[170], In 2019, Netflix released The Devil Next Door, a documentary by Israeli filmmakers Daniel Sivan and Yossi Bloch that focuses on Demjanjuk's trial in Israel. [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 authorities at Trawniki issued such documents to men detailed to guard detachments outside the camp. His return was met by protests and counter-protests, with supporters including members of the Ku Klux Klan. 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. [94] Central to the new evidence was a photograph of Ivan the Terrible and a description that did not match the 1942 appearance of Demjanjuk. The issuance of the stay by the immigration trial court was therefore improper, as that court had no jurisdiction over the matter. [11] Having died before a final judgment on his appeal could be issued, under German law, Demjanjuk remains technically innocent. One week later it sentenced him to death by hanging. [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. Several Jewish survivors of Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, key evidence placing him at the killing center. Though the card contained some information that was inconsistent with the testimony of the Treblinka survivors, it was the only document available that placed Demjanjuk at Trawniki as a police auxiliary (that is, in the pool of auxiliaries from which Treblinka guards were selected). [81] Additionally, Sheftel alleged that the trial was a show trial, and referred to the trial as "the Demjanjuk affair," alluding to the famous antisemitic Dreyfus Affair. His application for asylum was denied on 31 May 1984. [56] Writer Lawrence Douglas has called the case "the most highly publicized denaturalization proceeding in American history. "[77] It was later learned that Eliyahu Rosenberg had previously testified in a 1947 deposition that "Ivan the Terrible" had been killed in 1943 during a Treblinka prisoner uprising. "[9][pageneeded] After the conviction, Demjanjuk was released pending appeal. He was. [111] On 30 January 2008, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit denied Demjanjuk's request for review. [6] He was deported from the US to Germany in that same year. No wartime documentary evidence that definitively placed Demjanjuk at Treblinka has ever surfaced. US officials had originally been aware, without informing Demjanjuk's attorneys, of the testimony of two of these German guards. In the records of the former Ukrainian KGB in Kiev, the Demjanjuk defense team found dozens of statements of former Treblinka guards whom Soviet authorities had tried in the early 1960s. [150] He would, however, deliver three written declarations to the court that alleged that his prosecution was caused by a conspiracy between the OSI, the World Jewish Congress, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, while continuing to allege that the KGB had forged the documents used. [58] The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Demjanjuk's appeal on 25 February 1986, allowing the extradition to move forward. Since the earlier witnesses were now deceased, the Munich court accepted that survivor testimony be read into the proceeding to facilitate findings of mass murder and determine the identity and citizenship of many of the victims. [3] In 2009, Germany requested his extradition for over 27,900 counts of acting as an accessory to murder: one for each person killed at Sobibor during the time when he was alleged to have served there as a guard. [67] The complaint relied on evidence compiled by historians Charles W. Sydnor, Jr. and Todd Huebner, who compared Demjanjuk's Trawniki card to 40 other known cards and found that issues on the card that had fueled suspicions of fraud were in fact typical of Trawniki's poor record keeping. [114][115] On 10 November 2008, German federal prosecutor Kurt Schrimm directed prosecutors to file in Munich for extradition, since Demjanjuk once lived there. Accordingly, Demjanjuk re-filed his motion to reopen, and for an attendant stay, with the BIA. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. In November 2009, he again sat in the defendant's dock. However, his family has concerns over how his story is portrayed,they spoke with 3news. The Israeli Supreme Court, however, overturned the conviction, citing evidence that Ivan the Terrible was in fact a different man. She said that John always worried about her and their children. Rosenberg then exclaimed directly to Demjanjuk: "How dare you put out your hand, murderer that you are! Powered by. The defense argued that Demjanjuk had never been a guard, but that if he had been that he had had no choice in the matter. Since his death, Demjanjuk's family has continued to stand by him. By Robert D. McFadden. Based on eyewitness testimony by Holocaust survivors in Israel, he was identified as the notorious Treblinka extermination camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible. He and Vera had three children: John Jr., Irene, and Lydia, CBS reported. The first, Adolf Eichmann, was found guilty in 1961 and executed in 1962. [65], The prosecution team consisted of Israeli State Attorney Yonah Blatman, lead attorney Michael Shaked of the Jerusalem District Attorney's Office, and the attorneys Michael Horovitz and Dennis Gouldman of the International Section of the State Attorney's Office. [158], John Demjanjuk died at a home for the elderly in Bad Feilnbach, Germany on 17 March 2012, aged 91. Two grainy black-and-white pictures showing a man authorities believe to be convicted Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk working at the Sobibor death camp were published by German historians on. Terms of Use [160], Following his death, his relatives requested that he be