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John Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian-American who served as 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.
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.
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.
A kapo or prisoner functionary was a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the Schutzstaffel (SS) guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Israel. Capital punishment has only been imposed twice in the history of the state and is only to be handed out for treason, genocide, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the Jewish people during wartime. Israel is one of seven countries to have abolished capital punishment for "ordinary crimes only."
The Eichmann trial was the 1961 trial in Israel of major Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann who was kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents and brought to Israel to stand trial. The kidnapping of Eichmann was criticized by the United Nations, calling it a "violation of the sovereignty of a Member State". Israel and Argentina issued a joint statement on 3 August, after further negotiations, admitting the violation of Argentine sovereignty but agreeing to end the dispute. The Israeli court ruled that the circumstances of Eichmann's capture had no bearing on the legality of his trial. His trial, which opened on 11 April 1961, was televised and broadcast internationally, intended to educate about the crimes committed against Jews by Nazi Germany, which had been secondary to the Nuremberg trials which addressed other war crimes of the Nazi regime. Prosecutor and Attorney General Gideon Hausner also tried to challenge the portrayal of Jewish functionaries that had emerged in the earlier trials, showing them at worst as victims forced to carry out Nazi decrees while minimizing the "gray zone" of morally questionable behavior. Hausner later wrote that available archival documents "would have sufficed to get Eichmann sentenced ten times over"; nevertheless, he summoned more than 100 witnesses, most of whom had never met the defendant, for didactic purposes. Defense attorney Robert Servatius refused the offers of twelve survivors who agreed to testify for the defense, exposing what they considered immoral behavior by other Jews. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt reported on the trial in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The book had enormous impact in popular culture, but its ideas have become increasingly controversial.
Feodor Fedorenko or Fyodor Federenko 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.
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.
Dov Freiberg born Berek Freiberg, was a Holocaust survivor, writer, and witness at the Eichmann trial and the Demjanjuk case. Freiberg was a prisoner at Sobibor extermination camp where he participated in the Sobibor prisoners' revolt. After the revolt, he managed to escape into nearby woods and survived until the Soviet Army entered in July 1944.
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.
"Ivan the Terrible" 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 in survivor literature. 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. 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.
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.
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.
During World War II, Trawniki men were Central and 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.
Reinhold Hanning was an SS guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland.
Justice Thomas Walther is a lawyer based in Kempten, in the province of Bavaria in Germany. He is a former judge and German federal prosecutor for the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. He is known as the "last of the Nazi hunters" for his work in setting legal precedent in seeking punishment for former SS officers and guards who were involved in the Holocaust, whether directly responsible for deaths or not.
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.
The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law is a 1950 Israeli law passed by the First Knesset that provides a legal framework for the prosecution of crimes against Jews and other persecuted people committed in Nazi Germany, German-occupied Europe, or territory under the control of another Axis power between 1933 and 1945. The law's primary target was Jewish Holocaust survivors alleged to have collaborated with the Nazis, in particular prisoner functionaries ("kapos") and the Jewish Ghetto Police. It was motivated by the anger of survivors against perceived collaborators and a desire to "purify" the community.
References
- ↑ MUBI
- ↑ Fienberg, Daniel. "'The Devil Next Door': TV Review." The Hollywood Reporter , November 4, 2019. Archived from the original.
- ↑ "Netflix's 'The Devil Next Door' Tackles the Biggest True Crime of All: The Holocaust". Haaretz . 2019-11-04. Archived from the original on 2021-08-01. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
- ↑ Gajanan, Mahita. "The History Behind Netflix’s Nazi Trial Documentary Series, The Devil Next Door." Archived 2019-11-12 at the Wayback Machine TIME , November 4, 2019.
- 1 2 "Netflix says it will amend 'The Devil Next Door' series, following Polish prime minister's complaint", The Washington Post , archived from the original on November 16, 2019, retrieved November 18, 2019
- ↑ "Poland reacts angrily to Netflix Nazi death camp documentary". BBC News. 2019-11-12. Archived from the original on 2019-11-12. Retrieved 2019-11-06.
- ↑ Lawler, Richard (November 16, 2019), Netflix tweaks 'Devil Next Door' documentary after Polish PM complains, Engadget, archived from the original on November 17, 2019, retrieved November 18, 2019
- ↑ Shaw, Lucas (November 14, 2019), Netflix Plans to Amend Holocaust Film After Poland Complains, Bloomberg, archived from the original on November 16, 2019, retrieved November 18, 2019
- ↑ @PolandMFA(Ministry of Foreign Affairs) "Thank you for your reaction! We appreciate that @netflix raises difficult and important topics. We are sure that historical accuracy will be essential in your future productions." Twitter , 14 Nov. 2019. 2:16 p.m. from the original. Archived 2019-11-14 at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ Desta, Yohana (November 15, 2019), Netflix Edits True-Crime Docuseries After Riling Up Controversy in Poland, Vanity Fair, archived from the original on October 30, 2020, retrieved November 18, 2019