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. [45][46] Five Holocaust survivors from Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as having been at Treblinka and having been "Ivan the Terrible. Some facts of Demjanjuk's past are not in dispute. He added that camp documents and modern police biometric technology played a supporting role in reaching that conclusion. CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOIO) - John Demjanjuk is at rest in a cemetery near Cleveland. [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. [139] On 30 November 2009, Demjanjuk's trial, expected to last for several months, began in Munich. As Chelm was Demjanjuk's alibi, he was questioned about this omission during the trial by both the prosecutors and the judges; Demjanjuk blamed the trauma of his POW experience and said he had simply forgotten. Prosecutors had maintained that Demjanjuk was one of the Trawniki men Central and Eastern European collaborators recruited from Nazi-run camps for Soviet prisoners of war and served at the Sobibor, Majdanek and Flossenburg camps. [108] The United States Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in November 2004.[109]. [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. During his testimony, he told he was once checked for blood group by Nazi officials for putting a tattoo. Historican Martin Cueppers points at a man, presumably former security guard John Demjanjuk, at the Nazi death camp Sobibor during a news conference of newly discovered photos from the Sobibor . "I saw his eyes, I saw those murderous eyes", Rosenberg told the court, glaring at Demjanjuk. There is no evidence that POWs trained as police auxiliaries at Trawniki received such tattoos. His return was met by protests and counter-protests, with supporters including members of the Ku Klux Klan. [20] OSI was unable to establish Demjanjuk's whereabouts from December 1944 to the end of the war. Demjanjuk, convicted in May of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to five years in prison, died a free man in a nursing home in the southern Bavarian town of . As survivors of the Treblinka death camp take the stand against John Demjanjuk, his lawyers seek ways to challenge the accuracy of their testimony. [163] On 28 June 2012, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that Demjanjuk could not regain his citizenship posthumously. John Demjanjuk, convicted of one of the worst crimes in modern history, has sat in jail for more than six years waiting to die. The long and twisted saga of John Demjanjuk, a postwar immigrant and auto mechanic living a quiet life in Cleveland until 1977, is the final piece in the puzzle of American government deceit. Germany awaits a verdict in the trial against John Demjanjuk, accused of being an accomplice in the murder of thousands. [48] In 1982, Demjanjuk was jailed for 10 days after failing to appear for a hearing. [134] The indictment made almost no mention of Demjanjuk's service at Majdanek or Flossenbrg, as these were not extermination camps. On February 16, 1987, John Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel for crimes against humanity. He claims he was never at any of the camps and was a POW. [128] Demjanjuk sued Germany on 30 April 2009, to try to block the German government's agreement to accept Demjanjuk from the US. One week later it sentenced him to death by hanging. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. [102] Even before his acquittal by the Israeli Supreme Court, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had opened an investigation into whether OSI had withheld evidence from the defense. [133] Some 35 plaintiffs were admitted to file in the case, including four survivors of the Sobibor concentration camp and 26 relatives of victims. Born in Ukraine, John (Iwan) Demjanjuk was the defendant in four different court proceedings relating to crimes that he committed while serving as a collaboratorof the Nazi regime. Born in Soviet Ukraine, Demjanjuk was conscripted into the Red Army in 1940. [160], Following his death, his relatives requested that he be buried in the United States, where he once lived. [16], In 1940, he was drafted into the Red Army. John Demjanjuk's defense claimed that the card was a Soviet-inspired forgery, despite several forensic tests that verified it as authentic. [88] Demjanjuk said he just wrote a common Ukrainian surname after he forgot his mother's real name (Tabachyk). [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. [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. German historian Martin Cppers says the collection unveiled on Tuesday shows how lower-ranking SS were given significance as the Nazis developed the machinery of mass murder. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. | Learn more about Mohsen Dadjoo's work . Little is known about the death camp, in part because the Nazis razed it in late 1943 after an uprising by about 600 inmates. The defendant, John Demjanjuk of Seven Hills, has said in depositions that he had received a tattoo on his left arm at a prison camp at Graz, Austria. [151], On 15 January 2011, Spain requested a European arrest warrant be issued for Nazi war crimes against Spaniards; the request was refused for a lack of evidence. Demjanjuk denied serving in any death camps until his dying day and also denied helping the Nazis carry out the Final Solution. Demjanjuk was convicted as an accessory to the murder of 27 900 Jews on 12 May 2011 and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. 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. [121] As the Government noted, a motion to reopen, such as Demjanjuk's, could only properly be filed with the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) in Washington, D.C., and not an immigration trial court. [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. 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). 2023 BBC. [11] Having died before a final judgment on his appeal could be issued, under German law, Demjanjuk remains technically innocent. The tattoo was likely a SS blood group tattoo given to him when he joined the Russian Liberation Army. [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. The photographs were published on 28 January 2020 in the book Fotos aus Sobibor ("Photos from Sobibor"). [174][175] The following day, the Ludwigsburg Research Center qualified the announcement, saying that it is likely that one of the men in the noted photos is Demjanjuk, but that this cannot be said "with absolute certainty" ("mit absoluter Gewissheit"), given the time that had passed since they were taken. He was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to five years in prison. [180] It has digitized this collection for research. Other controversial evidence included Demjanjuk's tattoo. On May 19, 2008, the US Supreme Court declined to review his appeal. [59] Demjanjuk appealed his extradition; in a hearing on 8 July 1985, Demjanjuk's defense attorneys claimed that the evidence against him had been manufactured by the KGB,[60] that Demjanjuk was never at Treblinka, and that the court had no authority to consider Israel's request for extradition. [54] Demjanjuk also attracted the support of conservative political figures such as Pat Buchanan and Ohio congressman James Traficant. [17] After a battle in Eastern Crimea, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and was held in a camp for Soviet prisoners of war in Chem. 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. CREATIVE. [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. There, he raised a family and lived an unremarkable life until 1975, when he found himself on a list of American citizens believed to have once been Nazi guards. [106] The complaint alleged that Demjanjuk served as a guard at the Sobibr and Majdanek camps in Poland under German occupation and as a member of an SS death's head battalion at Flossenbrg. [111] On 30 January 2008, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit denied Demjanjuk's request for review. Demjanjuk was born in Dubovi Makharyntsi,[13] a farming village in the western part of Soviet Ukraine. The case had begun as an investigation into the Sobibor camp, due to Demjanjuk's alleged service at that killing center and to the testimony of a Soviet witness named Ignat' Danil'chenko in the late 1940s. A critical piece of evidence was John Demjanjuk's Trawniki camp identification card, located in a Soviet archive. [130], Demjanjuk was deported to Germany, leaving Cleveland, Ohio, on 11 May 2009, to arrive in Munich on 12 May. 44m. Assuming the pictures reveal something real, as they appear, it just adds another layer of knowledge in the open account we have with anyone who commits horrors against other human beings.. Hundreds of thousands of pages of previously unknown documents became available to both the prosecution and the defense. [88] 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. . In 1999, OSI filed a new denaturalization proceeding against Demjanjuk, alleging that he served as a Trawniki-trained police auxiliary at Trawniki itself, Sobibor, and Majdanek, and, later, as a member of an SS Death's Head Battalion at Flossenbrg. The pictures are also included in a new book, Photos From Sobibor, which was presented at Tuesdays news conference, held at the Topography of Terror, a museum on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. On July 29, 1993, the Supreme Court of Israel, reversing a lower court's verdict, acquitted John Demjanjuk of having participated, as "Ivan the Terrible," in the gassing . Demjanjuk, then 67 years old, testified on his own behalf, claiming that he had spent most of the war as a POW in German captivity