buried in the United States, where he once lived. "I say it unhesitatingly, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. [45][46] Five Holocaust survivors from Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka and having been "Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk was convicted by a Munich court in 2011. After 16 months of trial, proceedings closed in mid-March 2011. Upon receiving these files, and after years of litigation, Demjanjuk's American defense team filed a suit against the US government to set aside the judgment stripping him of his citizenship, and accused the OSI of prosecutorial misconduct. Danil'chenko had stated that he knew Demjanjuk from their service together in Sobibor and at the Flossenbrg concentration camp until 1945. These documents placed Demjanjuk at the Sobibor killing center as of March 26, 1943, and at the Flossenbrg concentration camp as of October 1, 1943. After his original extradition to Israel, Demjanjuk's family had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Department of Justice to obtain access to all investigative files at the OSI that related to Demjanjuk, Trawniki, and Treblinka. In 1988, during one of his trials, Irene, John Jr., and his wife Vera walked onto the stage and yelled at the prosecutors, telling them that they were all liars. Previously, historians knew of only two photos taken at Sobibor while it was still operational; the camp was dismantled after a prisoner revolt in 1943. [139] On 30 November 2009, Demjanjuk's trial, expected to last for several months, began in Munich. On Tuesday, experts speaking at Berlins Topography of Terror museum presented a previously unseen collection of 361 photos that once belonged to Johann Niemann, deputy commander of Sobibor between September 1942 and October 1943. 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. John Demjanjuks Wife, Vera Demjanjuk: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, Copyright 2023 Heavy, Inc. All rights reserved. Demjanjuk's lawyer argued that all of the ID cards could be forgeries and that there was no point comparing them. [145], As part of the prosecution's case, historian Dieter Pohl of the University of Klagenfurt testified that Sobibor was a death camp, the sole purpose of which was the killing of Jews, and that all Trawniki men had been generalists involved in guarding the prisoners as well as other duties; therefore, if Demjanjuk was a Trawniki man at Sobibor, he had necessarily been involved in sending the prisoners to their deaths and was an accessory to murder. [167] The investigation was closed in November 2012 after no evidence emerged to support the allegations. [149], Demjanjuk declined to testify or make a final statement during the trial. " It's all been lies from beginning to end," his daughter, Irene Nishnic, said through tears during his trial in Jerusalem in. [110] On 22 December 2006, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the deportation order. Learn more about Vera here. [172] Following Demjanjuk's conviction, however, Germany began aggressively prosecuting former death camp guards. In the summer of 1991, an OSI investigator searching in the Lithuanian National Archives in Vilnius for documentation related to a Lithuanian police battalion found by chance a document that placed Demjanjuk as a member of a Trawniki-trained guard detachment stationed at the Majdanek concentration camp between November 1942 and early March 1943. However, Demjanjuk's family, who had always claimed he was a Ukrainian prisoner of war, and that the accusations were simply a case of mistaken identity, had fought vigorously to prevent his deportation to Germany, defended him, and stood by his side until his death. He died in 2012. [30] Matia ruled that Demjanjuk had not produced any credible evidence of his whereabouts during the war and that the Justice Department had proved its case against him. [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. John Demjanjuk died in a German nursing home on March 17, 2012. [68], Prosecutors based part of these allegations on an IDcard referred to as the "Trawniki card". [147], On 24 February 2010, a witness for the prosecution, Alex Nagorny, who agreed to serve the Nazi Germans after his capture, testified that he knew Demjanjuk from his time as a guard. He grew up during the Holodomor famine,[14][15] and later worked as a tractor driver in a Soviet collective farm. [21], In August 1977, the Justice Department submitted a request to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio to revoke Demjanjuk's citizenship, based on his concealment on his 1951 immigration application of having worked at Nazi death camps. The German case set an important precedent and led to subsequent prosecutions in Germany that are continuing more than 70 years after the Holocaust. CLEVELAND There is a new show on Netlfix that you may have heard of called "Devil Next Door." It is about John Demjanjuk, a local autoworker accused of being a Nazi death camp criminal. GettyPicture taken on May 11, 2009 shows police and media waiting in front of the home of John Demjanjuk before he was carried out on a stretcher in Seven Hills, Ohio. At the trial, prosecutors said Demjanjuks job at Sobibor was to lead Jews to the gas chambers to be killed, writes Mahita Gajanan for Time. [92], The judge's acquittal of Demjanjuk for being Ivan the Terrible was based on the written statements of 37former guards at Treblinka that identified Ivan the Terrible as "Ivan Marchenko". After five more years of litigation, the District Court in Cleveland restored Demjanjuk's US citizenship on February 20, 1998, but without prejudice, leaving the option open for OSI to proceed with a new case based on new evidence. Chief US Immigration Judge Michael Creppy ruled there was no evidence to substantiate Demjanjuk's claim that he would be mistreated if he were sent to Ukraine. Vera and her son filed a complaint that their expenses were not reimbursed even though Demjanjuks proceedings were dismissed. Jewish organizations have opposed this, claiming that his burial site would become a center for neo-Nazi activity. [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. Demjanjuk also said, "Your Honors, if I had really been in that terrible place, would I have been stupid enough to say so? She wasnt able to go to Germany because of her heart problems. 