Ivan the Terrible (Treblinka guard)

Last updated

"Ivan the Terrible" (born 1911) is the nickname given to a notorious guard at the Treblinka extermination camp during the Holocaust. The moniker alluded to Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible, the infamous tsar of Russia. "Ivan the Terrible" gained international recognition following the 1986 John Demjanjuk case. By 1944, a cruel guard named "Ivan", sharing his distinct duties and extremely violent behavior with a guard named "Nicholas", was mentioned [1] in survivor literature (Rok w Treblince by Jankiel Wiernik, translated into English as A Year in Treblinka in 1945). Ukrainian–American John Demjanjuk was first accused of being Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka concentration camp. Demjanjuk was found guilty of war crimes and was sentenced to death by hanging. Exculpatory material in the form of conflicting identifications from Soviet archives was subsequently released, identifying Ivan the Terrible as one Ivan Marchenko, leading the Supreme Court of Israel to acquit Demjanjuk in 1993 because of reasonable doubt. [2] Demjanjuk was later extradited to Germany where he was convicted in 2011 of war crimes for having served at Sobibor extermination camp. While awaiting his appeal hearing, Demjanjuk died at the age of 91 in a nursing home. Under German law, his guilt was revoked, reinforcing his presumed innocence.

Contents

Background

Treblinka was managed by 20 to 25 SS overseers (Germans) and 80 to 120 Hiwi guards of various Soviet ethnicities, including Russian and Ukrainian Red army prisoners of war. They were assisted by a cadre of Jewish inmates known as kapos, who were prisoner functionaries. Ivan is a common Ukrainian, [3] Russian, and Belarusian given name. Volksdeutsche were known to have Slavic given names. [4] An example would be Ivan Klatt, Ukrainian guard leader or a Volksdeutscher who served in the Sobibor extermination camp. [5] According to Chil Rajchman six men called Ivan worked at Treblinka. [3] The vast majority of Hiwi guards who were trained at the Trawniki concentration camp facility had to contend with a language barrier. However, there were a number of Volksdeutsche among them, [6] [7] valued because they spoke German, Ukrainian, Russian and other languages. They could also understand basic Yiddish. The German and Austrian SS command, local Poles, and Jewish inmates often referred to guards as Ukrainians not only because of their ethnicity, or because they originated from Ukraine, [8] [ self-published source ] but because they spoke Ukrainian between themselves. [9] Most of the squad commanders however were Volksdeutsche. [7] [10]

Duties

Although there were other guards known as Ivan at Treblinka, [3] Ivan the Terrible was also referred to as Ukrainian. His function at the camp was to operate the two tank engines that fed the gas chambers. [11] The motors had been installed and fine-tuned by SS-Scharführer Erich Fuchs. [12] [13] Holocaust survivor Chil Rajchman testified that Ivan was about 25 years old at the time he worked in the camp. He was also known for his extreme cruelty. [11] Ivan the Terrible used to cut off the ears of workers as they walked by, and these people were forced to continue working as they bled. Shortly thereafter, he would proceed to killing them outright. He tortured victims with pipes, a sword, and whips before they entered the gas chambers. [3] [14]

Identity

The true identity of the guard referred to as Ivan the Terrible has not been conclusively determined. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, John Demjanjuk, a retired suburban Cleveland autoworker of Ukrainian descent, was accused of being Ivan. [15] He was tried in Israel in 1988 and sentenced to death, but the conviction was overturned. [16] [17]

One remarkable event during the trial in Israel involved a star witness for the prosecution, Eliyahu Rosenberg. Asked by the prosecution if he recognised Demjanjuk, Rosenberg asked Demjanjuk to remove his glasses "so I can see his eyes". Rosenberg approached and peered closely at Demjanjuk's face. When Demjanjuk smiled and offered his hand, Rosenberg recoiled and shouted, гро́зный! (Grozny!) meaning, "terrible" in Russian. "Ivan," Rosenberg said. "I say it unhesitatingly, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. It is Ivan from Treblinka, from the gas chambers, the man I am looking at now". "I saw his eyes, I saw those murderous eyes", Rosenberg told the court, glaring at Demjanjuk. Rosenberg then exclaimed directly to Demjanjuk: "How dare you put out your hand, murderer that you are!" [18] It was later revealed that Eliyahu Rosenberg had previously testified in a 1947 deposition that "Ivan the Terrible" had been killed during a prisoner uprising. [19]

