WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.240 Apple podcast episode title, The Ghost of Treblinka, 00:00:03.600 --> 00:00:06.519 Mistaken Identity, War Crimes, and the Search 00:00:06.519 --> 00:00:08.900 for Ivan the Terrible. In this deep dive, we 00:00:08.900 --> 00:00:11.539 explore one of the most complex, dramatic, and 00:00:11.539 --> 00:00:14.740 haunting legal sagas in history. Who was Ivan 00:00:14.740 --> 00:00:17.160 the Terrible, the notoriously cruel guard at 00:00:17.160 --> 00:00:19.780 the Treblinka extermination camp? We examine 00:00:19.780 --> 00:00:22.300 the shocking courtroom trials of John Dimchenjuk, 00:00:22.500 --> 00:00:25.420 a suburban Cleveland auto worker accused of unimaginable 00:00:25.420 --> 00:00:28.019 war crimes, and unpack the chaotic collision 00:00:28.019 --> 00:00:30.359 of eyewitness memory, unearthed Soviet archives, 00:00:30.420 --> 00:00:33.500 and international law. We'll also look at a controversial 00:00:33.500 --> 00:00:36.020 U .S. Justice Department cover -up that a federal 00:00:36.020 --> 00:00:38.740 judge compared to the Salem witch trials. Whether 00:00:38.740 --> 00:00:41.240 you are a history buff or fascinated by the intricate 00:00:41.240 --> 00:00:43.600 twists of the justice system, this deep dive 00:00:43.600 --> 00:00:45.799 offers a thorough, impartial look at the quest 00:00:45.799 --> 00:00:48.359 for truth amidst the darkest chapters of WWI. 00:00:48.240 --> 00:00:51.780 Ivan the Terrible, Treblinka Guard, John Dimjunge, 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:55.200 Holocaust History, WWII War Crimes Trial, Office 00:00:55.200 --> 00:00:57.439 of Special Investigations, Nazi Concentration 00:00:57.439 --> 00:01:00.560 Camp, Mistaken Identity, Soviet Archives. Welcome 00:01:00.560 --> 00:01:03.500 to the Deep Dive. I'm really glad you are joining 00:01:03.500 --> 00:01:06.659 us today because the historical saga we have 00:01:06.659 --> 00:01:09.019 in front of us is, and I really do not use this 00:01:09.019 --> 00:01:11.180 word lightly, it's staggering. Staggering is 00:01:11.180 --> 00:01:13.040 definitely the right word for this one. Yeah. 00:01:13.480 --> 00:01:16.019 We are going to be unpacking this startling, 00:01:16.079 --> 00:01:19.269 just... almost unbelievable premise. I want you 00:01:19.269 --> 00:01:23.400 to imagine, uh... A retired suburban auto worker 00:01:23.400 --> 00:01:26.939 living in Cleveland, Ohio. Why? Just a guy who 00:01:26.939 --> 00:01:29.519 worked on a Ford assembly line. He raised a family, 00:01:29.599 --> 00:01:31.560 went to church, and lived what appeared to be 00:01:31.560 --> 00:01:34.319 just a completely ordinary, quiet American life. 00:01:34.420 --> 00:01:37.480 The American dream, basically. Exactly. So how 00:01:37.480 --> 00:01:39.640 does a man like that end up sitting in a courtroom 00:01:39.640 --> 00:01:42.739 in Israel facing the death penalty and being 00:01:42.739 --> 00:01:45.140 accused of being one of the most sadistic, terrifying 00:01:45.140 --> 00:01:47.459 figures of the entire Holocaust? It's a huge 00:01:47.459 --> 00:01:50.989 leap. It is. And our mission today is to sift 00:01:50.989 --> 00:01:53.790 through the fog of war and really decades of 00:01:53.790 --> 00:01:56.230 tangled evidence to understand the identity, 00:01:56.349 --> 00:01:59.209 the crimes and the sprawling legal battles surrounding 00:01:59.209 --> 00:02:02.230 a Treblinka guard known to history only as Ivan 00:02:02.230 --> 00:02:04.290 the Terrible. Which is just a chilling moniker. 