19 News is not saying where for fear it could become a lightning rod for protests or vandalism. [173], In January 2020, the Topography of Terror Foundation in Berlin announced that they were about to exhibit and publish a collection of 361 photographs taken by Johann Niemann, deputy commandant of Sobibor, which had been made newly available by his descendants. Because his appeal was still pending when he died, he is now legally presumed innocent. Demjanjuk was born in Dubovi Makharyntsi,[13] a farming village in the western part of Soviet Ukraine. [67] On 19 May 1999, the Justice Department filed a complaint against Demjanjuk to seek his denaturalization. | [90] The judges agreed that Demjanjuk most likely served as a Nazi Wachmann (guard) in the Trawniki unit[88] and had been posted at Sobibor extermination camp and two other camps. [63] The prosecution conceived of the trial as a didactic trial on the Holocaust in the manner of the earlier trial of Adolf Eichmann. [136] Busch would also allege that the German justice system was prejudiced against his client, and that the entire trial was therefore illegitimate. You liar! John Demjanjuk was removed from the United States to Germany in May 2009. In an attempt to avoid deportation, Demjanjuk sought protection under the United Nations Convention against Torture, claiming that he would be prosecuted and tortured if he were deported to Ukraine. [180] It has digitized this collection for research. Now John Jr. is a father. [35], INS sent photographs to the Israeli government of the nine persons alleged by Hanusiak to have been involved in crimes against Jews: the government's agents asked survivors of Sobibor and Treblinka if they could identify Demjanjuk based on his visa application picture. [84] Demjanjuk also changed his testimony as to why he had listed Sobibor as his place of domicile from his earlier trials: he now claimed to have been advised to do so by an official of the United Nations Relief Administration to list a place in Poland or Czechoslovakia in order to avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union, after which another Soviet refugee waiting with him suggested Demjanjuk list Sobibor. [130], Demjanjuk was deported to Germany, leaving Cleveland, Ohio, on 11 May 2009, to arrive in Munich on 12 May. Just before he was sent to Germany, 19 News saw the same thing. [112][113] The Supreme Court's denial of review meant that the order of removal was final; no other appeal was possible. [141] Because of the long pauses between trial dates and cancellations caused by the alleged health problems of the defendant and his defense attorney Busch's use of many legal motions, the trial eventually stretched to eighteen months. Hence this physical evidence only suggested, but by no means proved, that Demjanjuk might have served as a concentration camp guard. [54] Demjanjuk also attracted the support of conservative political figures such as Pat Buchanan and Ohio congressman James Traficant. He and Vera had three children: John Jr., Irene, and Lydia, CBS reported. Demjanjuk became a US citizen in 1958. This page was last edited on 23 April 2023, at 19:42. Media related to John Demjanjuk at Wikimedia Commons. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. Vera was 86 when John died at the age of 91. [79] Most significantly, Sheftel called Dr. Julius Grant, who had proven that the Hitler diaries were forged. As Demjanjuk's appeal made its way to the Israeli Supreme Court, the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. [138], Doctors restricted the time Demjanjuk could be tried in court each day to two sessions of 90 minutes each, according to Munich State Prosecutor Anton Winkler. [168], The 1989 film Music Box, directed by Costa-Gavras, is based in part on the Demjanjuk case. SS authorities introduced the practice of blood-type tattooing into the Waffen-SS (Military SS) in 1942. In 1993 the verdict was overturned. Shame on you! Upon his arrival, German authorities arrested him and held him in Munich's Stadelheim prison. Moreover, after Demjanjuk's extradition to Israel, investigators at the OSI, while reviewing original personnel and administrative records from Flossenbrg, found references to Demjanjuk's name linked to his Trawniki military identification number (1393), thus independently corroborating Danil'chenko's testimony that Demjanjuk served at Flossenbrg. While living in the United States, he was married to Vera Demjanjuk and they had three children. On 19 May 2008, the US Supreme Court denied Demjanjuk's petition for certiorari, declining to hear his case against the deportation order. In 1988, during one of his trials, Irene, John Jr., and. The theme was never forget.. [19], Demjanjuk would later claim to have been drafted into the Russian Liberation Army in 1944. Demjanjuk was extradited from the United States specifically to stand trial for offenses attributed to Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, and not for other alternative charges. In 1999, US prosecutors again sought to deport Demjanjuk for having been a concentration camp