The Nazi Hunters (46 page)

Priebke shook his head: “Jews, no, nobody . . . I was never against Jews. I was from Berlin. We lived together in Berlin with many Jews. No, I didn’t.”

With that, he got into his car and slammed the door. His final words to his pursuer were delivered through his open window: “You are not a gentleman.”

It was the reporter’s turn to laugh sardonically as Priebke drove off. “
I
am not a gentleman,” he repeated.

Born in 1934, Donaldson was much too young to have fought in World War II, but he was always fascinated by that conflict, and how Hitler managed to mesmerize the German people. At ABC, he repeatedly watched Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will
with interns to study what he considered to be “the first real propaganda film.”

By the time that his producer Harry Phillips had tracked Priebke down and run surveillance on him for about two weeks before setting up the camera ambush, Donaldson was convinced that public interest in Nazis and their crimes was waning. But Donaldson and Phillips’s story reverberated around the globe, and led to the first serious push to bring Priebke to justice. Argentina extradited him to Italy in 1995, and a major legal battle followed. At first a military tribunal ruled that he should be freed on what amounted to a technicality, but he was rearrested, tried again, and sentenced to life in 1998. Because of his advanced years, he was kept under house arrest in Rome, where he died at age one hundred in 2013.

The Catholic Church refused to hold a public funeral for him in Rome, and neither Argentina nor Germany was ready to provide that
service either. It was left to the Society of St. Pius X, a splinter Catholic group that opposes the reforms in the Church in recent decades and has voiced doubts about the Holocaust, to organize the funeral in a church in Albano Laziale, a tiny hilltop town south of the capital. As the hearse moved through the streets, riot police did their best to restrain angry protesters who pounded the vehicle.

Priebke had remained defiant till the end, sticking with the line that he had only done his duty. Except in one respect: instead of killing 330 Italians as the 10:1 ratio required, he admitted they had rounded up 335 people, which meant that five more were killed than required. Apparently Priebke had added the five extra names when he was compiling the execution lists. “It went wrong,” he told a reporter for the German newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung
. But it was clear that he considered that a minor glitch—basically an accounting error that could not be reversed—in an otherwise smooth operation, which reportedly involved leading the victims, their hands tied behind them, to the caves. They were then forced to kneel and shot in the back of the neck.

Looking back at his long career in television, Donaldson said he was particularly proud of the Priebke story. “When people have asked me over the years what was
the
one interview, expecting me to say Reagan or Sadat or something like that, I would tell them about Priebke,” he said, calling it “the most important and interesting piece I did.”

While journalists were not Nazi hunters per se, the credo of the hunters had clearly rubbed off on Donaldson, as it did on some of his colleagues who pursued similar stories. These were stories that they felt mattered not just because of the headlines they generated. As Donaldson put it, “I believe in the old idea that if you don’t keep the memory of these things alive for future generations, Santayana’s dictum proves correct: if you do not remember history, you’re doomed to repeat it.”

In most cases, journalists covered whatever the Nazi hunters discovered or followed up on their tips, including the subsequent legal repercussions. In Priebke’s case, Donaldson’s dramatic on-the-street interview was the result of journalistic sleuthing rather than any breakthroughs by
the Nazi hunters themselves. When the interview aired, it sealed the former SS captain’s fate, ending his comfortable life in Argentina and leading to his extradition and sentencing.

• • •

The year 2015 marked the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and of the end of the war that produced the most astronomical body count in history. It was hardly surprising that there were fewer and fewer Nazi war criminals to be pursued and tried. The senior officers were probably all gone. A concentration camp guard who had been twenty in 1945 would have been ninety by then, which meant that inevitably the last cases involved junior personnel. This prompted disputes even among the Nazi hunters about the value of those remaining cases, at a time that the saga of those hunters was drawing to a close.

Ironically, one of the oldest cases of just such a lowly concentration camp guard took some startling new twists in the early part of this century, revising the rules of the game for whatever perpetrators still remained. It played out over several decades in the United States, Israel, and Germany, sparking controversy every step of the way. And even when the ninety-one-year-old retired autoworker from Cleveland at the center of the case, John Demjanuk, died in a nursing home in Germany in 2012, it left unanswered questions about the broader issues triggered by the successive proceedings against him.