00:02:04.769 --> 00:02:06.849 Very. We are going to look at the fragility of 00:02:06.849 --> 00:02:10.590 human memory, the unbelievable complexities of 00:02:10.590 --> 00:02:12.590 international law, and we're going to try to 00:02:12.590 --> 00:02:15.210 make sense of a historical mystery that literally 00:02:15.210 --> 00:02:19.009 spanned continents. And? You know, it is a profound 00:02:19.009 --> 00:02:21.849 historical mystery, but I think it is vital to 00:02:21.849 --> 00:02:24.409 establish right from the start that the events 00:02:24.409 --> 00:02:28.150 we are exploring today go far, far beyond the 00:02:28.150 --> 00:02:30.009 guilt or innocence of a single man. Right, it's 00:02:30.009 --> 00:02:32.050 much bigger than that. Exactly. This is really 00:02:32.050 --> 00:02:35.370 a story about how the justice system itself grapples 00:02:35.370 --> 00:02:37.969 with historical atrocities decades after the 00:02:37.969 --> 00:02:41.169 fact. I mean... when the crimes are this absolute 00:02:41.169 --> 00:02:43.710 and the scale of the horror is this incomprehensible, 00:02:44.370 --> 00:02:47.569 how does the machinery of modern law handle the 00:02:47.569 --> 00:02:49.830 decay of physical evidence? How does it handle 00:02:49.830 --> 00:02:51.810 the shifting geopolitical borders of nations 00:02:51.810 --> 00:02:54.169 and maybe most importantly, the deeply human, 00:02:54.310 --> 00:02:57.050 deeply flawed nature of trauma and memory? That's 00:02:57.050 --> 00:02:59.810 a huge part of this. It is. Over the course of 00:02:59.810 --> 00:03:01.569 this deep dive, we're going to be exploring the 00:03:01.569 --> 00:03:04.009 very limits of the legal process and what happens 00:03:04.009 --> 00:03:06.610 when the righteous pursuit of justice collides 00:03:06.610 --> 00:03:09.110 with the messy, often contradictory realities 00:03:09.110 --> 00:03:12.509 of history. OK. Let's unpack this, because to 00:03:12.509 --> 00:03:15.229 even begin to understand how an auto worker in 00:03:15.229 --> 00:03:18.530 Ohio gets dragged into an international war crimes 00:03:18.530 --> 00:03:21.689 tribunal, we really have to understand the place 00:03:21.689 --> 00:03:23.610 where the nightmare started. We have to go back 00:03:23.610 --> 00:03:26.349 to the source. We do. We need to go back in time 00:03:26.349 --> 00:03:29.150 and look at the dark architecture of Treblinka 00:03:29.150 --> 00:03:31.750 itself, because looking through the historical 00:03:31.750 --> 00:03:34.289 encyclopedic accounts of the camp, what immediately 00:03:34.289 --> 00:03:37.370 struck me was the management hierarchy. It's 00:03:37.370 --> 00:03:40.159 not what people expect. Not at all. I think when 00:03:40.159 --> 00:03:42.219 you or I hear the phrase extermination camp, 00:03:42.759 --> 00:03:45.000 our minds naturally populate it with an army 00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:48.020 of guards. You picture thousands of German soldiers 00:03:48.020 --> 00:03:50.360 blanketing the perimeter, running the operations, 00:03:50.919 --> 00:03:53.400 but the records upend that assumption entirely. 00:03:53.819 --> 00:03:56.460 Treblinka was managed by a shockingly small group 00:03:56.460 --> 00:03:59.020 of German SS overseers. We are talking about 00:03:59.020 --> 00:04:02.199 only 20 to 25 men in total. That number always 00:04:02.199 --> 00:04:05.000 stops people in their tracks. 