Useful Enemies Read online

  Useful Enemies

  Richard Rashke

  John “Iwan” Demjanjuk was at the center of one of history’s most complex war crimes trials. But why did it take almost sixty years for the United States to bring him to justice as a Nazi collaborator?

  The answer lies in the annals of the Cold War, when fear and paranoia drove American politicians and the U.S. military to recruit “useful” Nazi war criminals to work for the United States in Europe as spies and saboteurs, and to slip them into America through loopholes in U.S. immigration policy. During and after the war, that same immigration policy was used to prevent thousands of Jewish refugees from reaching the shores of America. 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. The White House, the Departments of War and State, the FBI, and the CIA supported policies that harbored Nazi war criminals and actively worked to hide and shelter them from those who dared to investigate and deport them. The heroes in this story are men and women such as Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and Justice Department prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum, who worked for decades to hold hearings, find and investigate alleged Nazi war criminals, and successfully prosecute them for visa fraud. But it was not until the conviction of John Demjanjuk in Munich in 2011 as an SS camp guard serving at the Sobibor death camp that this story of deceit can be told for what it is: a shameful chapter in American history.

  Riveting and deeply researched, Useful Enemies is the account of one man’s criminal past and its devastating consequences, and the story of how America sacrificed its moral authority in the wake of history’s darkest moment.

  Richard Rashke

  USEFUL ENEMIES

  John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals

  To Paula

  my essential

  INTRODUCTION

  History, Like Life, Is Messy

  NO EASY ANSWERS

  In November 2009, orderlies wheeled an eighty-nine-year-old former American citizen, John Demjanjuk, into a Munich courtroom on a gurney to face charges that he helped the Nazis murder 29,060 Jews at the Sobibor death camp in eastern Poland during World War II.

  Why did it take almost sixty years for the United States to find and extradite John Demjanjuk for trial in Germany as a Nazi collaborator?

  Finding an answer to this often-asked question is like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Historical forces, moral behaviors, legal issues, and matters of survival must be separated and realigned—a daunting task when an individual’s wartime actions and a country’s postwar judgments of those actions are so intertwined.

  In the United States, Israel, and finally in Germany, John Demjanjuk stood accused of being a Nazi collaborator. Yet if war is as much about survival as it is about killing, does wartime create its own version of what is right and wrong, based on an individual’s right of survival? If so, was John Demjanjuk a collaborator or simply a survivor?

  At the same time that postwar America was pursuing John Demjanjuk and other alleged Nazi collaborators in the courts, it was also employing and protecting former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. Was America’s use and shielding of these war criminals a repugnant but necessary and pragmatic choice to secure the nation during the Cold War? Or was it illegal, unethical, and immoral? And were its pick-and-choose decisions about which Nazi “collaborators” to try, deport, or extradite an exercise in cynicism and hypocrisy?

  If the end justifies the means, does a morally acceptable end justify any means? Is there a line of pragmatism and political expediency, albeit fuzzy and shifting, that an individual or a nation should not cross? If so, who decides where to draw that line?

  The panel of seven judges in Munich rendered a final answer—subject to appeal—in the case of John Demjanjuk and established a war crimes precedent in the process. For the first time, a German court convicted a Nazi-era war criminal without either documentary or eyewitness evidence that he had personally killed anyone. That precedent sent German prosecutors scurrying back to their file cabinets in search of other alleged Nazi collaborators who had “aided and abetted” in the murder of civilians, without proof that they had ever pulled a trigger. As a result of the Demjanjuk conviction, there may be more war crimes trials in Germany.

  For John Demjanjuk the long journey to Munich began in 1920 in a tiny Ukrainian village.

  IN HIS OWN WORDS

  Fleshed out with the history of the times, here is John Demjanjuk’s story. It is cobbled from official records bearing his signature and his sworn statements to prosecutors and courts in the United States and Israel.