in a camp near Chelm, Poland. Born in Soviet Ukraine, under Stalin's regime, John was originally named Ivan Demjanjuk. The pictures were part of a recently unearthed collection of private photos that once belonged to the deputy camp commander and show a young man resembling the Nazi identity card picture of Demjanjuk as he poses with other auxiliary guards at the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied eastern Poland in early 1943. In 1979, the newly created Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the DOJ took over prosecution of the case. Demjanjuk's lawyer argued that all of the ID cards could be forgeries and that there was no point comparing them. The first, Adolf Eichmann, was found guilty in 1961 and executed in 1962. Demjanjuk subsequently requested political asylum in the United States rather than deportation. The authenticity of the Trawniki card was affirmed by US government experts who examined the original document as well as by Wolfgang Scheffler of the Free University of Berlin during the hearing,[42][43] Scheffler also testified to the crimes committed by Trawniki men and that it was possible that Demjanjuk had been moved between Sobibor and Treblinka. [129] The German Administrative Court rejected Demjanjuk's claim on 6 May. Read about our approach to external linking. [89], On 29 July 1993, a five-judge panel of the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict on appeal. [172] Following Demjanjuk's conviction, however, Germany began aggressively prosecuting former death camp guards. [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. But the following year, U.S. prosecutors reopened the case. 2. Main telephone: 202.488.0400 After a federal appeals court upheld this decision, OSI filed a deportation proceeding in December 2004. He lived at a German nursing home in Bad Feilnbach,[10] where he died on 17 March 2012. The SS trained auxiliaries from occupied Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union to assist in the mass murder of Jews and other minorities. Shortly before his death, he was tried and convicted in Germany as an accessory to 28,060 murders at Sobibor. 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. A widely published Associated Press photo caught . 3. [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. Nightmares of Treblinka. Ten petitions against the decision were made to the Supreme Court. "Ivan", Rosenberg said. "Ivan the Terrible" gained international recognition following the 1986 John Demjanjuk case. "I say it unhesitatingly, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. [29][9][pageneeded] They moved to Indiana, and later settled in the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, Ohio. Secondly, I use cognitive psychology to make therapy, design, and media more compelling. In 1986, an unassuming Cleveland grandfather and autoworker is accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a brutal Nazi death camp guard. In 1986, an unassuming Cleveland grandfather and autoworker is accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a brutal Nazi death camp guard. Historians say the pictures also show Niemann and other Nazi camp leaders leisurely having drinks around a table on a camp terrace on a hot summer afternoon, as well as Niemann on horseback, his eyes focused on train tracks as a deportation train is about to arrive. Because the Soviet Union generally refused to cooperate with the Israeli prosecutions, this IDcard was obtained from the USSR and provided to Israel by American industrialist Armand Hammer, a close associate of several Kremlin leaders, whose help had been requested by the personal appeal of Israeli president Shimon Peres. He died in Germany in 2012. Russian court rejects detained US journalist appeal, No water, no light, as Sudan conflict rages on, Brother died saving birthday girl's life in US shooting, Realities dash hopes for Israel-Palestinian peace, Fighting hits Khartoum neighbourhoods - maps and images, How LinkedIn is changing and why some are not happy, Who didn't make the coronation guest list? The cover had a tattoo on it. Twisted history of John Demjanjuk An Ukranian 89-year-old will go on trial in Germany tomorrow over his alleged role in the deaths of more than 27,000 Jews during the Second World War. None of them identified Demjanjuk as having served at Treblinka. [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. Conscripted into the Soviet army, he was captured by German troops at the battle of Kerch in May 1942. About 1.7 million Jews were murdered at Sobibor and two other camps in 1941-43. 