20 to 25 men. Yeah. 00:04:05.379 --> 00:04:08.120 The sheer industrialized scale of the atrocity 00:04:08.120 --> 00:04:11.060 orchestrated by such a small nucleus of SS officers 00:04:11.060 --> 00:04:13.500 is always one of the most chilling, difficult 00:04:13.500 --> 00:04:16.399 aspects of Holocaust history to process. How 00:04:16.399 --> 00:04:19.000 is it even physically possible? Well, it wasn't. 00:04:19.139 --> 00:04:22.220 They absolutely could not run a facility of that 00:04:22.220 --> 00:04:25.800 size. specifically designed for mechanized mass 00:04:25.800 --> 00:04:29.259 murder with just two dozen men. So to make the 00:04:29.259 --> 00:04:32.480 camp function, the SS designed and relied upon 00:04:32.480 --> 00:04:35.959 a highly structured, deeply cynical hierarchy 00:04:35.959 --> 00:04:38.480 of coercion and collaboration. They outsourced 00:04:38.480 --> 00:04:41.800 it. Precisely. They effectively outsourced the 00:04:41.800 --> 00:04:45.279 daily hands -on brutality. And the records map 00:04:45.279 --> 00:04:48.439 out exactly who they outsourced it to. Beneath 00:04:48.439 --> 00:04:51.620 those 25 SS officers was a larger force of about 00:04:51.620 --> 00:04:55.079 80 to 120, what they called, Hewie guards. H 00:04:55.079 --> 00:04:57.339 -I -W -I Hill Swillage. Right. And these were 00:04:57.339 --> 00:05:00.139 men of various Soviet ethnicities, including 00:05:00.139 --> 00:05:02.839 Russian and Ukrainian Red Army prisoners of war. 00:05:02.959 --> 00:05:05.120 Yes, captured soldiers. And then beneath them, 00:05:05.120 --> 00:05:07.120 at the very bottom of this horrific hierarchy, 00:05:07.639 --> 00:05:09.980 there was a cadre of Jewish inmates known as 00:05:09.980 --> 00:05:12.240 kapos. Prisoner functionaries. Yeah, who were 00:05:12.240 --> 00:05:14.420 forced under threat of immediate death to assist 00:05:14.420 --> 00:05:17.079 in the camp's operations. But what really fascinated 00:05:17.079 --> 00:05:19.769 me in the research was the language dynamics 00:05:19.769 --> 00:05:21.949 among all these different groups. It sounds like 00:05:21.949 --> 00:05:24.129 Treblinka was operating in absolute linguistic 00:05:24.129 --> 00:05:28.069 chaos. Linguistic chaos is the exact right way 00:05:28.069 --> 00:05:30.449 to describe the environment. Yeah. And it was 00:05:30.449 --> 00:05:33.670 a chaos that the SS intentionally managed and 00:05:33.670 --> 00:05:36.490 exploited. How so? Well, the vast majority of 00:05:36.490 --> 00:05:39.290 these Hiwi guards had been trained at a specific 00:05:39.290 --> 00:05:42.329 SS facility called the Troniki concentration 00:05:42.329 --> 00:05:45.519 camp. OK. because these men came from all over 00:05:45.519 --> 00:05:47.839 the conquered Soviet territories, they faced 00:05:47.839 --> 00:05:50.399 severe language barriers, they couldn't understand 00:05:50.399 --> 00:05:53.040 the German SS, they often couldn't even understand 00:05:53.040 --> 00:05:55.819 each other, depending on their regional dialects, 00:05:56.060 --> 00:05:58.420 and they certainly could not understand the predominantly 00:05:58.420 --> 00:06:00.860 Polish and Yiddish -speaking Jewish inmates. 00:06:01.040 --> 00:06:04.120 So nobody can talk to anybody. Right. To bridge 00:06:04.120 --> 00:06:07.850 this gap, A specific demographic became incredibly 00:06:07.850 --> 00:06:10.470 valuable to the Nazi command structure, and those 00:06:10.470 --> 00:06:12.449 were the Volkssteuch. I've seen that term pop 00:06:12.449 --> 00:06:14.550 up a lot in World War II history. The ethnic 00:06:14.550 --> 00:06:16.769 Germans, right? Precisely. The Volkssteuch were 00:06:16.769 --> 00:06:18.589 ethnic Germans who had been living in Eastern 00:06:18.589 --> 00:06:21.029 Europe, sometimes for generations. Okay. They 00:06:21.029 --> 00:06:23.550 were highly valued in this horrific ecosystem 00:06:23.550 --> 00:06:27.310 because they were polyglots. They were the linguistic 00:06:27.310 --> 00:06:29.709 glue holding the camp's operations together. 00:06:29.910 --> 00:06:32.009 Because they spoke German. They spoke German. 