They did, however, consistently refer to an Ivan Marchenko, who had served as a gas motor operator at Treblinka from the summer of 1942 until the prisoner uprising in 1943, and who had stood out as a particularly cruel police auxiliary, perpetrating acts that were consistent with the memory of the Jewish Treblinka survivors. [53] The first day of the denaturalization trial was accompanied by a protest of 150 Ukrainian-Americans who called the trial "a Soviet trial in an American court" and burned a Soviet flag. [7][8] On 12 May 2011, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Based on eyewitness testimony by Holocaust survivors in Israel, he was identified as the notorious Treblinka extermination camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible. One month after the US Supreme Court's refusal to hear Demjanjuk's case, on 19 June 2008, Germany announced it would seek the extradition of Demjanjuk to Germany. The trial opened in Jerusalem on February 16, 1987. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that it is possible that Ivan Demjanjuk aka John Demjanjuk, believed to be "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblenka, may be the man in the middle of the first row, (photo credit: US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM). What Does John Demjanjuk's Family Think Of 'Devil Next Door - Bustle Vera, also from Ukraine, told Cleveland.com that she lived through World War II and famine. Vera said they moved to the U.S. in the 1950s and now that he had died, she expected to move out of their home in about a year. No wartime documentary evidence that definitively placed Demjanjuk at Treblinka has ever surfaced. He was recruited by the Germans and trained at Trawniki concentration camp, going on to serve at Sobibor extermination camp and at least two concentration camps. Demjanjuk's denial related both to the supposed operation of a truck's diesel engine by "Ivan the Terrible" for the gas chamber at Treblinka and to the SS's singling out of Ukrainians with experience driving trucks as Trawniki men. [94] However the Israeli justices noted that Demjanjuk had incorrectly listed his mother's maiden name as "Marchenko" in his 1951 application for US visa. Born in Soviet Ukraine, Demjanjuk was conscripted into the Red Army in 1940. They married and were still living in the camps in the 1950s when she gave birth to Lydia. Media related to John Demjanjuk at Wikimedia Commons. Because his appeal was still pending when he died, he is now legally presumed innocent. [117] The German foreign ministry announced on 2 April 2009 that Demjanjuk would be transferred to Germany the following week,[118] and would face trial beginning 30 November 2009. (The nearby Sobibor extermination camp was named after the village. Family of John Demjanjuk reacts to Netflix documentary [62], Demjanjuk's trial took place in the Jerusalem District Court between 26 November 1986 and 18 April 1988, before a special tribunal comprising Israeli Supreme Court Judge Dov Levin and Jerusalem District Court Judges Zvi Tal and Dalia Dorner. [48] Although Demjanjuk's Trawniki card only documented that he had been at Sobibor, the prosecution argued that he could have shuttled between the camps and that Treblinka had been omitted due to administrative sloppiness. John Demjanjuk's defense claimed that the card was a Soviet-inspired forgery, despite several forensic tests that verified it as authentic. He died in 2012 after legal battles that spanned 35 years. Ivan the Terrible John Demjanjuk True Story - The Trial of the