On 29 July 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict on appeal. The ruling was based on new evidence, the written statements of 37 former guards at Treblinka (some of whom had been executed by the Soviet Union, and others who had died of old age, and could therefore not be cross-examined) that identified Ivan the Terrible as another man named Ivan Marchenko (possibly Marshenko, or Marczenko). [20] [21] One document described Ivan the Terrible as having brown hair, hazel eyes, a square face, and a large scar down to his neck; (Demjanjuk was dark blond with gray eyes, a round face, and no such scar.) [22] [23] According to one testimony, Marchenko was last in seen in Yugoslavia in 1944. According to the testimony of Nikolai Yegorovich Shelayev, a Russian Treblinka gas chamber operator, he and Marchenko together with two Germans and two Jews, operated the motor which produced the exhaust gas that was fed into gas chambers. [24] Shelayev and Marchenko were transferred from Treblinka to Trieste in July 1943, where Marchenko guarded German warehouses and a local prison. In 1944 as Allied forces approached, Marchenko and a driver named Gregory "fled in an armored car to the partisans in Yugoslavia." [24] Shelayev last saw Marchenko in the spring of 1945, in Fiume, where he saw him coming out of a brothel. Marchenko told Shelayev that he had joined the Yugoslav partisans. As late as 1962, Soviet authorities were looking for him. [25] The Soviet documents created enough reasonable doubt to disqualify Demjanjuk, and his previous conviction was overturned. [26] Some of the exculpatory evidence that led to Demjanjuk's release in 1993 had come to light years before and was deliberately withheld from the Israelis by the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the US Department of Justice, which had urged Israel to charge him with being Ivan the Terrible. [27]

Gilbert S. Merritt Jr., judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, said of the OSI's handling of the Demjanjuk case: "Today we know that they – the OSI, the prosecution in the case and the State Department – lied through their teeth. Even then they knew without a doubt that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, but they hid the information from us. I am sorry that I did not have the information at the time. If I did, we would never have ruled in favor of his extradition to Israel." Merritt said that what happened in his courtroom was "nothing short of a witch hunt. In retrospect, it reminds me of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts 300 years ago. The prosecution, counseled by the OSI, presented documents and witnesses whose testimony was based on emotions and hysteria, but not hard evidence. To my regret, we believed them. This instance is a prime example of how justice can be distorted." [28]

John Demjanjuk was later extradited to Germany on charges that he was another guard by the name of Ivan Demjanjuk, who served at the Sobibor extermination camp. During the trial, the problem of identity again became a key issue. Demjanjuk claimed he was not the Ivan Demjanjuk alleged to have been a guard at Sobibor, and that the Trawniki identification card supplied by the OSI to Germany, and on which the prosecution based its case, was a Soviet KGB forgery. [29] On 12 May 2011, Demjanjuk was convicted pending appeal by a German criminal court of having been a guard at Sobibor extermination camp. Demjanjuk's appeal had not yet been heard by the German Appellate Court when he died in March 2012. As a consequence, the German Munich District Court declared him "presumed innocent". The court also confirmed that Demjanjuk's previous interim conviction was invalidated, and that Demjanjuk was cleared of any criminal record. [30]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Treblinka extermination camp</span> Nazi extermination camp in Poland (1942–1943)

Treblinka was the second-deadliest extermination camp to be built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, 4 km (2.5 mi) south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The camp operated between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Final Solution. During this time, it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered in its gas chambers, along with 2,000 Romani people. More Jews were murdered at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Belzec extermination camp</span> Nazi German death camp in occupied Poland

Belzec was a Nazi German extermination camp in occupied Poland. It was built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Polish Jews, a major part of the "Final Solution", the overall Nazi effort to complete the genocide of all European Jews. Before Germany's defeat put an end to this project more than six million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust. The camp operated from 17 March 1942 to the end of June 1943. It was situated about 500 m (1,600 ft) south of the local railroad station of Bełżec, in the new Lublin District of the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open-air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Demjanjuk</span> Ukrainian guard at Nazi death camps (1920–2012)