00:06:32.120 --> 00:06:34.120 which allowed them to take orders directly from 00:06:34.120 --> 00:06:37.180 the SS officers. But they also spoke Ukrainian, 00:06:37.360 --> 00:06:39.699 Russian, and other Slavic languages. Which let 00:06:39.699 --> 00:06:43.279 them command the hui guards. Exactly. And perhaps 00:06:43.279 --> 00:06:46.079 most terrifyingly, many of them could understand 00:06:46.079 --> 00:06:48.720 basic Yiddish or Polish. Giving them a direct 00:06:48.720 --> 00:06:51.600 line to the inmates. Yes, a direct line of communication 00:06:51.600 --> 00:06:55.060 and control over the Jewish inmates. Because 00:06:55.060 --> 00:06:57.199 of this ability to bridge the language divide, 00:06:57.600 --> 00:06:59.759 most of the squad commanders among the guards 00:06:59.759 --> 00:07:02.500 were pulled from the Volkssteuch. And here is 00:07:02.500 --> 00:07:04.759 where the seeds of our entire central mystery 00:07:04.759 --> 00:07:07.240 are planted. The historical accounts point out 00:07:07.240 --> 00:07:10.000 something so seemingly mundane, but so crucial 00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:12.519 to everything that unfolds decades later in the 00:07:12.519 --> 00:07:15.199 courtroom. The terminology. Yes. The German and 00:07:15.199 --> 00:07:18.560 Austrian SS command, the local Polish population 00:07:18.560 --> 00:07:20.959 outside the camp, and the Jewish inmates inside 00:07:20.959 --> 00:07:23.759 the camp, they all tended to refer to these Hebe 00:07:23.759 --> 00:07:26.819 guards universally as Ukrainians. Even though 00:07:26.819 --> 00:07:28.810 they weren't all from Ukraine. Right, they didn't 00:07:28.810 --> 00:07:31.170 use that label necessarily because every single 00:07:31.170 --> 00:07:33.649 guard was actually from Ukraine, but because 00:07:33.649 --> 00:07:36.290 the guards often spoke Ukrainian amongst themselves 00:07:36.290 --> 00:07:38.730 as a common default language. It became a catch 00:07:38.730 --> 00:07:41.490 -all term, a monolith. Exactly, and within that 00:07:41.490 --> 00:07:44.329 massive monolithic group of guards labeled simply 00:07:44.329 --> 00:07:47.230 as Ukrainians, there were names being thrown 00:07:47.230 --> 00:07:51.579 around by the inmates. The name Ivan? was incredibly 00:07:51.579 --> 00:07:54.639 common among Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians. 00:07:54.639 --> 00:07:56.720 It's very common. In fact, I was reading the 00:07:56.720 --> 00:07:59.120 testimony of a Treblinka survivor named Chil 00:07:59.120 --> 00:08:02.470 Rashman. And he explicitly noted that he personally 00:08:02.470 --> 00:08:05.189 knew of six different men named Ivan working 00:08:05.189 --> 00:08:07.370 as guards at Treblinka at the exact same time. 00:08:07.410 --> 00:08:10.589 Six. Six men, all named Ivan, all called Ukrainians. 00:08:10.949 --> 00:08:13.410 If we pause and connect this to the bigger picture, 00:08:13.930 --> 00:08:16.050 we really need to consider what this environment 00:08:16.050 --> 00:08:19.029 meant for the victims and how it laid the groundwork 00:08:19.029 --> 00:08:22.149 for future legal complexities. The SS deliberately 00:08:22.149 --> 00:08:26.560 insulated themselves. By using Soviet POWs, men 00:08:26.560 --> 00:08:29.259 who had often faced a stark choice between starving 00:08:29.259 --> 00:08:32.940 to death in a frozen German POW camp or volunteering 00:08:32.940 --> 00:08:36.039 for the Tronecky training program, the SS forced 00:08:36.039 --> 00:08:38.720 the dirty, hands -on violence down the chain 00:08:38.720 --> 00:08:41.240 of command. They kept their hands clean. relatively 00:08:41.240 --> 00:08:43.759 speaking. Exactly. For the inmates experiencing 00:08:43.759 --> 00:08:47.039 this, it created a blur of trauma. Imagine being 00:08:47.039 --> 00:08:49.539 surrounded by men in various mismatched uniforms, 00:08:49.899 --> 00:08:52.580 shouting in German, Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish. 00:08:52.639 --> 00:08:55.419 It's overwhelming. When trauma of this magnitude 00:08:55.419 --> 00:08:58.259 is inflicted day after day, the human brain simply 00:08:58.259 --> 00:09:01.139 struggles to encode every specific granular detail 00:09:01.139 --> 00:09:03.659 like a camera recording a video. You just go 00:09:03.659 --> 00:09:05.929 into survival mode. Yes. Instead, the inmates 00:09:05.929 --> 00:09:08.070 categorized their tormentors by the overarching 00:09:08.070 --> 00:09:10.309 labels they heard shouted across the yard, the 00:09:10.309 --> 00:09:12.509 Ukrainians, the Ivans. They're trying to track 00:09:12.509 --> 00:09:14.769 where the danger is coming from? The sheer commonality 00:09:14.769 --> 00:09:16.990 of the name Ivan, combined with this linguistic 00:09:16.990 --> 00:09:19.610 blurring, created an environment where distinguishing 00:09:19.610 --> 00:09:22.350 one guard from another 40 years later would become 00:09:22.350 --> 00:09:25.169 a profound forensic challenge. But out of all 00:09:25.169 --> 00:09:27.870 those guards, out of the half dozen men named 00:09:27.870 --> 00:09:30.450 Ivan, there was one who did not blur into the 00:09:30.450 --> 00:09:33.190 background. No, he did not. One who stood out 00:09:33.190 --> 00:09:35.970 so starkly that his name became synonymous with 00:09:35.970 --> 00:09:38.330 the camp itself. And that leads us perfectly 00:09:38.330 --> 00:09:40.990 into his specific profile. We have to talk about 00:09:40.990 --> 00:09:42.610 him. We have to talk about the man who actually 00:09:42.610 --> 00:09:45.970 earned the nickname Ivan the Terrible. The historical 00:09:45.970 --> 00:09:49.029 records detail this specific individual. He was 00:09:49.029 --> 00:09:52.129 born in 1911, and the nickname, of course, was 00:09:52.129 --> 00:09:55.330 an allusion to the infamous Russian czar Ivan 00:09:55.330 --> 00:09:58.340 the Fourth. Right. But he wasn't given this name 00:09:58.340 --> 00:10:00.460 by the inmates just because he was generally 00:10:00.460 --> 00:10:02.799 cruel. It was because of his specific duties 00:10:02.799 --> 00:10:05.779 in the camp and the unimaginable, personalized 00:10:05.779 --> 00:10:08.159 way he carried them out. His primary function 00:10:08.159 --> 00:10:10.639 at Treblinka was mechanical, but devastating. 00:10:11.059 --> 00:10:13.539 He was tasked with operating the two tank engines 00:10:13.539 --> 00:10:15.799 that fed the gas chambers. Just running the engines. 00:10:15.879 --> 00:10:17.860 Running the engines. And I think it is important 00:10:17.860 --> 00:10:20.320 to highlight a detail from the records. Those 00:10:20.320 --> 00:10:23.500 specific motors had been installed and fine -tuned 00:10:23.500 --> 00:10:26.759 by an SS Scharfuehrer named Eric Fuchs. That 00:10:26.759 --> 00:10:28.860 detail really stopped me in my tracks when I 00:10:28.860 --> 00:10:32.320 read it. The idea of an engineer meticulously 00:10:32.320 --> 00:10:35.639 fine -tuning a tank engine. Not to make a vehicle 00:10:35.639 --> 00:10:39.059 run smoother, but to maximize the deadly efficiency 00:10:39.059 --> 00:10:41.960 of carbon monoxide exhaust for mass murder. It 00:10:41.960 --> 00:10:45.360 is the absolute zenith of the mechanized, industrialized 00:10:45.360 --> 00:10:48.539 death the Nazis perfected. It's horrifying. But 00:10:48.539 --> 00:10:50.679 while Erich Fuchs was the mechanic who set it 00:10:50.679 --> 00:10:54.289 up, Ivan was the operator. He was the man physically 00:10:54.289 --> 00:10:56.889 running the engines, throwing the switches that 00:10:56.889 --> 00:10:59.509 pumped the exhaust gas into the packed chamber. 