Defending "Ivan the Terrible"
Subtitle: the conspiracy to convict John Demjanjuk
By: Yoram Sheftel ; translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman.
Publisher: Regnery Pub.; Distributed to the trade by National Book Network
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Washington, D.C; Lanham, MD
Language: eng
Number of pages: 445
Subjects: Demjanjuk, John -- Trials, litigation, etc.; War criminals -- Identification.; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); War crime trials -- Jerusalem.
Description: Here is the true story of the infamous show-trial of John Demjanjuk, the man falsely accused of being one of the most monstrous Nazi war criminals, Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. Now for the first time, Demjanjuk's lawyer, Yoram Sheftel, one of Israel's most prominent attorneys and a fervent Israeli nationalist, tells the story of a horrible miscarriage of justice motivated more by his beloved nation's desire for retribution for the Holocaust than by the evidence.

This real-life courtroom drama starts in the Soviet Union, where the "evidence" against Demjanjuk was first forged by the KGB as part of an international diplomatic "sting." Among the "stung" was the U.S. Justice Department. There the Office of Special Investigations, in charge of finding Nazi war criminals, and with a record of failure and a fading future, lost no time in pouncing on the hapless Demjanjuk.

Soon in their zeal to send to his death the man they claimed was Ivan, U.S. government officials were concealing evidence that proved Demjanjuk innocent so they could take away his citizenship and extradite him to Israel, all the while hiding the truth.

Once in Israel a fair trial was all but impossible. With the press whipping up a frenzy of hate against an innocent man and blatantly biased judges allowing flagrantly falsified evidence in an atmosphere more like a lynching than a trial, John Demjanjuk was convicted and condemned to death.

Only at the eleventh hour was Sheftel, by that time the most hated man in Israel, abe to find the conclusive bit of evidence that would prove beyond a doubt that John Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, was innocent of all charges, and never participated in any way in the horror of the Holocaust.

The questions Sheftel raises in this important and stimulating book - about the role of the media in sensational cases; about the validity of "repressed memory" testimony; about the struggle between prejudice and law in a democracy - come right out of today's headlines and are more important than ever right here at home.
Notes: Originally published: The Demjanjuk affair. London : V. Gollancz, 1994.