Only the earliest part of Demjanuk’s story is beyond dispute. Like so many others caught in the upheavals of the twentieth century, he had the misfortune of growing up in a region that would quickly feel the brunt of the murderous policies of both Stalin and Hitler.
Born in a tiny village near Kiev in 1920, Iwan Demjanuk (he changed his first name to John when he became a U.S. citizen) only had four years of schooling before he found himself working on a collective farm. When Stalin unleashed his campaign to destroy all Ukrainian opposition to forced collectivization in the early 1930s, the Soviet leader triggered a famine that cost millions of lives. Demjanuk and his family barely survived. When Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union, he was drafted into the Red Army, seriously
wounded, and, after a long recovery, returned to the fighting. In 1942, he was captured by the Germans, joining the ranks of Soviet POWs, many of whom quickly succumbed to brutal treatment, starvation, and disease.

As Stalin saw it, all the soldiers who were captured by the Germans were “
traitors who had fled abroad”; they were to be punished immediately upon their return, and, in the meantime, their families were to be punished as well. Given those circumstances and the harsh conditions they had endured before the war under Soviet rule, it was hardly surprising that some POWs decided that they were better off casting their lot with their captors to survive. They responded to calls for “volunteers” to serve as camp guards or later as soldiers in the Russian Liberation Army, commanded by General Andrei Vlasov, an early Soviet hero of the war who switched sides after his capture. Vlasov claimed his goal was to topple Stalin, not serve Hitler, but his action meant that he was ready to fight alongside the German invaders.

According to Demjanuk, he served first in an all-Ukrainian unit of the Waffen SS, which meant getting a tattoo of his blood type on his upper arm, and then in Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army. But he said he never saw action at the end of the war, and managed to keep his background secret during his time in a displaced persons camp in Germany afterward. He thus avoided the forced repatriation of Vlasov’s men to their homeland, where their leader and many of his followers were promptly executed. He married a fellow Ukrainian in the DP camp, and found work as a driver for the U.S. Army.

Applying for refugee status, he invented a story about working as a farmer for much of the war in Sobibor, a Polish village that became infamous because of the death camp the Germans set up there. Demjanuk insisted that he only picked this particular village because many Ukrainians lived there. In 1952, he settled in the United States with his wife and daughter. He had two more children, and fit in well with the Ukrainian exile community in Cleveland, where he was seen as a staunchly anti-communist Christian dedicated to freeing his native land from Soviet oppression.

But in 1975 Michael Hanusiak, a former member of the U.S. Communist
Party who was the editor of the
Ukrainian Daily News,
put together a list of seventy alleged Ukrainian war criminals in the United States. One of them was Demjanuk, who was identified as an SS guard in Sobibor. Both the FBI and the Ukrainian community viewed Hanusiak’s paper as a highly suspect source that channeled Soviet disinformation. But the INS, which was already under pressure from Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman for failing to do anything about most of the Nazi war criminals living in the United States, began making inquiries. Its investigator sent photos of Demjanuk and several other suspected war criminals to Israel, all taken when they were young. The idea was to see if those who had survived the camps remembered any of the faces in the photo spreads presented to them.

Miriam Radiwker, a Ukrainian-born police investigator who had worked in the Soviet Union and Poland before immigrating to Israel, showed the photos to camp survivors. When she brought in Treblinka survivors to see if they could identify another suspect in the spread, one of them pointed to Demjanuk’s picture and exclaimed: “Iwan, Iwan from Treblinka, Iwan Grozny.” The latter term meant “Ivan the Terrible,” the designation for a guard who operated the gas chambers and reveled in beating, whipping, and shooting prisoners. Since the information the Americans had sent indicated that Demjanuk was a guard at Sobibor not Treblinka, Radiwker was both startled and skeptical.

But then two other Treblinka survivors picked out Demjanuk’s picture and identified him as Ivan the Terrible, one with certainty and the other with a cautionary note that he could not be completely sure since the photo was not from the same period as Demjanuk’s alleged service in the camp. While their physical descriptions of Ivan the Terrible suggested a close match with Demjanuk, they were not perfect, especially when it came to memories of his height.