00:10:59.629 --> 00:11:02.730 He was the executioner. He was. Yet reading the 00:11:02.730 --> 00:11:04.669 survivor accounts, it wasn't just the mechanical 00:11:04.669 --> 00:11:07.250 killing that made him infamous. It was his intimate 00:11:07.250 --> 00:11:10.190 personal cruelty outside the chambers. What's 00:11:10.190 --> 00:11:12.009 fascinating here, and I use the word fascinating 00:11:12.009 --> 00:11:15.330 in the darkest, most clinical sense, is how human 00:11:15.330 --> 00:11:17.769 memory latches on to specific types of terror. 00:11:17.809 --> 00:11:20.269 Yeah. The gas chambers represented a massive 00:11:20.269 --> 00:11:23.950 system. It was an industrialized, almost faceless 00:11:23.950 --> 00:11:26.769 bureaucracy of genocide. But what Ivan the Terrible 00:11:26.769 --> 00:11:29.169 chose to do outside those chambers was intimate, 00:11:29.450 --> 00:11:32.370 sadistic, and deeply personal. It was chaotic 00:11:32.370 --> 00:11:35.710 violence. And that is what seared his face and 00:11:35.710 --> 00:11:38.169 his name into the minds of the survivors. The 00:11:38.169 --> 00:11:40.250 testimony of that survivor we mentioned earlier, 00:11:40.470 --> 00:11:43.289 Chil Rochman, goes into agonizing detail about 00:11:43.289 --> 00:11:46.360 this. He testified that Ivan was about 25 years 00:11:46.360 --> 00:11:49.200 old at the time he worked in the camp. And Rochman 00:11:49.200 --> 00:11:51.919 described a level of extreme specific cruelty 00:11:51.919 --> 00:11:55.100 that is genuinely hard to even process. It really 00:11:55.100 --> 00:11:57.500 is. He testified that Ivan used to stand by the 00:11:57.500 --> 00:12:00.019 pathways and slice off the ears of passing workers 00:12:00.019 --> 00:12:02.120 as they carried materials. Just as they walked 00:12:02.120 --> 00:12:05.139 by. Yes. He would force these people to continue 00:12:05.139 --> 00:12:08.240 working, carrying heavy loads as they bled profusely 00:12:08.240 --> 00:12:10.759 from the sides of their heads. And then shortly 00:12:10.759 --> 00:12:13.100 after, he would outright kill them. Unbelievable. 00:12:13.519 --> 00:12:16.480 Rochman also testified that Ivan actively tortured 00:12:16.480 --> 00:12:19.940 victims with pipes, a sword, and whips right 00:12:19.940 --> 00:12:21.980 before they were forced into the gas chambers. 00:12:22.259 --> 00:12:26.179 It is absolute unadulterated sadism. He wasn't 00:12:26.179 --> 00:12:28.759 just following orders to run an engine. He was 00:12:28.759 --> 00:12:30.940 actively reveling in the infliction of physical 00:12:30.940 --> 00:12:33.700 pain. He brought a sword to an extermination 00:12:33.700 --> 00:12:36.580 camp. He used a sword. He used whips. He used 00:12:36.580 --> 00:12:40.200 heavy iron pipes. This wasn't the distant disconnected 00:12:40.200 --> 00:12:42.580 push of a button from a control room, this required 00:12:42.580 --> 00:12:45.580 physical exertion to destroy human beings before 00:12:45.580 --> 00:12:48.019 they were ultimately murdered. It's so visceral. 00:12:48.120 --> 00:12:49.860 And returning to the concept of memory encoding, 00:12:50.360 --> 00:12:52.440 this is exactly why Ivan the Terrible became 00:12:52.440 --> 00:12:55.539 legendary among these survivors. Amidst the mass 00:12:55.539 --> 00:12:58.179 trauma of Treblinka, where thousands of people 00:12:58.179 --> 00:13:00.320 were being systematically murdered daily in a 00:13:00.320 --> 00:13:04.169 highly organized routine, Ivan's personal unpredictable 00:13:04.169 --> 00:13:06.690 violence stood out. It broke the routine. It 00:13:06.690 --> 00:13:09.629 was a localized, terrifying reign of terror within 00:13:09.629 --> 00:13:12.539 an already unimaginable hell. And we know this 00:13:12.539 --> 00:13:14.740 reputation wasn't something constructed