From Esquire:
“Netflix's Devil Next Door
Follows The Decades Long Hunt for Holocaust Killer Ivan the Terrible”
The new series reexamines the
evidence against retired Cleveland auto worker John Demjanjuk. In the 1980s,
John Demjanjuk was a retired auto worker living a quiet life with his family in
a Cleveland suburb. But in 1985, a group of Holocaust survivors identified
Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, a sadistic Nazi death camp guard who tortured
men, women, children, and babies before pushing them into the gas chamber at
the Nazi German Treblinka camp in occupied Poland. The five episodes of the new
Netflix series The Devil Next Door, from the executive producers of the
docu-series Wild, Wild Country, follow the trials set over two decades which
sought to determine whether Demjanjuk was a brutal killer, or the victim of
mistaken identity. While interviews with Demjanjuk’s family portray him as an
innocent family man unfairly maligned, the evidence against him is haunting.
Testimony by Holocaust Survivors
The documentary shows a small but
clear headshot of Demjanjuk which set in motion the investigation against him
in 1985. His name had been on a list of war criminals after he emigrated to the
U.S., and a group of Holocaust survivors identified Demjanjuk’s image from a
lineup after the image was sent over from the KGB in the 1980s. The survivors
said they’d seen the man in the photo at the death camp Treblinka, and that
they believed he was the notorious Ivan the Terrible, a guard who reveled in
brutalizing and then murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews. When Holocaust survivors took the stand at
Demjanjuk’s trial in Israel, they delivered vivid and horrifying accounts of
their time at the death camps. They were certain they’d seen Demjanjuk push
their relatives into the gas chamber, they said. One man left the stand,
walking up to Demjanjuk to stare him in the eye, then shouted “That is the
devil!” Another survivor pleaded, “Why did you kill them? Why?” as Demjanjuk
sat expressionless in the courtroom.
The ID Card
Another key piece of evidence was
an 1948 S.S. Identity Card with Demjanjuk’s name, photo, and accurate personal
details. The photo is, of course, of a much younger man because it was taken
more than 4 decades earlier, but it nears a striking resemblance to Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk claimed he’d never seen the picture
and couldn’t be sure whether or not it was him, and his lawyer called it a
“phony” card sent to the U.S. from the KGB, meant to spread misinformation and
drive a wedge between Ukrainians and Jews in the States. The same trove of documents included evidence
of Nazis sending the man identified as Demjanjuk to work as a guard at Sobibor,
a camp near Treblinka, where Ivan the Terrible worked. Though no documents
placed him at Treblinka, Sobibor was located near the camp in question and it
was argued Demjanjuk could have been transferred over.
A Fax from KGB
Thanks to the ID card, other
documents, and testimony from the Holocaust survivors, Demjanjuk was found
guilty and sentenced to death in 1988. He was held until 1993 when the KGB
faxed over additional paperwork indicating that another man named Ivan
Marchenko was Ivan the Terrible. The Israeli Supreme Court struck down the
earlier guilty conviction on grounds of reasonable doubt, pointing to the new
evidence. The verdict resulted in outrage, particularly among the Holocaust
survivors. “How could you be in
Jerusualem sitting in a court of law and say that the survivors' testimony is
less than a reasonable doubt?" Israeli State Prosecutor Eli Gabay says in
the documentary. "To say to that survivor, 'The man you saw outside of the
gas chamber for months on end killing your family? We don’t believe you. We
just don’t believe you that it’s him.'” Demjanjuk was released by Israel and he
returned to Cleveland, where he avoided attention until 1999.
A New Trial
The Israeli Supreme Court had
ruled that Demjanjuk was not Treblinka camp’s Ivan the Terrible. But in 1999,
the U.S. government sued Demjanjuk again to strip him of his citizenship to
investigate his role as a Nazi guard at the Majdanek and Sobibor Nazi German
camps in occupied Poland. The ID card had placed Demjanjuk at Sobibor, and the
new trial investigated his role as an accessory to murder for the more than
27,000 killed there. In 2009, Demjanjuk was deported to Germany where he stood
trial on the charges. The indictment, as quoted by the New York Times, read,
“When a transport of Jews arrived, routine work was suspended and all camp
personnel took part in the routine process of extermination.” During the new
trial, the judge found clear evidence showing Demjanjuk’s path from Soviet
prisoner to a guard at Sobibor. Defense attorneys for Demjanjuk tried to argue
that their client had no choice but to work in the camp. In 2011, Demjanjuk was
found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison, but he died in 2012 at age
91 while awaiting his appeal in a German nursing home. According to German law,
a conviction isn't official until appeals are complete, leaving Demjanjuk's
case unsettled.
^
Netflix recommended two completely different shows for me to stream
today. The first was “The Great British Baking Show: Holiday Edition” and the
second was “The Devil Next Door” (about the Nazi Death Camp guard, John
Demjanjuk.) So according to Netflix I have a choice of either watching a
light-hearted Christmas baking show or a tense-Holocaust documentary. I do plan
on watching both, but it seems odd to suggest both to me at the same time since
Christmas and the Holocaust don’t go together at all. I have long-known about
John Demjanjuk and even today I 100% believe he was a Ukrainian Collaborator
for the Germans who helped murder innocent men, women and children. I don’t
know for sure if he was at Treblinka or if he was “Ivan The Terrible” but when
you even hear Demjanjuk himself speak and what he wrote on official documents
to enter the US (where he said he worked as a “driver” around Sobibor - a Nazi Death Camp - as well as him freely admitting he got a Blood Tattoo that only the most hardened SS got) there are just too many things
that add-up to show that he was at a Death Camp. He may not have died after
being found guilty of war crimes, but the fact that he died in Germany (not in
his “adopted” US homeland) and that he was never able to clear his name is some
kind of justice if not complete justice for his victims and the survivors. I also
believe he is looking up at us from Hell sitting next to other evil people
knowing that his name will be (and should be) known not as a simple, hardworking,
loving Immigrant to America as he had hoped, but as a poor, frail, man stripped
of his US Citizenship and the world seeing him for the murderer he was. ^
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