The Devil Next Door

Last updated
The Devil Next Door
Genre Crime
Documentary
Directed byYossi Bloch
Daniel Sivan
ComposersEduardo Aram
Antônio Pinto
Country of originUnited States
International
Original languagesEnglish
Hebrew
No. of episodes5
Production
Executive producersBen Braun
Dan Braun
Josh Braun
James Haygood
Lisa Janssen
Guy Lavie
Maya E. Rudolph
Dan Stern
Production location Israel
EditorJesse Overman
Running time3h 49min
Original release
Network Netflix
ReleaseNovember 2019 (2019-11)

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]

Contents

Summary

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.

Cast

Map of Poland controversy

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 noted on November 15, 2019 that it was "unclear" when Netflix would add those clarifications. [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

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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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kapo</span> Prisoner functionary in Nazi concentration camp

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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."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eichmann trial</span> 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann

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.

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<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">Dov Freiberg</span> Polish Holocaust survivor, writer

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.

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"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.

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References

  1. MUBI
  2. Fienberg, Daniel. "'The Devil Next Door': TV Review." The Hollywood Reporter , November 4, 2019. Archived from the original.
  3. "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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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
  6. "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.
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. @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
  10. 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