In Search of “Ivan the Terrible”: John Demjanjuk and the Judicial Use of Ironic Argumentation

John Demjanjuk was born in 1920 in the Ukrainian village of Duboviyc, and for many years, he and his family suffered through the devastation of World Wax I and the Ukrainian famines and collectivizations of the 1930s. In the tragic tales that have been told about his life, there is some evidence that he eventually joined a Soviet youth organization and would be drafted by the Soviet army. Arguers in many different courts around the world have tried to determine just where Demjanjuk served between 1942 and 1945 (Teicholz, 1990), and as late as February 4, 2003, the Polish government announced that a new probe that would investigate the role that "Ivan the Terrible" played in the World War II mass murders of Polish Jews by Nazi henchmen (Pasek, 2003; "Quick Hits," 2003). For those who are interested in the role that individuated justice plays in these modern Holocaust trims, one of the key issues in these legal proceedings involves the question of positive identification of key perpetrators, and Demjanjuk has been at the center of these debates for more than a quarter of a century, During the post-World War II years, he would make his way to America and become a respected citizen, and for decades he led what seemed to be an idyllic life. He bought a home in Ohio, got a job as an autoworker, raised a family, and became a respected member of the American-Ukrainian community. Yet John Demjanjuk's peace and tranquility was shattered during the 1970s and early 1980s, when authorities from several nations alleged that they had found convincing evidence that he was in fact "Ivan the Terrible," a sadistic Ukrainian guard who had served at the Treblinka death camp (Sheftel, 1996; Wallace, 1996). For the next several decades, Demjanjuk would become an iconic figure, a walking illustration of America's belated recognition of the horrors of the Judeocide (Mayer, 1988, p. vii). He and his lawyers were involved in almost a dozen criminal and civil suits, and the prosecution of Demjanjuk's cases were considered to be barometers that calibrated how particular communities felt about pedagogical lessons that were taught in these Holocaust trials (Landau & Levinson, 1991; Sereny, 1992, pp. 32-34; Shaviv, 1988; Sheftel, 1996). In many of the dominant American stories that were told about former Nazis, these were heinous crimes that didn't have any statute of limitations. In July of 2001, American officials told reporters that they would continue pursuing these elderly war criminals (Slater, 2001). Critics of these proceedings countered that "John Demjanjuk" couldn't possibly be "Ivan the Terrible," and that these show trials tell us little about the culpability of individual defendants. Moreover, some government officials were accused of having blurred the symbolic lines that separated politics from the "rule of law." Feagler, writing for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in December of 1993, noted that Demjanjuk had worn the sign saying "monster": ... for 17 years. He will never get rid of it. He will wear it in his casket. He will die with people believing he is a monster. He will always, for many, be the symbol of the Holocaust. That's been the problem with the Demjanjuk case from the beginning. The symbolism. Justice refuses to deal in symbols. Justice is interested in individuals and their individual actions .... A symbol is a thing. A repository for hatred and hurt. And frustration and revenge. From the beginning, Demjanjuk and his lawyers have had to battle more than evidence ... Demjanjuk would be a stand-in for the terribles who got away. For Hitler. For Himmler and Goering, who took poison. For Mengel, who escaped to South Africa, and Bormann, who just vanished. When Demjanjuk stood in the dock in Israel, they stood with him. Their evil was on trial along with his alleged evil. But he was all that was left to revile in the flesh. (Feagler, 1993, para.10-15) Douglas (2001), one of the most insightful commentators on these trials, contends that various societies have profited a great deal from having the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, but that the Demjanjuk proceedings have been counterproductive (p. …