Volume 39, Number 16 · October 8, 1992
John Demjanjuk and the Failure of Justice
By Gitta Sereny
In late August, the US Court of Appeals in Cincinnati gave a fresh twist to the tangled case of John Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian-born auto mechanic who was denaturalized in 1981, and sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 for war crimes. The verdict in Jerusalem, that he was 'Ivan the Terrible'—the gas-chamber operator at the Treblinka death camp in Poland during the Second World War—is now under appeal. But there has been growing concern about the evidence leading to Demjanjuk's extradition to Israel in 1986, and the US appellate court, after sifting through 750 pages of documents received from the Department of Justice, has ordered the four US prosecutors in his 1981 denaturalization case to be questioned under oath. The hearings before Federal Judge Thomas Wiseman, appointed 'special master,' will be held in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 15–16, and other officials of the Office for Special Investigations of the Justice Department (OSI) are expected to be called in November.
Feature, 4483 words
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