Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 30, 1993 TAG: 9307300178
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: JERUSALEM LENGTH: Medium
In a 405-page decision, the five-judge panel said recently discovered interrogations of Soviet prisoners who guarded death camps in Germany and occupied Poland during World War II raise the possibility that Ivan the Terrible was not Demjanjuk but another person, Ivan Marchenko, who has never been found.
The court did find compelling evidence that Demjanjuk had served as a guard in at least two other Nazi death camps where Jews were exterminated. The justices decided, however, not to hold another trial, and Israel issued a legal order for Demjanjuk's expulsion even before he had left the courtroom Thursday morning.
Demjanjuk, who entered the United States after World War II and became an auto worker in Cleveland, was extradited to Israel in 1985 and his U.S. citizenship was revoked after the Justice Department built a case against him as Ivan the Terrible.
Family members said they would appeal to have him returned to the United States. In Washington on Thursday night, a Justice Department official said Demjanjuk is ineligible to return because of evidence that he served at Trawniki, a training camp for death-camp guards, and at Sobibor, another Nazi death camp.
A federal appeals court in Cincinnati reopened the 7-year-old extradition proceeding last year and appointed a federal judge to investigate whether the Justice Department improperly concealed contradictory evidence. Earlier this month, the judge found that while U.S. prosecutors "failed to challenge the evidence they possessed," they did not intentionally mislead the courts.
Demjanjuk is to leave Israel in the next few days, as soon as another country agrees to accept him, officials said. He may fly to his native Ukraine. Ukrainian officials said Demjanjuk would likely be allowed to live there, the Associated Press reported.
Demjanjuk, 73, who has been in solitary confinement in Israel's Ayalon Prison for seven years, listened with headphones as the verdict was translated into his native Ukrainian. He showed few signs of emotion, periodically yawning and looking out at his son, John Jr., and daughter's husband, Edward Nishnic, in the courtroom.
"I miss my wife. I miss my family. I miss my grandchildren," he shouted to reporters. "I want to go home."
The younger Demjanjuk, who has spent years working only on Demjanjuk's defense, began to weep in the courtroom as the acquittal was announced.
"The matter is closed - but not complete," declared Chief Judge Meir Shamgar at the end of 16 years of investigation and prosecution. The trial in 1988 was highly publicized, and the Israeli government used it to deliver a national lesson about the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis.
In the aftermath of the verdict, Israel had to confront the prosecution's errors while trying not to undermine the place of the Holocaust in its national consciousness.
"We don't make a decision about the historic truth," said Mordechai Kramnitzer, head of the Hebrew University Law School. "All we do is make a decision about the legal truth. This is a legal truth and not more."
Just as the conviction in 1961 and execution in 1962 of the Nazi Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann was a seminal moment in Israeli history, so too is the Demjanjuk verdict being seen as a turning point. Some prominent lawyers and scholars recently have questioned whether Israel will ever again hold a Nazi war-crimes trial.
Even as Shamgar read the unanimous verdict for two hours Thursday in court, he expressed a large measure of doubt about Demjanjuk's true wartime deeds.
"The complete truth is not the prerogative of the human judge," he said. "Obscurity remains."
by CNB