John Demjanjuk was a Trawniki man and Nazi camp guard at Sobibor extermination camp, Majdanek, and Flossenbürg. Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, when he was tried and convicted in Israel after being misidentified as "Ivan the Terrible", a notoriously cruel watchman at Treblinka extermination camp. In 1993 the verdict was overturned. Shortly before his death, he was tried and convicted in the Federal Republic of Germany as an accessory to the 28,060 murders that occurred during his service at Sobibor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operation Reinhard</span> Code name for the creation of German extermination camps in Poland in World War II

Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt was the codename of the secret German plan in World War II to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. The operation proceeded from March 1942 to November 1943; about 1.47 million or more Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early November 1942, a rate which is approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the kill rate in the Rwandan genocide. In the time frame of July to October 1942, the overall death toll, including all killings of Jews and not just Operation Reinhard, amounted to two million killed in those four months alone. It was the single fastest rate of genocidal killing in history.

The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the U.S Justice Department was created in 1979 to identify and expel, from the United States, those who assisted Nazis in persecuting "any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion." This involved gathering, verifying, and presenting in court eyewitness and documentary evidence of decades-old crimes. The evidence was incomplete and scattered around the world. Much of it was then in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain. Nonetheless, the OSI investigated 1,700 persons suspected of being involved in Nazi war crimes. Over 300 have been prosecuted with at least 100 stripped of their U.S. citizenship and 70 deported, the most recent in 2021. Others have left voluntarily, fled, or have been blocked from entering the United States. In the 1980s, at least seven men facing investigation or prosecution from the OSI committed suicide.

Operation Last Chance was launched July 2002 by the Simon Wiesenthal Center with its mission statement being to track down ex-Nazis still in hiding. Most of them were nearing the end of their lifetimes, hence the operation's name. Efraim Zuroff is director of the Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem who serves as the Israeli liaison as well as overseer of this project, the focus of which is an investigation, prosecution, and conviction of the last remaining Nazi war criminals and collaborators. Many have obtained citizenship in Canada and the United States under false pretenses; usually by misrepresentation, omission, or falsification of their criminal past, specifically, war crimes which rose to the level of crimes against humanity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trawniki concentration camp</span> Nazi forced labor and SS training camp near Lublin in Poland

The Trawniki concentration camp was set up by Nazi Germany in the village of Trawniki about 40 kilometres (25 mi) southeast of Lublin during the occupation of Poland in World War II. Throughout its existence the camp served a dual function. It was organized on the grounds of the former Polish sugar refinery of the Central Industrial Region, and subdivided into at least three distinct zones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feodor Fedorenko</span> SS guard at a concentration camp and war criminal

Feodor Fedorenko was a Soviet Nazi collaborator and war criminal who served at Treblinka extermination camp in German occupied Poland during World War II. As a former Soviet citizen admitted to the United States under a DPA visa (1949), Fedorenko became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970. His prior Nazi collaboration was discovered in 1977, leading to his denaturalization in 1981. He was deported to the USSR and sentenced to death for treason and participation in the Holocaust. Fedorenko was executed in 1987.

Jakob (Jack) Reimer was a Trawniki camp guard who later emigrated to the United States and became a salesman and restaurant manager.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erich Lachmann</span>

Erich Gustav Willie Lachmann was an SS functionary who participated in Operation Reinhard in Sobibor extermination camp. Lachmann was born on 6 November 1909 in Legnica. His first job was that of a journeyman bricklayer. In spring 1933, he joined the Stahlhelm paramilitary organization and subsequently the SA, despite not being a member of the Nazi Party. In September of that same year, he was conscripted into the auxiliary police force and attended an Unterführer training course in Katowice. Despite failing the course, he was promoted to Oberwachtmeister.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Treblinka trials</span> Trials related to the personnel of the Treblinka extermination camp that began in 1964

The two Treblinka trials concerning the Treblinka extermination camp personnel began in 1964. Held at Düsseldorf in West Germany, they were the two judicial trials in a series of similar war crime trials held during the early 1960s, such as the Jerusalem Adolf Eichmann trial (1961) and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials (1963–65), as a result of which the general public came to realize the extent of the crimes that some two decades earlier had been perpetrated in occupied Poland by German bureaucrats and their willing executioners. In the subsequent years, separate trials dealt with personnel of the Bełżec (1963–65), Sobibor (1966), and Majdanek (1975–81) extermination camps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Siegfried Graetschus</span>

