TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

172 Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf: Treblinka
acy. Thanks to the committed efforts of Sheftel, the death sentence was
quashed by the Israeli Appeals Court, and Demjanjuk was able to return to the
USA after seven years of innocent imprisonment.
In the following account of the Demjanjuk case, we are relying for the
most part on Rullmann’s documentation for events before 1987, the year his
book was published; for the following period, we rely upon the Sheftel book.
Ivan Demjanjuk, born in 1920 in the Ukraine, fell into German hands as a
soldier of the Red Army in 1942. He was at first employed in the repair of
railroad tracks, and then was sent to the prisoner of war camp of Che�m in
eastern Poland, where he was held until the beginning of 1944. In order to escape
the hunger in the camp, he put himself at the disposal of the Germans as
an auxiliary volunteer and was assigned to a Ukrainian National Guard unit
under General Shandruk, which fought side by side with the Wehrmacht
against the Soviets. In 1945, Demjanjuk escaped the fate of many of his countrymen,
who were delivered by the British to the Bolsheviks, then shipped off
to the camps of the Gulag Archipelago. After living for a few years in Germany,
where he married a Ukrainian woman, he emigrated to the U.S. in
1952, and made a life for himself there as an auto worker, receiving citizenship
in 1958.
The fact that Demjanjuk was active in the Ukrainian community in his new
residence of Cleveland, Ohio, spelled disaster for him. A certain Michael Hanusiak,
staff member of the Communist newspaper Ukrainian News, published
one article after another, in which the anti-Communist Ukrainian exiles
supporting the independence of their homeland were smeared as ‘Nazi collaborators.’
According to Hanusiak, seventy of these sinister figures were living
in Cleveland. In 1975, Demjanjuk came into the crosshairs of the Ukrainian
News. Hanusiak claims that he had found the testimony of a certain Danilchenko
in a Soviet archive, according to which the latter had gotten to know
an Ivan Demjanjuk in Sobibór in March 1943. There – according to Danilchenko
– that Demjanjuk had driven Jewish prisoners into the gas chambers as
an executioner’s assistant of the Germans; in the spring of the same year, he
was allegedly sent, together with Danilchenko, to the Flossenbürg concentration
camp, where he again was employed as a guard.
Now the battue against the autoworker could begin. The Cleveland newspaper
Plain Dealer identified him as ‘Ivan the Terrible,’ and starting in 1976,
U.S. immigration authorities sought information against him. They requested
the Jewish World Congress to find former Sobibór inmates who could incriminate
the suspect. There were no prosecution witnesses, and the mysterious
Danilchenko himself had vanished without a trace. In a search for witnesses,
a U.S. investigative group traveled to Israel, where seven former Treblinka
prisoners ‘recognized’ Demjanjuk as the evil Ivan of Treblinka on the
basis of a photograph. These statements of course contradicted Danilchenko’s