  Iwan Demjanjuk{Iwan is the spelling of the common name Ivan.} was born on April 3, 1920, in the Ukrainian village of Dubovi Makharintsi. With a population of about three hundred, it was not on any map. The village was near Kiev, one of the oldest cultural centers in Eastern Europe. But as important as Kiev was to Ukrainian national identity, it offered nothing to a barefoot boy born into a farming family and destined to be a farmer himself.

  Iwan never had a chance to attend Kiev’s famous Taras Shevchenko National University, or the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, or the Kiev-Mohyla Academy. He got as far as fourth grade in the village school before being drafted to work on a communist collective farm (kolkhoz), where he slowly advanced from horse and plow to tractor.

  Iwan was the epitome of a survivor. He lived through Joseph Stalin’s artificially created famine of 1932–33 (the Holodomor), during which three to four million Ukrainians died of starvation. The famine hit children like Iwan the hardest. As one observer described them: “You could see each bone in their arms and legs protruding from the skin, how bones joined, and [how] the entire skeleton was stretched over with skin that was like yellow gauze. And the children’s faces were tormented, just as if they were seventy years old…. And the eyes. Oh, Lord!”

  The famine kept the Demjanjuk family teetering on the brink of starvation for fifteen months and made a lasting impression on thirteen-year-old Iwan. It became a compass point in his life’s journey, toughened his will to live, and taught him skills he would need to survive the Nazi earthquake about to tear Europe apart. Iwan also managed to dodge Stalin’s maniacal purges of the 1930s and early 1940s, during which an estimated 3.3 million intellectuals, political activists, and Communist Party leaders, whose loyalty was under suspicion, were executed or imprisoned in the Siberian gulags. Among them were thousands of Ukrainian journalists, poets, teachers, wealthy landowners, and clergymen. Iwan survived the purges because Stalin feared the pen and the tongue, not the tractor and its driver.

  In the end, the dictator paid a heavy price for raping Ukraine. The Holodomor, the purges, and state-mandated atheism sowed the seeds of hatred deep in Ukraine’s Christian heart.

  Like his father, Nikolai, before him, Iwan was drafted into an artillery division of the Red Army. It galled the young man that he was forced to defend Stalin and communism, but the alternative was death as a traitor. And like his father, who lost several fingers during World War I (probably from frostbite), Iwan too was scarred by war. He suffered a shrapnel wound in the back from the premature explosion of an artillery shell. The paralyzing wound was so serious that he spent nearly a year in hospitals before being sent back into battle at Kerch, a Ukrainian harbor city in Crimea.

  For the German Reich, the Kerch port was a tempting plum. After heavy fighting, it captured the city in November 1941. But not for long. Mounting a surprise attack from the sea, the Reds recaptured Kerch a month later, only to have the German navy retake it once again the following spring. During the battles for Kerch, the Germans killed or took as prisoners more than 160,000 Red Army soldiers. Iwan was one of the survivors
.

  Because Stalin distrusted the loyalty of his Christian soldiers, Soviet military law required Iwan to kill himself rather than be taken prisoner. POWs could be tortured for military information, flipped to fight against the Red Army, or used as labor cogs in the Reich’s war machine. For twenty-two-year-old Iwan, suicide was not only a sin; it was the ultimate act of loyalty to the atheistic government he hated. As a matter of conscience and survival, Iwan chose to take his chances as a German POW.

  The capture of Soviet soldiers presented the Reich with a huge problem. It had several million Russian POWs but no system to process them, not enough shelters and food, and no medicine or doctors. Conditions in the jerry-built POW camps in western Ukraine and eastern Poland were so atrocious that prisoners resorted to digging holes in the ground to keep warm and to eating the frozen dead for dinner.

  In an attempt to buy time, the German SS (Schutzstaffel), a nonmilitary protection squad, opened a transit camp in Rovno, a rail transportation hub in western Ukraine, which offered the Reich army easy access to Germany and its occupied territories. During the winter of 1941–42, an estimated two million Red Army POWs died in Rovno from starvation, exposure, typhus, and dysentery before Berlin decided to put them to work, as Stalin had feared.