1. One photo shows Niemann posing on a horse in early 1943 at the Sobibor ramp - the place where deported Jews arrived in cattle trucks. [20] These documents were found in former Soviet archives in Moscow and in Lithuania, which placed Demjanjuk at Sobibor on 26 March 1943, at Flossenbrg on 1 October 1943, and at Majdanek from November 1942 through early March 1943; administrative documents from Flossenbrg referencing Demjanjuk's name and Trawniki card number were also uncovered. John Demjanjuk, az Ukrajnbl bevndorolt, tisztessgben megszlt egykori Ford-gyri munks bks clevelandi nyugdjas vei akkor rtek vget, amikor 1985-ben az amerikai kormny megvdolta azzal, hogy valjban egy nci hbors bns, aki annak idejn nem csupn rszt vett, de rmt is lelte a . [95] One described Ivan the Terrible as having brown hair, hazel eyes and a large scar down to his neck; Demjanjuk was blond with grayish-blue eyes and no such scar. [78] During the trial, Demjanjuk was again identified on the photo spread by Otto Horn, a former German SS guard at Treblinka. 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. [157][158] His release pending appeal was protested by some, including Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. [149], Demjanjuk declined to testify or make a final statement during the trial. Demjanjuk, an Ohio autoworker whose U.S. citizenship was twice stripped, had steadfastly denied being a Nazi collaborator. One year later, in December 2005, a US Immigration Court ordered Demjanjuk deported to his native Ukraine. Argo Contemporary Art Museum & Cultural Centre is a former 1920s beer distillery in the heart of Tehran . 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. [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. After Jewish survivors viewing a photo spread identified Demjanjuk as serving at Treblinka near the gas chambers, however, US government officials instead pursued the Treblinka charges. Demjanjuk admitted the scar under his armpit was a Waffen-SS tattoo . 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. "[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. His citizenship was once again revoked, in 2002, and he was deported in 2009 to Germany, where he was charged with being an accessory to the murder of about 28,000 Jews at Sobibor. [101], Demjanjuk was released to return to the United States. 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. [144] Demjanjuk's defense team argued that these documents were Soviet forgeries. Everyone involved in this horror was guilty., He added: I think the need to positively identify Demjanjuk as the guy who did the worst things is about wanting to achieve closure, closing the circle around what happened. [91]The Trawniki certificate also implied that Demjanjuk had served at Sobibor, as did the German orders of March 1943 posting his Trawniki unit to the area. 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. Nightmares of Treblinka. The single count in the indictment was operating the gas chambers at Treblinka. BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) _ Mark O ' Connor defended John Demjanjuk because he was convinced the retired autoworker couldn't be the Nazi death camp guard who savagely beat Jews on the way to the gas chamber. He said that in March or April 1944, he and Demjanjuk were sent from Sobibor to Flossenbrg, where they were all given a blood-type tattoo. [40], The proceeding opened with the prosecution calling historian Earl F. Ziemke, who reconstructed the situation on the Eastern Front in 1942 and showed that it would have been possible for Demjanjuk to have been captured at the Battle of Kerch and arrive in Trawniki that same year. 1362, 1377 (N.D.Ohio 1981). [153][154][155][156] Presiding Judge Ralph Alt ordered Demjanjuk released from custody pending his appeal, as he did not appear to pose a flight-risk. He voluntarly tells everyone in court he had an SS tattoo on his arm. Ukrainian guard at Nazi death camps (19202012), Loss of US citizenship and extradition to Israel, Verdict and Israeli Supreme Court reversal, Second loss of US citizenship and extradition to Germany, Death and posthumous efforts to restore US citizenship, Subsequent prosecutions of Nazi extermination camp guards in Germany, sfn error: no target: CITEREFRaschke2013 (, US Immigration and Naturalization Service, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, United Nations Convention against Torture, Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, List of denaturalized former citizens of the United States, "Seven Hills' John Demjanjuk, convicted Nazi guard, dies in Bavaria at 91", "Israeli judge: Demjanjuk was 'Ivan the Terrible', "Israel recommends that Demjanjuk be released", "John Demjanjuk, 91, dogged by charges of atrocities as Nazi camp guard, dies", "Convicted Nazi Criminal Demjanjuk Deemed Innocent in Germany Over Technicality", "John Demjanjuk: Things we are left to tend to think", "Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk dies aged 91", "Anger simmers in Demjanjuk's home village", " :: ", "Looking Back on the Demjanjuk Trial in Munich", "Sixty years later, alleged