Columnist Distorts Debate Over Nazi War Criminal Trials
When Judge Ruggero Aldissert recently declared that it was
wrong to prosecute aging Nazi war criminals, the Philadelphia
Jewish community reacted with horror and outrage. Except, that is,
for Howard Altman, a Jewish columnist for the weekly Philadelphia
City Paper, who devoted an entire column to defending Judge
Aldissert's view. Unfortunately, Altman distorted the issues at
stake in the debate and also misrepresented Israel's prosecution of
Nazi war criminal John Ivan Demjanjuk.
Judge Aldissert, it will be recalled, made his remarks
concerning the case of Lansdowne resident Jonas Stelmokas, age
80, who faces deportation to his native Lithuania because of his
Nazi activities. Thanks to the efforts of the U.S. Justice
Department's Office of Special Investigations, and U.S.
Congressman Charles Schumer (D-NY), Stelmokas will have his
U.S. citizenship revoked, because he failed to disclose his Nazi past
when he submitted his application to enter the United States in
1949.
Aldissert was outvoted by his fellow-judges, who ruled that
the prosecution proved "clearly, unequivocally, and convincingly"
that Stelmokas served in a unit of Lithuanian Nazi collaborators and
was on duty when his unit carried out a massacre of 9,200 Jews on
October 28-29, 1941. Judge Aldissert, who is himself in his late
70s, complained that "to continue the prosecution of octogenarians
(and soon nonagenarians) is, to be sure, a political decision."
Aldissert also questioned the reliability of Holocaust survivors'
memories in identifying their persecutors.
Aldissert has his fans. Peter B. Hyrcenko of Allentown, in a
letter to the Philadelphia Daily News, denounced "the frame-up of
John Demjanjuk and others," and expressed his hope that there will
be a Divine judgement visited upon "these three-piece-suit 'Nazi
hunters' for their crimes against elderly men." Another letter-writer
in the News, Robin Gurrison of Philadelphia, claimed that "the
witnesses don't know what day it is, let alone remember someone
from so long ago."
One of Aldissert's few Jewish supporters, Philadelphia
Weekly columnist Howard Altman, asserted that Aldissert "does
have a point...pursuing cases against old men like Demjanjuk and
Stelmokas would push the envelope beyond traditional notions of
due justice...their accusers are old men and women with failing
memory."
Altman is wrong about Demjanjuk. He's wrong about
Stelmokas. And he's wrong about the evidence used in such cases.
To begin with, an old memory is not automatically a
"failing" memory. As Ms. Linda-Lynn Fagan has pointed out in the
letters column of the Philadelphia Weekly, "The events recalled by
concentration camp survivors are not accounts of what they
consumed for breakfast last month or at what time they retrieved the
mail 40 years ago...The memories [those experiences] left are
burned as deeply in the minds of the victims as are the numbers into
my Uncle Arieh's forearm."
The Israeli Supreme Court, in its final ruling in the
Demjanjuk case, upheld the validity of the survivors' memories.
Thirteen separate witnesses unhesitatingly picked Demjanjuk out of
a photo lineup. The five who were still alive at the time of the trial
testified against him and, as the Court noted, the hadn't seen him
just once or twice; they had "worked near [Demjanjuk], saw
him for days, weeks and months from a distance of a few meters
and lived under the fear of his deeds...Everyone gave detailed
descriptions, far in excess of the facial identification alone, which
provided an objective and logical basis for the weight of the
identification."
In any event, survivors' memories are only one part of the
evidence used in trials of Nazi war criminals. The savage deeds of
Stelmokas's unit, the Third Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion,
were described in an impressive body of historical documentation
that was presented at his hearings. And Stelmokas admitted he was
a member of that Battalion. His claim --contradicted by the
historical record-- is that his unit did not take part in the massacres.
Likewise, in the Demjanjuk case, the Israeli prosecutors
introduced a significant amount of physical evidence, including the
photo-identification card made out to young Ivan Demjanjuk when
he enrolled in Trawniki, the facility where the Nazis trained death-
camp guards. His defense at the trial was that it was all a
Communist plot--the Soviets "forged" the i.d. card, he claimed.
Upon his graduation from Trawniki, Demjanjuk worked at the
Flossenbuerg, Regensbuerg. and Sobibor death camps, where he
committed numerous atrocities. Then, according to the prosecution,
he was transferred to the Treblinka camp, where his savagery gained
so much notoriety that he was popularly known as "Ivan the
Terrible" (his original name was Ivan; he changed it to John when
he moved to the U.S. after the war). The evidence, both physical
evidence and memories, was overwhelming; Demjanjuk was
convicted as charged.
But while his appeal was pending, the Soviet Union
collapsed, new Holocaust records became available from Soviet
archives, and Demjanjuk's lawyers --who suddenly began regarding
Soviet records as reliable, not "forgeries"--found new evidence in
the archives. They produced postwar testimony about "Ivan" by
other Treblinka guards which, in some cases, did not
seem to match what was known about Demjanjuk. His attorneys
made much of th fact that some of the guards said Ivan the
Terrible's name was "Ivan Marchenko" rather than "Demjanjuk" --
until the prosecution pointed out that Demjanjuk had
listed "Marchenko" as his last name when he applied to enter the
United States after the war. Demjanjuk's explanation at the trial was
that Marchenko was "a common name," and he just thought of it
off the top of his head when he was filling out the U.S. immigration
forms.
Prof. Alan Rosenbaum of Cleveland State University, an
expert on Nazi war criminals, sums it up this way: "There was a
mountain of evidence against him and a shred of doubt." The
Israeli Supreme Court choose to use the shred of doubt to set him
free. "Our own Supreme Court likely would have reached a
different result," the New Republic noted. But the Israeli decision
was not an acquittal by any stretch of the imagination; it was an
affirmation of a small doubt about one aspect of a very long and
bloody record. Nor did the Israeli court's ruling cast any doubt on
either the reliability of survivors' memories or on the weight of the
physical and historical evidence against Nazi war criminals. Perhaps
Howard Altman should take a closer look at the court records
in both the Stelmokas and Demjanjuk cases; he might be surprised
at what he finds when he looks behind the headlines.
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