The trial of John Demjanjuk
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 3 July 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1986 a car factory worker from the United States was accused of being ‘Ivan the Terrible’, a notorious concentration camp guard at Treblinka during the Holocaust.
John Demjanjuk was extradited from the United States to Israel.
His trial became one of the most high profile cases in Israel’s history.
He was convicted, then later acquitted and then re-convicted in a German court for having worked in a different camp, Sobibor.
Lawyers for the defence, Yoram Sheftel, and prosecution, Eli Gabay, in the Israeli trial tell Dan Hardoon about the process of trying Demjanjuk, and the impact it made on their country’s society.
A Whistledown production for BBC World Service.
(Photo: John Demjanjuk in the Supreme Court of Israel. Credit: David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast with me, Dan Hardoon. Today I'm revisiting |
| 0:10.7 | one of the biggest trials in Israeli history. In 1986, a car factory worker from Ohio called |
| 0:19.0 | John Damianyuk stood accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a notoriously sadistic guard at |
| 0:25.0 | the Treblinka extermination camp during the Holocaust. I've been speaking to Eligabai, one of |
| 0:30.8 | the prosecutors working on behalf of the State of Israel. The testimony of the survivors was the |
| 0:37.2 | jewel in our case and we were very confident that he would be convicted. We'll also be hearing from |
| 0:44.6 | the man who defended John Damianyuk, Israeli defense lawyer Yolam Sheftel. I was public enemy number |
| 0:51.3 | one in the State of Israel for 18 months at least. I was more hated even than my client. |
| 1:00.0 | 25 years earlier, people in Israel and around the world had watched as Israel's sentence Nazi |
| 1:05.3 | war criminal Adolf Eichmann to death by hanging for his role in masterminding the Holocaust. |
| 1:11.9 | Now they were glued to their TV screens once again in a trial that hinged on the testimonies of |
| 1:17.4 | Holocaust survivors. I remember once being on a bus in Jerusalem, full of maybe 60 people. |
| 1:23.6 | Here's Eligabai again. The testimony was played by the bus driver over the speakers of the bus. |
| 1:30.0 | The Terrible Shows from inside, by gas chain, Mama, Papa. A pin could be heard dropped. It was an |
| 1:38.2 | unbelievable experience for Israel to hear these testimonies being voiced by the survivors about |
| 1:48.0 | their experience in the hands of the Nazis. John was born Ivan Damianyuk in 1920 in Soviet Ukraine. |
| 1:56.4 | After fighting for the Red Army in Crimea, he was captured by the Germans in 1942. |
| 2:02.0 | When the war was over, Damianyuk emigrated to America and settled in Cleveland, Ohio, |
| 2:07.1 | where he worked as a machinist for the Ford Motor Company. It wasn't until 1975 that Damianyuk's |
| 2:13.5 | activities during the war came under scrutiny. His name featured on a list of Ukraine and American |
| 2:19.2 | suspected of collaborating with the Nazis. When Damianyuk's photograph was shown to survivors |
| 2:25.1 | of the Trebinga extermination camp, they identified him as Ivan Grožni. In English, Ivan the Terrible. |
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