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"Ivan the Terrible" - More Doubts
Commentary on Patrick Buchanan's History
The following column by Patrick Buchanan contains several errors offact regarding the Holocaust. It is reprinted here wishout permissionand for purposes of reference.My commentaryon this column debunks his errors.
Jamie McCarthy
Patrick Buchanan, "Dividing Line,"New YorkPost, March 17, 1990.
This May, Israel's Supreme Court will decide whether John Demjanjuk,the Cleveland auto worker convicted of being "Ivan the Terrible," thebutcher of Treblinka who operated the gas chamber, follows AdolphEichmann to the gallows.
Oddly, the closer Demjanjuk comes to death, the more certain hisinnocence appears. Had we known in 1980, when he was stripped of U.S.citizenship, what we know today, he would have walked out of hisCleveland courtroom a free man.
Just weeks ago, CBS' "60 Minutes" discovered Marianna Dudek in avillage near Treblinkia. Did she remember "Ivan the Terrble"? Indeedshe did: she had slept with him for the gold Ivan ha taken from theJews, she said; his real name was Ivan Marchenko.
At the War Crimes Commission in Warsaw, CBS was shown a list of guardsfrom Treblinka. Marchenko's name was on it; Demjanjuk's was not.
The only hard evidecnne against Demjanjuk remains the I.D. card fromTrawniki training camp, which puts Demjanjuk in a different camp,Sobibor.
Late in the Jerusalem trial, we learned that the U.S. JusticeDepartment had withheld evidence, dating to 1979, that another guard,Danilchenko, also recalled Demjanjuk at Sobibor in the same monthsDemjanjuk's accusers swear he was at Treblinka.
Now, a U. S. researcher has finished an exhaustive study of the I.D.card, and three like it from Soviet archives, delivered to Israel byArmand Hammer. All four are patent forgeries.
Demjanjuk's card, supposedly issued in mid-1942, is validated with theseal of SS-Brigadefuehrer Odilo Globocnik. But Himmler himselfdismissed Globocnik in March of '42, while Demjanjuk was still in theRed Army.
Three of the cards, including Demjanjuk's, carry the stamp of theWaffen SS; but the Waffen SS did not take over Trawniki until 1943, ayear after Demjanjuk supposedly departed.
On guard Juchnowoskij's card, his picture is reversed (buttons are onthe left side of the blouse) while the numbers on the blouse are notreversed, proof the picture was composed in a lab.
One card bears the signature of a Corporal Teufel; Teufel had beenpromoted to sergeant three months before. The same card bears thesignature of Capt. Hoefle; Hoefle had already been promoted to Majorto carry out the deportation of the Warsaw Jews.
Moreover, graphic elements of the seals are grossly misaligned; the SSthunderbolts are wrongly printed in the Roman script; one stamp isupside down.
Nazi documents have been copied professionally for years; why, then,such clumsy forgeries? Simple: The KGB forgers had no authenticTrawniki card to work from.
But what about the eyewitnesses?
Well, among the atrocities for which Demjanjuk must hang is using adrill to bore into the rectum of prisoner Finkelstein. Only, in his1945 sworn testimony, Finkelstein did not mention this.
Moreover, S. Reizman, the leader of the Treblinka prisoners, nevermentioned any Ivan in his list of the Ukrainian personnel atTreblinka, compiled at meetings of survivors in Lodz on Nov 5, 1945.
Another witness at Demjanjuk's trial swore in 1945 and 1947 that he'dkilled Ivan in 1943.
Is this collective perjury? No, something else. Since the war, 1,600medical papers have been written on "The Psychological and MedicalEffects of the Concentration Camps on Holocaust Survivors."
This so-called "Holocaust Survivor Syndrome" involves "group fantasiesof martyrdom and heroics." Reportedly, half of the 20,000 survivortestimonies in Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem are considered"unreliable," not to be used in trials.
Finally, the death engine. During the war, the underground governmentof the Warsaw Ghetto reported to London that the Jews of Treblinkawere being electrocuted and steamed to death.
The Israeli court, however, concluded that the murder weapon for850,000 was the diesel engine from a Soviet tank which drove itsexhaust into the death chamber. All died in 20 minutes, Finkensteinswore in 1945.
The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide tokill anybody. In 1988, 97 kids, trapped 400 feet underground in aWashington, DC tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust intothe car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes.
Demjanjuk's weapon of mass murder cannot kill. The Soviet I.D. cardsare patent forgeries. Polish witnesses say "Ivan" was another man;Israeli eyewitnesses contradict their own sworn statements, contradictone another, and are contradicted in turn.
And John Demjanjuk, bewildered and innocent, advances towardexecution.
God help us. We are the Salem judges of our own time.