Nazi guard may stand trial", "Convicted Nazi criminal John Demjanjuk dies at 91", "Judge Rules Autoworker Must Lose Citizenship for Falsifying Past", "NAZI DEPORTATION TRIAL CENTERS ON IDENTITY CARD", "Defense Rests in Trial of Alleged Nazi Guard", "Ex-Nazi Suspect Loses Immigration Court Case", "MAN ACCUSED OF NAZI CRIMES IS TO BE EXTRADITED TO ISRAEL", "John Demjanjuk: Prosecution of a Nazi collaborator", "Demjanjuk quoted: Guards only followed orders", "2nd witness calls Demjanjuk 'Ivan the Terrible', "Acquittal in Jerusalem; Israel court sets Demjanjuk free, but he is now without a country", "KGB evidence reopens the case of 'Ivan the Terrible': Holocaust: Recently released files bolster the appeal of the man convicted as a Nazi death camp monster", "Why Nazi trials must end: The story behind the likely acquittal of", "Decision of Israel Supreme Court on petition concerning John (Ivan) Demjanjuk", "Judge orders accused camp guard deported", "Accused Nazi guard Demjanjuk loses court appeal", "Germany seeks extradition of Nazi guard from US", "Court: 'Ivan the Terrible' can be tried in Germany", "Former Nazi camp guard charged 29,000times", "Former Nazi camp guard to be deported to Germany", "John Demjanjuk's trial in Germany to start 30 November", "U.S. judge allows deportation of accused Nazi guard", "Nazi suspect's deportation appeal rejected", "Demjanjuk removed from Ohio home on stretcher", "Nazi war crimes suspect granted emergency stay", "Alleged Nazi guard Demjanjuk hits legal brick wall", "Demjanjuk loses German court bid to block deportation", "Krankenwagen bringt Demjanjuk ins Untersuchungsgefngnis", "Germany files charges against alleged Nazi guard Demjanjuk", "Demjanjuk lawyer calls for case to be closed", "John Demjanjuk war crimes trial begins in Munich", "Man Tied to Death Camp Goes on Trial in Germany", "John Demjanjuk, 91, Dogged by Charges of Atrocities as Nazi Camp Guard, Dies", "Witness in alleged Nazi Demjanjuk trial under investigation for murder", "German court rejects Demjanjuk extradition request", "Demjanjuk convicted of helping Nazis to murder Jews during the Holocaust", "John Demjanjuk zu fnf Jahren Haft verurteilt", "Court finds Nazi camp guard guilty of assisting in Holocaust deaths", "Former US citizen convicted in Nazi camp deaths", "Convicted Nazi criminal Demjanjuk deemed innocent in Germany over technicality", "Demjanjuk family asks to bury Nazi war criminal in US", "Ukrainian political party leader says Demjanjuk was buried in US weeks after his March death", "John Demjanjuk's widow asks for hearing on citizenship of late husband, convicted Nazi war criminal", "US court: No posthumous US citizenship for Demjanjuk, convicted in war crimes probe", "Court rejects appeal for Demjanjuk citizenship", "Demjanjuk attorney files complaint against doctors", "Doctors Did Not Hasten Demjanjuk's Death", "Was John Demjanjuk Really 'Ivan the Terrible'? He had appealed the conviction. There are no pictures of inmates or gas chambers. )[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. 44m. [88] The court declined to find him guilty on this basis because the prosecution had built its entire case around Demjanjuk's identity with Ivan the Terrible, and Demjanjuk had not been given a chance to defend himself from charges of being a guard at Sobibor. He was freed pending appeal of the conviction. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. When news broke that suspected Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk would be deported to Germany to face charges of accessory to murder in 29,000 cases, this tiny hamlet, deep in Ukraine 's. Eslamshahr (Persian: , also romanized as Eslmshahr), is a city in the Central District of Eslamshahr County, Tehran province, Iran, and serves as capital of the county.. At the 2006 census, its population was 357,171 in 91,293 households. Demjanjuk had not mentioned Chelm in his initial depositions in the United States, first referring to Chelm during his denaturalization trial in 1981. Demjanjuk was deported to Israel, and an Israeli court tried and convicted him primarily based on the eyewitness testimony of five Jewish survivors of Treblinka. OSI did not submit these deposits into evidence and took them as a further indication that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible, though none of the guards mentioned Demjanjuk having been at Treblinka. 1. This was considered circumstantial corroboration of Hanusiak's claims, but its agents were unable to find witnesses in the US who could identify Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk appealed the deportation order on various grounds, including the argument that, given his age and poor health, deportation would constitute torture against which he was seeking protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. 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