In his place, Demjanjuk hired Israeli trial lawyer Yoram Sheftel whom O'Connor had hired as co-counsel. Sheftel focused the defense largely on the claim that Demjanjuk's Trawniki card was a KGB forgery. Most significantly, Sheftel called Dr. Julius Grant, who had proven that the Hitler diaries were forged. Grant testified that the document had been forged. He also called Dutch psychologist Willem Albert Wagenaar, who testified to flaws in the method by which Treblinka survivors had identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. 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.
John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demjanjuk; Ukrainian: Іван Миколайович Дем'янюк; 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 Flossenbürg. Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, ...
Demjanjuk's citizenship was revoked for having lied about his past in 1981, with the judge persuaded especially by the testimony of Otto Horn. Demjanjuk subsequently requested political asylum in the United States rather than deportation. His application for asylum was denied on 31 May 1984.
Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, when he was tried and convicted after being misidentified as " Ivan the Terrible ", a notoriously cruel watchman at Treblinka extermination camp. Shortly before his death, he was again tried and convicted as an accessory to 28,000 murders at Sobibor.
In 1988 , Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death. He maintained his innocence, claiming that it was a case of mistaken identity. In 1993 the verdict was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court, based on new evidence that cast reasonable doubt over his identity as "Ivan the Terrible".
On 18 April 1988, the Jerusalem District Court found Demjanjuk "unhesitatingly and with utter conviction" guilty of all charges and being Ivan the Terrible. One week later it sentenced him to death by hanging. Demjanjuk was placed in solitary confinement during the appeals process. While there, carpenters began building the gallows that would be used to hang him if his appeals were rejected, and Demjanjuk heard the construction from his cell.
After the conviction, Demjanjuk was released pending appeal. He lived at a German nursing home in Bad Feilnbach, where he died on 17 March 2012. Having died before a final judgment on his appeal could be issued, under German law, Demjanjuk remains technically innocent.
Demjanjuk died in a German nursing home in 2012 appealing separate war crimes charges in Munich, where he was accused of being an accessory in the death of nearly 30,000 Jewish prisoners, The New York Times reported.
In 2017, Sheftel represented Elor Azaria, the young Israeli soldier who fatally shot an unarmed Palestinian man as he laid helpless on the ground during a 2016 skirmish in the West Bank, the New York Times reported. That case, too, struck a nerve amongst Israelis — and horrified human rights groups across the globe.
Israeli lawyer Yoram Sheftel, who represented accused Nazi war criminal and Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk during his trial in the '80s, has long-been a polarizing figure in the country’s criminal justice system. Sheftel is one of a handful of eccentric characters portrayed on Netflix’s new docu-series “The Devil Next Door,” which follows ...
On May 11, 2009, after filing numerous unsuccessful motions in the United States and Germany, Demjanjuk was finally deported to Germany. Upon arrival in Munich, he was arrested and sent to prison. Two months later, Demjanjuk was formally charged with nearly 28,000 counts of accessory to murder.
On February 18, 1988, he was found guilty of the sole allegation in the indictment. Two months later, Demjanjuk was sentenced to death. The conviction and sentence triggered an automatic appeal, but by this time, stories of another 'Ivan' had begun to circulate.
Ivan Demjanjuk was born in 1920 in the Ukrainian village of Duboviye Makharynsty, near Vinitsa. Life was little more than survival, even before Stalin starved to death about 7 million Ukrainians in a campaign to end private land ownership. In 1939, Demjanjuk was drafted into the Soviet Army.
On February 16, 1987, John Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel for crimes against humanity. The single count in the indictment was operating the gas chambers at Treblinka.
Sheftel introduced testimony by Ignat Danielchenko, a guard at the Sobibor death camp. (Unlike Auschwitz, which was both a slave labor camp and an extermination factory, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, and Chelmno were created and operated exclusively to exterminate large numbers of people in the shortest possible time.)
Jerome Brentar was a Holocaust denier. Brentar addressed conferences of the Institute for Historical Review. In his talks before the I.H.R., Brentar insisted that Demjanjuk was innocent, because the crimes he was charged with are a fabrication created by the Jews.
In 2010, John Demjanjuk turned 90 years old. The man who came to be known as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ and the subject of the most protracted war crimes case in history is on trial in Germany for mass murder committed before most people alive today were born, and nearly 33 years after he was first identified.
1. Demjanjuk's trial before the special tribunal (Supreme Court Judge Dov Levin, and Jerusalem District Court Judges Zvi Tal and Dahlia Dorner) was opened with the reading out session on November 26, 1986. For practical purposes, the hearings commenced only on February 16, 1987 and this primarily in response by the Court to applications for postponement filed by the defense, to enable it to prepare properly for the trial.
In October 1975, there came into the possession of certain members of the U.S. Senate a list of Nazi war criminals living so the document alleged in the U.S. The list gave the suspects' names and personal particulars, in most cases also stating what they had done during World War II.