Demjanjuk 7
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Well, it looks like the Nazi hunters were right after all. Old John Demjanjuk has lost the seventh, and hopefully last, decision by the judges who ride the 6th circuit of the United States Court of Appeals. The panel of judges hearing the case concluded unanimously that the Cleveland autoworker had, indeed, been a guard at Nazi concentration camps during World War II. They affirmed a lower court decision stripping the war criminal of his citizenship. There probably isn’t much hope that this will lead to a final justice, which would be the aging Demjanjuk ending his life on a gallows in the Jewish state. But it does make it unlikely that Demjanjuk will die with the honor of holding American citizenship.
One of the memorable things about the Demjanjuk case is how it flushed out an odd array of defenders. Most famous, of course, was the right-wing columnist Patrick Buchanan, who campaigned tirelessly for Demjanjuk. There was also the crooked congressman James Traficant, now in prison. For a while, Vanity Fair magazine was beating the drums for Demjanjuk. In Toronto, Demjanjuk has been the subject of a recent cabaret play. At one point, the New York Times opposed his execution by Israel, even if found guilty, astounding many in New York by writing, “Extreme retribution, even against the right man, would only add another death to the Holocaust.”
From the crowd that argued its interest in Demjanjuk was not about his claimed innocence but merely about due process, the prosecution got little help. Few newspapers launched their own efforts to track down evidence that might help return him to the foot of the gallows, though Israel’s high court concluded that he had been a guard at, among other places, Sobibor, where the only business was death. Some 250,000 persons, mostly Jews, died there, and once they arrived at Sobibor, their average life expectancy was under three hours. It has been nearly 11 years since Demjanjuk was returned to America, and the press fell silent. But the Nazi hunters at the Justice Department have been plugging away in obscurity. They never forgot what it meant to do what Demjanjuk did.
