occupation (by the way, highly appreciated by the Israeli Jad Vashem) Jan Ciekawski wrote: “Isn’t it ironical that now the Germans are judges. Aren’t they trying to hide their responsibility? I cannot help thinking that Demjanjuk’s case has nothing to do with justice. It is a propagandist tool.”
It is true that Germany has been trying to get rid of the complex of “national guilt,” as the main propagandist and living classic Martin Walser says “to stop the historical sadomasochism,” “to take away the moral beater of Oswiecim making our nation vulnerable.”
In this context the recent scandal with “lectures” of notorious associate professor Rossolinski-Liebe is not surprising. It is another action in the multi-level German public policy aiming at seizing and shaping other nations’ historical discourse and determining its content and limits. The public reply of the authorities of the Center for Polish and European Studies at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy who protested against imposing that “lecturer” was significantly frank: “We could not influence the choice of invited lecturers and trusted it to our partners (the German Academic Exchange Service, the Boll Foundation, and the German embassy).”
Such confidence and flattery might cost a lot.
