TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter V: Treblinka Trials 171
Ivan wants me to have sexual relations with a dead woman. So then he
went up to him and reprimanded him. Ivan only said to me (in Russian),
I’ll give it to you. He gave it to me and he found the opportunity.”
Another witness, Yehiel Reichmann, testified as follows, according to the
Jerusalem verdict: 499
“I want to tell what took place next to the well with my friend Finkelstein.
While I was still washing teeth together with him, with Finkelstein,
this Ashmadai (devil) Ivan came with a drilling machine for drilling holes.
And he rotated this drilling machine for making holes on Finkelstein’s buttocks
and said to him, if you scream I’ll shoot you… He injured that
Finkelstein, he was bleeding and suffering great pain, intense pain, but he
was not permitted to scream, because Ivan had given him an order – ‘If
you scream, I’ll shoot you’… Ivan was a super-devil, a super destroyer
from Treblinka.”
Thus went the witness testimony during a trial, which from the very beginning
was intended to once again, more than four decades after the end of the
war, graphically conjure up the horror of the ‘Holocaust’ before the eyes of
the world in general and of the Israeli populace in particular. The trial had
originally been planned to be conducted in a soccer stadium (!), but since its
show-trial character would than have appeared all too evident, this notion was
abandoned and a movie theater was chosen as the courtroom. The Israeli media
relentlessly stoked the hysteria, and the trial was a mandatory topic in the
nation’s schools. But then things went much differently from the way they
were planned: The trial became a colossal fiasco for the State of Israel and its
judiciary.
The two most important books about the Demjanjuk trial are Hans Peter
Rullmann’s outstanding 1987 Der Fall Demjanjuk. Unschuldiger oder Massenmörder?
(The Demjanjuk Case: Innocent Man or Mass Murderer?) 500 and
Yoram Sheftel’s Defending “Ivan the Terrible.” The Conspiracy to Convict
John Demjanjuk. H. P. Rullmann, former Yugoslavia correspondent of the
German left-wing news magazine Der Spiegel and chairman of the German-
Croatian Society, throws light not only on the background and early stages of
the Demjanjuk trial (the trial was still underway when the book appeared), but
also goes into the historical context, in particular the tension-laden relations
between Jews and Ukrainians; several times the author expresses doubts as to
the correctness of the official version of Treblinka. On the other hand, the Israeli
attorney Y. Sheftel, Demjanjuk’s defense counsel, by his own admission
an ardent Zionist, accepts this version without reservation and insists merely
on the personal innocence of his client, who has been the victim of a conspir-
499 Ibid., p. 186.
500 Yoram Sheftel, Defending “Ivan the Terrible.” The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk,
Regnery Publishing, Washington 1996.