TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

174 Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf: Treblinka
An obviously embarrassing detail was that one of these witnesses, Eliyahu
Rosenberg, had in 1947 in Vienna stated the following: 504
“The second of August 1943 was set as the day of the revolt. […] About
three-thirty in the afternoon everything was prepared for the revolt. […]
Then one of the water-carriers right then dashed into the barracks and
yelled: ‘Revolution in Berlin.’ This was the signal. Thereupon some people
rushed into the barracks of the Ukrainian guard detachment, where among
others also the Ukrainian Ivan was sleeping, and killed the Ukrainians
with shovels.”
During the trial, however, Rosenberg offered the excuse that he was only
repeating what he had heard and had not actually witnessed the death of Ivan.
In April 1988, as everyone had expected, the Jerusalem Court passed the
death sentence but it was not carried out. By then all too many embarrassing
mistakes had occurred, and defense counsel Sheftel (who had acid sprayed in
his face by a criminal at the end of 1988, a few days after a second Demjanjuk
attorney, Dov Eitan, had fallen to his death from a high-rise building) thoroughly
exploited these errors in his appeal. Finally, Sheftel pointed to one
Ivan Marchenko – missing without a trace – as the actual Ivan the Terrible.
This name had first been mentioned by a former prostitute living in the
hamlet of Treblinka, who had numbered among her clientele several Ukrainian
guards from the camp during the war, among them Marchenko, but Sheftel
soon found more evidence of him in the USSR. According to Soviet court
documents, a Ukrainian by the name of Nikolai Shelaiev, who had been condemned
to death and shot in 1952 due to alleged crimes in Treblinka, had
identified this Ivan Marchenko as operator of the gas chambers of Treblinka.
Shelaiev’s testimony was confirmed by several other former Treblinka guards,
and a personal ID card of Marchenko from Trawniki also came to light.
The Israeli judiciary now had to grit its teeth and concede that Demjanjuk,
despite all the oaths of the five eyewitnesses, had not been ‘Ivan the Terrible’,
but first undertook yet another weak attempt to charge him with crimes, this
time in Sobibór and Flossenbürg. But there were no witnesses to such crimes,
and according to the Israeli-American extradition treaty Demjanjuk could not
be tried for offenses in these two camps, since his extradition had been predicated
solely on his alleged atrocities in Treblinka. Thus he was finally able to
return to the United States in September of 1993. To date this innocent man
has not received a single dollar of compensation for the shameful injustice
done to him. On the contrary: his persecution began anew in February 2002,
504
This explanation of Rosenberg has been reproduced in full by H. P. Rullmann, op. cit. (note
188), on pp. 133f.