  Adolf Hitler assigned the task of building and managing the Reich’s more than six thousand transit, POW, concentration, labor, and death camps to the SS. SS officers selected the healthiest POWs and penned them inside hastily constructed camps in the Reich-occupied territories until they could be placed in proper labor camps. Iwan was sent first to Rovno in June 1942, then to an outdoor holding camp in Chelm, Poland, a historic city founded in the ninth century and only a twenty-minute train ride from the Bug River, which divided Poland and the Soviet Union. Chelm served as a cultural center for both Poles and Jews, who had lived in relative harmony until Hitler made it legal to rob and kill Jews.

  The Soviet army occupied Chelm for eleven days in 1939, before retreating back across the Bug as the German army advanced eastward. Many Chelm Jews, who feared the Nazis more than they loved their homes, fled into the Soviet Union behind the Red Army. After the war, the majority stayed there.

  The Nazis eventually killed, or sent to work camps and death camps, all but a few Chelm Jews, who managed to hide. The Chelm holding camp for Soviet POWs (including Iwan Demjanjuk) is not to be confused with the tiny village of Chelmno, the site of a not-so-secret Nazi extermination camp in northern Poland. It was at Chelmno that the Nazis experimented with gas as a murder weapon, first in sealed vans, then in two primitive gas chambers with adjacent crematoria. The Chelmno guinea pigs were mostly Polish Jews, Gypsies (Roma), and Russian POWs.

  The Chelm prisoner holding camp was a corral without barracks, ringed with rolls of barbed wire. Prisoners who tried to escape got caught in the wire and were left to die of exposure and dehydration. During the 1942–43 winter, the SS gave the camp’s first sixty thousand Soviet POWs wood and tools, and ordered them to build their own barracks. Most died of starvation or sickness. The following winter was almost as cruel. The only survivors were prisoners who were selected to work in labor camps or who “volunteered” to serve as camp guards. Iwan survived the winter.

  Late in 1943, the SS sent Iwan to Graz, Austria, to be inducted into an all-Ukrainian unit of the Waffen SS (armed SS) to fight the Red Army. At Graz, a doctor tattooed Iwan’s blood type on his upper left arm in case he was wounded and needed a blood transfusion. A few weeks later, the SS transferred Iwan to Heuberg, Germany, where he was inducted into the Russian Liberation Army (RLA). Given his hatred of the communists as a Ukrainian and as a Christian, young Iwan saw his service in the RLA as both an honor and a patriotic duty.

  The RLA was under the command of Andrei Vlasov, a Red Army general whom the Germans had taken prisoner a few months after Iwan. To the Reich, General Vlasov was a public relations coup—a Soviet war hero because of his brilliant defense of Moscow and Leningrad in the deadly winter of 1941. In reality, Vlasov was, like Iwan, an anti-Stalinist.

  When Vlasov offered to collaborate with the German army against the Soviet Union, Berlin accepted. In September 1944, as the Red Army relentlessly drove the Germans west, the Reich incorporated the RLA into the German army.

  Although most RLA soldiers (Vlasovtsy) saw action in the final year of the war and suffered heavy casualties, Iwan survived. General Vlasov never called up Iwan’s unit, so he sat out the last days of the war far from the front.

  When Germany surrendered in May 1945, there were more than ten million uprooted and starving men, women, and children in Western Europe. They poured through the gates of displaced persons (DP) camps in the American, British, and French military sectors like a human tsunami. Most were former slave laborers, concentration camp inmates, and POWs. Among them was Iwan Demjanjuk.

  Iwan entered a DP camp in Landshut, the former site of a slave labor subcamp of the infamous Dachau prison complex. While in Landshut, he joined the camp’s uniformed police force and met Vera Kowlowa, a fellow Ukrainian whom the Germans had uprooted to work as a domestic. They married in September 1947, then moved to the much larger, American-run DP camp in Regensburg, Bavaria, hoping to find better food and living conditions. As an insurance policy, Iwan worked for the U.S. Army as a truck driver, hauling wood, coal, and other camp supplies.