guard, and his citizenship was revoked in 2002. In July 2009, German prosecutors indicted Demjanjuk on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder at Sobibor. With five years of careful review into thousands of Trawniki-related documents that had been unavailable before 1991, OSI investigators could track through wartime documents Demjanjuk's entire career as a Trawniki-trained guard and as a concentration camp guard from 1942 to 1945. Accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a sadistic guard who beat and tortured camp prisoners, according to survivor testimony, Demjanjuk was found guilty and sentenced to death. Demjanjuks wife attended the same church listed in the obituary: St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral. [152], On 12 May 2011, aged91, Demjanjuk was convicted as an accessory to the murder of 28,060Jews at Sobibor killing center and sentenced to five years in prison with two years already served. [135], Demjanjuk was represented by German attorney Ulrich Busch and Gnther Maul. [76] Through Baltic migr supporters living in Washington DC, the defense was also able to acquire internal OSI notes that had been thrown in a dumpster without shredding that showed that Otto Horn had in fact had difficulty identifying Demjanjuk and had been prompted to make the identification. The trial opened in Jerusalem on February 16, 1987. John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demjanjuk; Ukrainian: '; 3 April 1920 17 March 2012) was a Ukrainian-American who served as a Trawniki man and Nazi camp guard at Sobibor extermination camp, Majdanek, and Flossenbrg[2] Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, when he was tried and convicted in Israel after being misidentified as Ivan the Terrible, a notoriously cruel watchman at Treblinka extermination camp. He fought in World War II and was taken prisoner by the Germans in spring 1942. Demjanjuk had not mentioned Chelm in his initial depositions in the United States, first referring to Chelm during his denaturalization trial in 1981. [125] The Government argued that the Court of Appeals has no jurisdiction to review the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which denied the stay. Most of the guards were executed after the war by the Soviets,[93] and their written statements were not obtained by Israeli authorities until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Washington, DC 20024-2126 There he became a United Auto Workers (UAW) diesel engine mechanic at the nearby Ford automobile factory,[30] where a friend from Regensburg had found work. [99], After Demjanjuk's acquittal, the Israeli Attorney-General decided to release him rather than to pursue charges of committing crimes at Sobibor. Gas . [132] Demjanjuk was tried without any connection to a concrete act of murder or cruelty, but rather on the theory that as a guard at Sobibor he was per se guilty of murder, a novelty in the German justice system that was seen as risky for the prosecution. The accounts of 21 guards who were tried in the Soviet Union on war crimes gave details that differentiate Demjanjuk from Ivan the Terrible in particular that 'Ivan the Terrible's surname was Marchenko, not Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk was only the second person to be tried for these charges in Israel. In 1952 they emigrated to the United States. On May 19, 2008, the US Supreme Court declined to review his appeal. [21], After the end of the war, Demjanjuk spent time in several displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany. | READ MORE. [37] While the government was preparing for trial, Hanusiak published pictures of an ID card identifying Demjanjuk as having been a Trawniki man and guard at Sobibor in News from Ukraine. Nevertheless, blood-type tattooing was never consistently implemented. The German jurisdictional authority rested on the murder of people brought to Sobibor on 15 transport trains from the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands between April and July 1943, among whom were individual German citizens who had fled to Holland in the 1930s. Born in Ukraine, John (Iwan) Demjanjuk was the defendant in four different court proceedings relating to crimes that he committed while serving as a collaborator of the Nazi regime. Demjanjuk became a US citizen in 1958. Eli Rosenbaum was the acting Director of the United States Office of. She said she had 10 grandchildren and was very worried about their future. "[4] Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 for trial. The stranger settled in Cleveland after World War II with his wife and little . Sheftel focused the defense largely on the claim that Demjanjuk's Trawniki card was a KGB forgery. Based primarily on the survivor identifications, the Israeli court convicted John Demjanjuk and, on April 25, 1988, sentenced him to death, only the second time that an Israeli court had imposed capital punishment upon a convicted defendant (the first being Eichmann). TTY: 202.488.0406, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center. Even the Makers of 'The Devil Next Door' Can't Agree", "Historians: Sobibor death camp photos may feature Demjanjuk", "Sobibor perpetrator collection Collections Search United States Holocaust Memorial Museum", "John Demjanjuk: NS-Verbrecher auf Fotos nicht eindeutig identifizierbar", " : ", "United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Acquires Sobibor Perpetrator Collection", List of Sobibor extermination camp personnel, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Demjanjuk&oldid=1151393809, Soviet military personnel of World War II from Ukraine, Prisoners and detainees of the United States federal government, Loss of United States citizenship