decades 00:13:14.740 --> 00:13:16.919 later during the trials. It was cemented very 00:13:16.919 --> 00:13:20.779 early in survivor literature. By 1944, a cruel 00:13:20.779 --> 00:13:23.419 guard named Ivan, who shared his violent duties 00:13:23.419 --> 00:13:25.500 with another guard named Nicholas, was already 00:13:25.500 --> 00:13:27.879 being written about. It was immediate. Specifically, 00:13:28.059 --> 00:13:31.220 he was prominently mentioned in a 1945 translated 00:13:31.220 --> 00:13:33.559 work by John Kuehl -Wernick called A Year in 00:13:33.559 --> 00:13:36.299 Treblinka. So right after the war ends, the ghost 00:13:36.299 --> 00:13:38.480 of this man is already haunting the surviving 00:13:38.480 --> 00:13:41.440 Jewish community. His crimes are documented in 00:13:41.440 --> 00:13:44.120 the very first drafts of Holocaust history. Exactly. 00:13:44.820 --> 00:13:47.059 But the records are very clear on one frustrating 00:13:47.059 --> 00:13:50.980 point. Ivan disappeared in 1945, and his fate 00:13:50.980 --> 00:13:53.480 was entirely unknown. He simply vanished into 00:13:53.480 --> 00:13:56.480 the ether. Like so many perpetrators in the chaotic, 00:13:57.159 --> 00:13:59.299 completely destabilized aftermath of the war, 00:13:59.700 --> 00:14:02.379 he slipped away. The Allies are advancing, the 00:14:02.379 --> 00:14:04.870 camps are falling. The camps were either liberated 00:14:04.870 --> 00:14:07.409 or dismantled by the retreating Nazis to hide 00:14:07.409 --> 00:14:10.809 the evidence. He left behind no forwarding address, 00:14:11.330 --> 00:14:14.590 no clear paper trail, nothing but the profoundly 00:14:14.590 --> 00:14:17.350 traumatized memories of the few who survived 00:14:17.350 --> 00:14:20.129 him. So I want you listening to Imagine Carrying 00:14:20.129 --> 00:14:22.460 That Weight. Imagine holding on to those traumatic 00:14:22.460 --> 00:14:25.159 memories for decades. Imagine having the image 00:14:25.159 --> 00:14:27.779 of a man with a sword, a man who sliced off ears, 00:14:28.059 --> 00:14:29.519 burned into your subconscious. You just never 00:14:29.519 --> 00:14:31.519 forget it. You build a new life, maybe you move 00:14:31.519 --> 00:14:34.019 to a new country, you try to move on, but you 00:14:34.019 --> 00:14:36.379 are always waiting for justice. You are waiting 00:14:36.379 --> 00:14:38.600 for the authorities to find the monster. Which 00:14:38.600 --> 00:14:41.039 leads us to the explosive, headline -grabbing 00:14:41.039 --> 00:14:44.620 trials of the 1970s and 80s, and to the accusation 00:14:44.620 --> 00:14:47.000 that rocked the world. The breakthrough. Because 00:14:47.000 --> 00:14:48.860 suddenly the justice system announced they had 00:14:48.860 --> 00:14:51.299 finally found him and he wasn't hiding out in 00:14:51.299 --> 00:14:53.659 a fortified bunker in South America or living 00:14:53.659 --> 00:14:56.259 under an alias in a remote village. He was living 00:14:56.259 --> 00:14:59.039 in suburban Cleveland. The shift from the absolute 00:14:59.039 --> 00:15:02.120 horror of the Treblinka death camp to the quiet 00:15:02.120 --> 00:15:05.759 manicured suburbs of Ohio is incredibly jarring. 00:15:06.019 --> 00:15:09.059 And it introduces us to the central figure of 00:15:09.059 --> 00:15:12.899 the legal saga. John Demjanjic. Right. John Demjanjic 00:15:12.899 --> 00:15:15.460 was a retired autoworker of Ukrainian descent. 