  Postwar Europe offered three choices to DPs like Iwan: return to one’s home country, create a new life in Western Europe, or emigrate to a country outside Europe. Iwan chose emigration. As a first step in the process, he requested refugee status from the International Refugee Organization. That step posed a moral problem. If Iwan told refugee officials that he was a former Russian POW who had served in the RLA, he could be handed over to the Red Army for extradition back to the Soviet Union. The 1945 Yalta Agreement between the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union stipulated that all Soviet POWs had to be remanded to Soviet authorities along with any Soviet citizen who had lived in the Soviet Union before 1937. Iwan Demjanjuk was both a POW and someone who had lived in the Soviet Union before 1937.

  Iwan knew that if he were handed over to the Soviets, he was a dead man. Word had drifted across the Bug River that Stalin was trying POWs as Nazi collaborators. Some were executed. Most were sentenced to a slow death in Siberia. Vlasovtsy officers got special handling. Stalin summarily hung them publicly as traitors, including General Vlasov himself, whom the Red Army had captured during the waning months of the war.

  • • •

  In March 1948, Iwan wrote on his refugee application form that from 1937 to 1943 he had worked as a farmer in Sobibor, a tiny village in eastern Poland near the Bug River. That lie put him beyond the legal reach of the Soviet Union. Iwan chose the town of Sobibor as his fake residence because there was a sizable Ukrainian colony there, a fact that would make his story realistic if anyone bothered to check. To account for the months between 1943 and the end of the war in June 1945, Iwan wrote on his application that he had worked as a stevedore on the docks of Pillau, a German port on the Baltic Sea, and as a laborer in Munich.

  Refugee officials accepted Iwan’s application without challenge. They had to process millions of forms, didn’t have time to check details, and had no access to records.

  • • •

  In 1950, Iwan and Vera had their first child, Lydia. Hoping to create a better life for his new family, Iwan applied for and received a visa to the United States, based on a sworn statement that he had spent the years 1937–45 working in Sobibor, Pillau, and Munich, and that he had taken no part in the persecution of any person due to race, religion, or national origin. Under the aegis of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, Iwan, Vera and Lydia Demjanjuk steamed into New York harbor on the USS General W. G. Haan on February 9, 1952. Vera cried when she caught sight of the Statue of Liberty.

  The Demjanjuks were only three of approximately one hundred thousand war refugees who entered the United States that year. Between four and five hundred thousand European
refugees would eventually sink new roots in America after World War II.

  For both Iwan and Vera, New York was the end of a harrowing journey of cunning and luck. Burying their painful memories under a comforter of hope, they settled into the harsh life of a penniless immigrant family. With all their possessions crammed into two boxes, they boarded a train for Decatur, Indiana, where a farmer and a spare room were waiting.

  Iwan (now Ivan) began his new life in America tending pigs. Unable to speak English, the life of the Demjanjuks in rural Indiana was isolated and depressing until they made friends with a neighboring Polish family. When his new friends learned that Ivan was a mechanic, they found him a full-time job at a garage in Decatur. It didn’t pay well, but it was a step up from castrating piglets.

  Fortunately for him and his family, Ivan had a Ukrainian friend who lived in Cleveland and worked at the new Ford Motor Company plant in the suburbs. The friend, whom Ivan had met at a DP camp in Germany, invited the Demjanjuks to Cleveland, promising to help them get settled and find Ivan a good job at Ford. Given Ivan’s experience as a mechanic, Ford quickly hired him as a hot-engine tester, a responsible job that required both mechanical and analytical skills. It was a well-paying, secure job, with the United Auto Workers union watching his back while he listened to motors purr on the assembly line. Vera got a job in a nearby General Electric plant.

  Like thousands of immigrants before them, the Demjanjuks lived in a series of cheap, two-room flats and apartments and pinched nickels and dimes. Then, in 1956, four years after reaching New York, they bought a small, fixer-upper house. As their family grew—they had a second daughter, Irene, and a son, John—they bought and moved to a second home, then a third. Each move brought them one step closer to the American dream.