As John Demjanjuk Awaits Deportation,
Remembering the Story of Nazi War Criminals and the United States
The Zeskind Fortnight No. 15
April 14, 2009
John Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian-born retired autoworker charged repeatedly with war crimes, has asked a federal appeals court in Ohio to stop his deportation to Germany. First stripped of his United States citizenship in 1981 for lying about his Nazi past upon entry to this country, he was deported to Israel in 1986, convicted and sentenced to death, but released on a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court. He returned to the USA in 1993 and had his citizenship restored. Demjanjuk’s citizenship was revoked again in 2002, after further investigation by the Justice Department confirmed his role at the Sobibor camp.
Throughout Demjanjuk has claimed that he was an ordinary soldier in the Soviet Army who after being captured by the Germans was held as a prisoner of war. Documents from the Soviet Union showing otherwise, he contended, were forged. He is now charged in Germany with assisting in the murder of 29,000 victims at the Sobibor death camp in the Lublin district of Poland.
Between 200,000 and 250,000 Jews died at Sobibor, according to The Holocaust Encyclopedia. After May 1942, this camp became one of several where carbon monoxide produced by a diesel motor was pumped into gas chambers, poisoning the inmates in about thirty minutes. In October 1943, a revolt by 600 inmates at Sobibor broke through the wire fence after attacking the guards and the weapons arsenal. Most of the escapees were killed in the mine fields that surrounded the camp, and others died at the hands of Polish fascists and thieves. Thirty five survived the war, however, to tell their story. After the rebellion, the Nazis razed the camp, but they could not erase the memory of what they had done. Nevertheless, Holocaust deniers and others have tried to rewrite this history in an attempt to either exonerate Hitler’s National Socialism, or to prettify the United States post-war record with war criminals.
In 1990, Pat Buchanan, a Reagan speechwriter who ran for president three times before settling into his current position as a television commentator, wrote that “diesel engines do not emit enough carbon dioxide to kill anybody.” It was an absurd claim, which helped earn him the sobriquet, “spokesman for war criminals in the United States,” from Nazi-hunter Allen Ryan, Jr. Over a ten year period, Buchanan wrote multiple times in defense of the Ukrainian-born camp guard and in opposition to the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Created in 1979 by legislation drafted by Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, the OSI is a Justice Department agency that has investigated war criminals living in the United States. Among other complaints, Buchanan argued that by giving credence to documents provided by the KGB, the OSI was using faulty evidence. In this regard, Buchanan’s campaign against the OSI has been a continuation of his own Cold War politics.
Prior to OSI’s founding, the United States government’s history with Nazi war criminals was not pretty. American prosecutors at the Nuremburg trials helped bring a modicum of justice to the post-war world. But under President Harry Truman, the Army Counterintelligence Corps and the CIA protected, financed and used Nazis and war criminals in their own intelligence operations.
The complete story of this relationship is too large and too significant to describe here, but a library of documents on the subject was finally declassified in 2002 and is now stored at The National Security Archives in Washington, DC. These papers describe the CIA’s work with General Reinhard Gehlen, who commanded Hitler’s intelligence gathering on the Eastern Front during the war, and Gehlen’s reconstituted his anti-Soviet intelligence network after the war. The CIA’s own history of this program described it as a “double-edged sword” that “suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB.” Christopher Simpson’s Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on The Cold War, Our Domestic and Foreign Policy, published in 1988, describes these events in great detail.
Gehlen was not the only Nazi that American intelligence agencies protected. Revelations about Klaus Barbie, an SS officer known to the French as the Butcher of Lyon, show that the US helped him escape into South America after the war and then used him in the years after.
The mistake made by recruiting Gehlen and installing him and his analysis at the center of the United States intelligence assessment of the Soviet Union was compounded by a second initiative, known as Project Paperclip. It brought Nazi scientists into the United States after sanitizing their war records. The rationale for “Paperclip” was supposedly that it denied the Soviet Union the chance to enlist German scientists into its rocket and nuclear science programs. The moral stain of this program was only erased in part by OSI, which investigated one of the scientists, Arthur Rudolph, and pushed him into deportation.
By 2008, OSI had successfully prosecuted 107 cases and helped declassify documentation of some of the CIA’s worst abuses. Because of the lack of enough usable evidence, however, hundreds of other war criminals remained safely resident until the end of their lives, according to the 1985 book, Nazi War Criminals in America: The Basic Handbook, by Charles R. Allen, Jr., who was chasing down the evidence on these individuals two decades before the OSI was formed.
The Demjanjuk case is one of the last of its kind, and there may be those who think that because he is an 89-year old man with the health ailments typical of old age that he should be left alone. The American record on this topic is too abysmal, however, to shrink from the demands for justice by all of those who did not reach old age—either because they died in the camps and ghettos or died fighting the Nazis, whether in military uniform or like those at Sobibor, in a last ditch attempt to claim human dignity for themselves.
TZF