Siegfried Graetschus was a German SS functionary at the Sobibor extermination camp during Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Holocaust in occupied Poland. He was assassinated by a prisoner during the Sobibor uprising.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sobibor trial</span> War crimes trial against SS officials

The Sobibor trial was a 1965–66 judicial trial in the West German prosecution of SS officers who had worked at Sobibor extermination camp; it was held in Hagen. It was one of a series of similar war crime trials held during the early and mid-1960s, such as the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann by Israel in Jerusalem, and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–65, also held in West Germany. These trials heightened general public and international understanding of the extent of the crimes that had been perpetrated in occupied Poland some twenty years earlier by Nazi bureaucrats and persons acting as their executioners.

Allan A. Ryan Jr. was an American attorney, author and a law professor at Harvard University, where he taught from 1985 until his death. He is best known for his work as a Justice Department lawyer who in the early 1980s identified and prosecuted dozens of Nazi collaborators living in the United States, earning him a reputation as America's foremost Nazi hunter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chil Rajchman</span> Holocaust survivor

Chil (Enrique) Meyer Rajchman a.k.a. Henryk Reichman, nom de guerre Henryk Ruminowski was one of about 70 Jewish prisoners who survived the Holocaust after participating in the August 2, 1943, revolt at the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. He reached Warsaw, where he participated in the resistance in the city, before it was captured by the Soviet Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kalman Taigman</span> Israeli-Polish Holocaust survivor

Kalman Taigman also Teigman Hebrew: קלמן טייגמן was an Israeli citizen who was born and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. One of the former members of the Jewish Sonderkommando who escaped from the Treblinka extermination camp during the prisoner uprising of August 1943, Taigman later testified at the 1961 Eichmann Trial held in Jerusalem.

WachmannNikolay Yegorovich Shalayev was a Soviet SS auxiliary guard (Hilfswilliger) trained at Trawniki and serving as a gas chamber operator at the Treblinka extermination camp in occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He was one of two guards in charge of the motor that produced the exhaust fumes which were fed through pipes into the gas chambers during the killing process.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trawniki men</span> Central and Eastern European Nazi military unit

During World War II, Trawniki men were Eastern European Nazi collaborators, consisting of either volunteers or recruits from prisoner-of-war camps set up by Nazi Germany for Soviet Red Army soldiers captured in the border regions during Operation Barbarossa launched in June 1941. Thousands of these volunteers served in the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland until the end of World War II. Trawnikis belonged to a category of Hiwis, Nazi auxiliary forces recruited from native subjects serving in various jobs such as concentration camp guards.

Chaim Sztajer was a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor known for his participation in the Treblinka uprising. Sztajer was detained as a Sonderkommando in the Treblinka extermination camp for ten months, from early October 1942 until 2 August 1943, when he managed to escape during the uprising. Sztajer was held in Treblinka II, known as the 'death camp', in the final months of his detention. In secret communications with Jankiel Wiernek, who was held in Treblinka I, Sztajer assisted in coordinating the uprising between the two camps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sobibor uprising</span> Planned escape by prisoners in October 1943 in Sobibor prison camp

The Sobibor uprising was a revolt of about 600 prisoners that occurred on 14 October 1943, during World War II and the Holocaust at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland. It was the second uprising in an extermination camp, partly successful, by Jewish prisoners against the SS forces, following the revolt in Treblinka.

