FACES AND PLACES: What Rosenbaum should have said, but didn't (07/03/05)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

What Rosenbaum should have said, but didn't

On June 20, Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), was back making headlines.

And the indolent American press, with the memory bank of a fig, was aiding and abetting.

Commenting on a federal judge's deportation ruling, Eli Rosenbaum declared: "John Demjanjuk's role in helping to doom thousands of Jews to annihilation in Sobibor's gas chambers renders him singularly unworthy of continued residence in this country. His participation in the ghastly crimes of the Holocaust make him unfit to remain here..." The fawning American press wrote it all down, asking no questions.

Had Mr. Rosenbaum been honest, he would have said something entirely different, something like the following, perhaps:

"Ladies and gentlemen of the press. Today we are pleased to announce that a federal judge ruled that John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant, and retired auto worker can be deported from the United States for a second time because he served as an armed Nazi guard at several Nazi camps. As you will recall, the Office of Special Investigations once tried to convince the world that John Demjanjuk was "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka. We spent hundreds of thousands of American taxpayer dollars to do just that. Our entire case was based on a bogus identity card supplied by the Soviets, and the memories of five elderly survivors 40 years after being freed from Treblinka. We were so determined to deport Demjanjuk for war crimes that we even withheld exculpatory evidence from his defense team. When this deception was later discovered by a federal judge, he ruled that OSI had perpetrated a fraud against the court.'

"We believed that Mr. Demjanjuk could never be found guilty by a jury of his peers so we opted for a civil trial where the rules of evidence are less demanding. In contrast to a criminal proceeding where the defendant must be found guilty 'beyond a shadow of a doubt,' a civil trial requires only 'a preponderance of evidence.'

"Judge Frank Battisti ruled that Mr. Demjanjuk was eligible for deportation in 1981, not because he was a war criminal but because the judge believed he lied on his U.S. visa application.

"We were in touch with the Israelis during the Cleveland trial and were able to convince them to accept John Demjanjuk for trial. We told them it was an open and shut case. John Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1984. We refused to provide relevant documents to the press under the Freedom of Information Act because we needed them in the event that the Israelis exonerated Demjanjuk and he had to be sent to the Soviet Union for trial.

"After spending seven and a half years in an Israeli jail, Mr. Demjanjuk was found guilty following a nationally televised show trial held in a concert hall. To prove that Ukrainians had a long history of anti-Semitism, the prosecution case included references to Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Simon Petliura. John Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in 1993.

"The Israeli judicial system provided no legal assistance for indigent defendants so Ukrainians in the United States and Canada were forced to raise over a million dollars for the Demjanjuk defense.

"Our intimate relations with the Soviet justice system ended with the 1990 Soviet collapse. Demjanjuk's defense team was able to travel to Ukraine to obtain documents proving that John Demjanjuk had never been a guard at Treblinka and was certainly not Ivan the Terrible. When this evidence was presented to the Israeli Supreme Court, he was exonerated. He returned to the United States in 1993. His citizenship was restored in 1998.

"All of this was very embarrassing to OSI, especially after a three-judge federal appeals panel in Cincinnati unanimously ruled that the prosecutors in the Demjanjuk case withheld evidence 'in part to curry favor with Jewish organizations which had put pressure on them...' We appealed the decision to the Supreme Court to no avail.

"You can appreciate our predicament in 1998. We had to do something to restore our credibility. Returning to the drawing board, we were able to get a new Demjanjuk trial in 1999. This time there was no mention of Treblinka. Nor were there any witnesses. Instead, we presented what the judge called 'a mountain of evidence' to demonstrate that although John Demjanjuk had not been at Treblinka, he was an armed guard at the Sobibor, Majdanek and Flossenburg concentration camps.

"We applaud the courage of Chief Immigration Judge Michael Creppy for his ruling. We also wish to thank the World Jewish Congress, where I worked for a time. While at WJC I wrote the definitive ADL report titled 'The Campaign Against the U.S. Department of Justice Department's Prosecution of Suspected Nazi War Criminals.' I also monitored The Ukrainian Weekly, focusing on the writing of one Mykhailo Bociurkiw, a Ukrainian Canadian [Source: Eli Rosenbaum's February 2, 1987, letter to the Canadian Jewish Congress, written at the time he was general counsel for the WJC], and passing it on to the Canadian Jewish Congress which had invited Neal Sher, former OSI director, to assist them in their Nazi-hunting efforts. We believe it is most unfair that Mr. Sher was later disbarred in the District of Columbia for unauthorized reimbursements while he was an employee of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims.

"As you know, we have asked the governments of Germany, Poland and Ukraine to accept John Demjanjuk. Germany has said they have no faith in our findings and Poland is wavering. Ukraine is our best bet because we believe the government there needs to work on its image. As Jewish organizations in the United States, the Israeli government, Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Weisel have emphasized consistently, Ukraine has a long history of anti-Semitism. Ukraine can now change that perception.

"Finally, I wish to thank the mainstream American press for its 30-plus years of toadyism. You never asked too many questions - especially those related to Congressional oversight hearings - you consistently labeled John Demjanjuk a 'Nazi' even though he never was one, and you always underscored his Ukrainian ethnicity. You've made our job a lot easier!"

Myron Kuropas's e-mail address is: kuropas@comcast.net.

| Home Page |