The Devil Next Door | |
---|---|
Genre | Crime Documentary |
Directed by | Yossi Bloch Daniel Sivan |
Composers | Eduardo Aram Antônio Pinto |
Country of origin | United States International |
Original languages | English Hebrew |
No. of episodes | 5 |
Production | |
Executive producers | Ben Braun Dan Braun Josh Braun James Haygood Lisa Janssen Guy Lavie Maya E. Rudolph Dan Stern |
Production location | Israel |
Editor | Jesse Overman |
Running time | 3h 49min |
Original release | |
Network | Netflix |
Release | November 2019 |
The Devil Next Door is a documentary series about John Demjanjuk, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out while serving as a guard at Nazi extermination camps during World War II, who spent years living in Cleveland. [1] The show premiered on Netflix in 2019. [2] [3]
The documentary shows the legal battles of Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker in Cleveland accused of being a German-Nazi prison camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible". Arrested, denaturalized as an American citizen and extradited to Israel in 1986, Demjanjuk was tried as a war criminal in a highly-publicized trial. Several survivors questioned at trial identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. He was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to death, but his conviction was overturned by reasonable doubt, based in part on documents released after the Cold War that identified a different guard as Ivan the Terrible. [4]
Although there was not enough evidence to identify Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, he was identified as a Nazi guard at the Sobibor extermination camp and several other camps. He was deported from the United States to Germany in 2009 and was charged with over 27,900 counts of accessory to murder. He was again found guilty in May 2011 and sentenced to five years in prison. Demjanjuk died in prison while his case was on appeal and so the German legal system will no longer seek a determination on his guilt or innocence. [5]
The documentary interviews several figures from the trial, including Demjanjuk's attorney and family members and Israeli and American prosecutors, journalists, and academics. It contains extensive footage from his first trial, including testimony from Holocaust survivors and archival footage from concentration camps.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki criticized the documentary for including a modern-day map of Poland, with the location of Nazi death camps marked on it. Morawiecki considered that it implied that Poland was responsible for the death camps instead of Nazi Germany. The map was shown as part of a segment from a 1985 television report that first detailed the allegations against Demjanjuk. [6] It was shown "repeatedly in various versions of the series", with no explanation that the camps were run by Germans. [5] Morawiecki sent a letter to Netflix about the map, and Netflix agreed in November 2019 to "provide more information" onscreen to clearly show that the camps were operated by the Germans. Netflix was thanked by Morawiecki. [7] [8] [9] Vanity Fair observed on November 15, 2019, that it was "unclear" when Netflix would add those clarifications. [10]
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 identified 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. 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.
A kapo was one of the prisoner functionaries, a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the 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."
Lawrence R. Douglas is an American legal scholar. He teaches in the department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he holds the James J. Grosfield Professorship. He is an author of journalism, fiction, and nonfiction books.
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.
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 uprising. 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 case of Ukrainian–American John Demjanjuk. 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.
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 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.