References

  1. ↑ Wiernik, Yankel (1945). "5 – An Inmate Who Escaped Tells the Day-To-Day Facts of One Year of His Torturous Experiences". A Year in Treblinka. New York: American Representation of the General Jewish Workers' Union of Poland.
  2. ↑ Haberman, Clyde (July 30, 1993). "Acquital in Jerusalem: A Mixed Verdict; Court Decision Brings Pride to Many In Israel and Dissatisfaction to Others". The New York Times. Retrieved July 31, 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Unsolved History: Investigating Mysteries of the Past by Joe Nickell, The University Press of Kentucky, 2005, ISBN   0813191378. p. 38
  4. ↑ Hitler's Last Courier by Armin D. Lehmann, Xlibris, 2001, ISBN   0738831212
  5. ↑ Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team. Aktion Reinhard Trawniki Staff Page.
  6. ↑ Gregory Procknow, Recruiting and Training Genocidal Soldiers, Francis & Bernard Publishing, 2011, ISBN   0986837407. p. 35.
  7. 1 2 Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps by Yitzhak Arad, Indiana University Press, 1987, ISBN   0253342937. p. 21.
  8. ↑ Mirchuk, Petro. My meetings and discussions in Israel. A Meeting with the 'Dvazhdi Geroy' (Twice-Over Hero) of Israel.
  9. ↑ Tadeusz Piotrowski (2006). Ukrainian Collaboration. McFarland. p. 217. ISBN   0786429135 . Retrieved April 30, 2013.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  10. ↑ Gregory Procknow, Recruiting and Training Genocidal Soldiers, Francis & Bernard Publishing, 2011, ISBN   0986837407. p. 35.
  11. 1 2 Bill Ong Hing, Defining America: Through Immigration Policy, Temple University Press, 2003, ISBN   1592132332. p. 223
  12. ↑ Arad, Yitzhak (1987). Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Google Books preview). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 31. ISBN   0-253-21305-3. Testimony of SS Scharführer Erich Fuchs in the Sobibor-Bolender trial, Düsseldorf.
  13. ↑ McVay, Kenneth (1984). "The Construction of the Treblinka Extermination Camp". Yad Vashem Studies, XVI. Jewish Virtual Library.org. Retrieved November 3, 2013.
  14. ↑ Alexander Kimel. "Holocaust Bystanders – The Ukrainians". Archived from the original on April 22, 2012. Retrieved April 14, 2012.
  15. ↑ "In pictures: The story of John Demjanjuk". BBC News . May 12, 2011.
  16. ↑ "Profile: John Demjanjuk". BBC News . November 30, 2009. Retrieved May 12, 2011.
  17. ↑ In memory of John Demjanjuk, Kyiv Post (March 21, 2012)
  18. ↑ Broder, Jonathan (February 26, 1987). "2d Witness Calls Demjanjuk 'Ivan The Terrible'". Chicago Tribune . Retrieved July 8, 2012.
  19. ↑ Pyle, Christopher H. (2001). Extradition, Politics, and Human Rights. Temple University Press. ISBN   1-56639-823-1; Chapter 19. Ivan Who? Getting the Wrong Man
  20. ↑ Nickel, Joe (2010). Unsolved History: Investigating Mysteries of the Past. University of Kentucky Press. Ch. 4
  21. ↑ "Wprof: Lawyer Asks Demjanjuk Release". Los Angeles Times . December 31, 1990.
  22. ↑ Williams, Daniel (December 21, 1991). "KGB Evidence Reopens the Case of 'Ivan the Terrible' : Holocaust: Recently released files bolster the appeal of the man convicted as a Nazi death camp monster". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved July 4, 2012.
  23. ↑ Deseret News, news article dated March 9, 1992. 'Ivan' Fled to Yugoslavia, Demjanjuk Defense Says; downloaded on July 5, 2012
  24. 1 2 Court Proceedings Extracts & Interrogations. Former Trawniki SS and Ukrainian Civilians serving in the Treblinka Death Camp. Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team.
  25. ↑ Draaisma, Douwe (2012). Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past, Cambridge University Press. p. 129
  26. ↑ Hedges, Chris. Article in New York Times dated July 30, 1993. Acquittal in Jerusalem; Israel Court Sets Demjanjuk Free, But He Is Now Without a Country. Downloaded on July 4, 2012.
  27. ↑ Raab, Scott. "John Demjanjuk: The Last Nazi". Article in Esquire Magazine dated August 11, 2010.
  28. ↑ Melman, Yossi. News article dated November 14, 1997. "Who Lied About Demjanjuk?," Ha'aretz Israeli News,
  29. ↑ The Local. "Demjanjuk's SS identity card was forged, his lawyer says." News article dated April 13, 2012.
  30. ↑ Convicted Nazi criminal Demjanjuk deemed innocent in Germany over technicality, at Haaretz.com, retrieved March 23, 2012, viz. statement by Munich state court spokeswoman Margarete Noetzel.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.