by prior Nazi affiliation, Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi Germany, People convicted of crimes against humanity, World War II prisoners of war held by Germany, Pages using cite court with unknown parameters, Articles with dead external links from December 2017, Articles with permanently dead external links, Short description is different from Wikidata, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Wikipedia extended-confirmed-protected pages, Pages using infobox military person with embed, Articles containing Ukrainian-language text, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from January 2023, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. new charges would be unreasonable given the seriousness of those of which he had been acquitted, conviction on the new charges would be unlikely, and. He is the lowest ranking person ever tried in Germany for Nazi war crimes. The identification was based on historic research and modern biometric technology, which measures anatomical or physiological characteristics. He was 91. Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics, Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically, Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust, Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust. After returning to Trawniki in August 1943, Marchenko transferred to Trieste, Italy, and disappeared towards the end of the war. Cookie Policy It is Ivan from Treblinka, from the gas chambers, the man I am looking at now." Danilchenko was a former guard at Sobibor and had been deposed by the Soviet Union in 1979 at the request of the OSI (US Office of Special Investigations). While interviews with Demjanjuk's family portray him as an innocent family man unfairly maligned, the evidence against him is haunting. This is the latest chapter in the long, complex saga of John Demjanjuk, who was accused of participating in Nazi war crimes. [124] The same day, Demjanjuk's son filed a motion in the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit asking that the deportation be stayed,[124] which was subsequently granted. On May 12, 2011, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. The prosecution called expert witnesses to testify on the authenticity of the card including its signatures by various Nazi officers, paper, and ink. 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. Demjanjuk's family had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Department of Justice to obtain access to all investigative files at the OSI that related to Demjanjuk . The motion sought to reopen the matter of the removal order against him; that order of removal had been originally issued by an immigration court in 2005, had been upheld by the BIA on administrative appeal in late 2006,[111] and was further upheld by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals; after these two appeals, the US Supreme Court had, as noted above, denied any review. [164][165] On 11 September 2012, the court denied Demjanjuk's request to have the appeal reheard en banc by the full court. In August 1977, Demjanjuk was accused of having been a Trawniki man. [18] According to German records, Demjanjuk most likely arrived at Trawniki concentration camp to be trained as a camp guard for the Nazis on 13 June 1942. Demjanjuk immigrated to the United States in 1952 and became a naturalized US citizen in 1958. [82], Demjanjuk testified during the trial that he was imprisoned in a camp in Chem until 1944, when he was transferred to another camp in Austria, where he remained until he joined an anti-Soviet Ukrainian army group. John Demjanjuk, 91, Dogged by Charges of Atrocities as Nazi Camp Guard, Dies. The principal allegation was that three former prisoners identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, who operated the petrol engines sending gas to the death chamber. After a required hearing, US authorities extradited Demjanjuk to Israel to stand trial on charges of crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. [55] Others, particularly American Jews, were outraged by the presence of Demjanjuk in the United States and vocally supported his deportation. [163] On 28 June 2012, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that Demjanjuk could not regain his citizenship posthumously. He was then brought to a German prisoner of war camp in Chem in July 1942. [67] The prosecution alleged that Demjanjuk had listed Sobibor on his US immigration application in an attempt to cover up his presence at Treblinka. Ten petitions against the decision were made to the Supreme Court. She hadnt seen him since 2009, when he was taken to Germany for another trial. March 17, 2012. The prosecution charged that he was the Treblinka killing center guard known to prisoners as Ivan the Terrible, and that he had operated and maintained the diesel engine used to pump carbon monoxide fumes into the Treblinka gas chambers. Now, a photo has emerged from the Nazi death camp at Sobibor, a camp where John Demjanjuk was accused of serving. [20] OSI was unable to establish Demjanjuk's whereabouts from December 1944 to the end of the war. John Demjanjuk's defense claimed that the card was a Soviet-inspired forgery, despite several forensic tests that verified it as authentic. Demjanjuks citizenship was ultimately rescinded, and in 1986, he was extradited to Israel to stand trial. CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) - John Demjanjuk is at rest in a cemetery near Cleveland. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. )[23] Demjanjuk later claimed this was a coincidence, and said that he picked the name "Sobibor" from an atlas owned by a fellow applicant because it had a large Soviet population.