Radiwker reported her findings to the Americans, who were left to sort them out. In 1977, the U.S. attorney’s office in Cleveland formally charged Demjanuk, claiming that he was the Treblinka guard known as Ivan the Terrible.
The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations,
which was launched in 1979, was quick to take up the case. Since Treblinka’s records were destroyed by the Germans, one of its investigators began searching for documents from Trawniki, the training camp for Soviet POWs who were destined to become SS guards. On the assumption that the records were in Soviet hands, he made an inquiry through the U.S. embassy in Moscow. In early 1980, the Soviet embassy in Washington sent over an envelope to OSI containing a copy of an SS identity card in the name of Iwan Demjanuk. The birth date and his father’s name were correct. The card was also featured in some Ukrainian newspapers.

Allan Ryan, who had joined OSI as deputy director, and his team compared the photo on the card to Demjanuk’s 1951 photo on his U.S. visa application. “There was no doubt that the two photos were of the same man,” he concluded. Although the card indicated that Demjanuk had been posted to Sobibor and made no mention of Treblinka, Ryan concluded they had their man. “You son of a bitch,” he recalled thinking. “We’ve got you.”

But not everyone was convinced the government was making the right case. The
Ukrainian Daily News
had reported earlier that a former Ukrainian SS guard, who had served a long prison sentence in the Soviet Union and then remained in Siberia, claimed he had served with Demjanuk in Sobibor, not Treblinka. George Parker, a Justice Department attorney who had worked on the Demjanuk case from the beginning, was troubled enough by the inconsistencies to write a memo to OSI Director Walter Rockler and Ryan warning that they consider other options such as at least adding service at Sobibor to the charges—and possibly dropping the Treblinka charge altogether. But Ryan, who replaced Rockler in the top job, decided to stick with the accusation that Demjanuk was Treblinka’s Ivan the Terrible.

During the subsequent courtroom battles, the government won its case and Demjanuk was stripped of his citizenship. The American Ukrainian community vociferously protested that OSI had railroaded an innocent man based on fabricated evidence from Moscow, but that did not stop Israel from requesting his extradition.
On January 27, 1986,
Demjanuk was hustled onto an El Al flight for Tel Aviv. For the first time since Eichmann, Israel had decided to put an alleged Nazi war criminal on trial.

While Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir proclaimed that Israel was doing so in the name of “
historic justice,” the decision was highly controversial. Avraham Shalom, who had been the deputy commander of the Eichmann operation in Buenos Aires, was by then the director of Shin Bet, the internal security agency. Before Israel requested Demjanuk’s extradition, Prime Minister Shimon Peres asked Shalom for his view. “
I told him don’t do that because there’s only one Eichmann,” Shalom recalled, alluding to the fact that Demjanuk was a minor figure by comparison. “If we diminish the prize, it would diminish the effect.”

In emotional testimony at Demjanuk’s trial in Jerusalem, Treblinka survivors swore that he was Ivan the Terrible. “He’s sitting here,” Pinchas Epstein shouted, pointing to the defendant. “I dream about him every single night. . . . He is etched in me. In my memory.” Spectators applauded, and at other times screamed curses at both Demjanuk and Yoram Sheftel, his Israeli defense lawyer. “You’re a liar. You murdered my father,” a Polish Jew shouted at Demjanuk. They denounced Sheftel as a “Kapo,” “Nazi,” and “shameless bastard.” In April 1988, the court found Demjanuk guilty and sentenced him to death.

But by the time his defense team appealed the decision to the Israeli Supreme Court, new evidence had surfaced that the real Ivan the Terrible was a guard named Ivan Marchenko.
CBS’s
60 Minutes
broke the story that a Polish prostitute whom Marchenko had visited frequently had agreed to talk; earlier, her husband had both confirmed what she said and added that Marchenko, who bought vodka in his shop, talked openly about operating the gas chambers. Combined with other information that undercut the case against Demjanuk, this signaled disaster for the prosecution.