00:15:15.940 --> 00:15:17.960 He had emigrated to the United States after the 00:15:17.960 --> 00:15:20.059 war, settled in Cleveland, got a job working 00:15:20.059 --> 00:15:23.120 for Ford Motor Company, raised a family, went 00:15:23.120 --> 00:15:26.039 to his local church. By all outward appearances, 00:15:26.340 --> 00:15:28.799 an entirely normal, unremarkable pursuit of the 00:15:28.799 --> 00:15:31.580 American dream. But throughout the 1970s and 00:15:31.580 --> 00:15:33.779 80s, an investigation by the U .S. government 00:15:33.779 --> 00:15:36.679 gains momentum, and John Demjanjic is formally 00:15:36.679 --> 00:15:39.159 accused of being Ivan the Terrible. It made international 00:15:39.159 --> 00:15:42.039 news instantly. The U .S. strips him of his citizenship 00:15:42.039 --> 00:15:45.419 and he is extradited to Israel. In 1988, he is 00:15:45.419 --> 00:15:47.500 put on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against 00:15:47.500 --> 00:15:50.100 humanity. We need to understand the gravity of 00:15:50.100 --> 00:15:53.139 that 1988 trial in Israel. It was a monumental 00:15:53.139 --> 00:15:55.720 historic event. Everyone was watching. It was 00:15:55.720 --> 00:15:57.860 broadcast publicly. It was highly publicized 00:15:57.860 --> 00:16:01.779 across the globe and it carried the immense crushing 00:16:01.779 --> 00:16:05.379 emotional weight of the Holocaust survivors seeking 00:16:05.379 --> 00:16:07.740 justice in the Jewish state. It wasn't just a 00:16:07.740 --> 00:16:10.659 trial of one autoworker from Ohio? No, it was 00:16:10.659 --> 00:16:13.240 a societal attempt to put the Holocaust itself 00:16:13.240 --> 00:16:16.440 on the stand again, very much echoing the famous 00:16:16.440 --> 00:16:19.620 Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem decades earlier. 00:16:20.340 --> 00:16:22.740 For Israel, this was about historical reckoning. 00:16:22.809 --> 00:16:25.250 And the centerpiece of this trial, the moment 00:16:25.250 --> 00:16:28.509 that the historical transcripts detail with incredible 00:16:28.509 --> 00:16:31.649 cinematic precision, was the dramatic courtroom 00:16:31.649 --> 00:16:34.389 confrontation with the prosecution's star witness. 00:16:34.669 --> 00:16:37.029 This is the turning point. This was a Treblinka 00:16:37.029 --> 00:16:39.690 survivor named Eliyahu Rosenberg. I want to paint 00:16:39.690 --> 00:16:41.730 the picture of this courtroom scene because the 00:16:41.730 --> 00:16:44.309 tension is palpable even just reading about it. 00:16:44.409 --> 00:16:46.389 You can feel it through the pages. Rosenberg 00:16:46.389 --> 00:16:48.889 is on the witness stand. The prosecution asks 00:16:48.889 --> 00:16:51.149 him if he recognizes the man sitting at the defense 00:16:51.149 --> 00:16:54.049 table. Rosenberg looks over and asks Demjanjuk 00:16:54.049 --> 00:16:56.570 to remove his glasses. He says to the judge, 00:16:56.649 --> 00:16:59.429 quote, So I can see his eyes. It is a request 00:16:59.429 --> 00:17:03.250 deeply rooted in primal human instinct. We inherently 00:17:03.250 --> 00:17:06.150 believe the eyes hold the immutable truth of 00:17:06.150 --> 00:17:08.710 a person's identity, the core of who they are, 00:17:08.829 --> 00:17:11.769 the window to the soul. Exactly. For a survivor 00:17:11.769 --> 00:17:14.549 trying to bridge a gap of over 40 years, trying 00:17:14.549 --> 00:17:17.009 to pierce through the aging process of a man 00:17:17.009 --> 00:17:19.789 sitting in a suit. The eyes are the ultimate 00:17:19.789 --> 00:17:22.769 identifier. So Demjanjuk obliges. He takes off 00:17:22.769 --> 00:17:25.130 his glasses. Rosenberg physically approaches 00:17:25.130 --> 00:17:27.349 him. He walks right up to the defense table and 00:17:27.349 --> 00:17:30.289 peers closely into Demjanjuk's face. And according 00:17:30.289 --> 00:17:32.990 to the transcripts, Demjanjuk smiles at him and 00:17:32.990 --> 00:17:35.650 offers his hand for a handshake. Think about 00:17:35.650 --> 00:17:37.990 the psychological dissonance in that single second. 00:17:38.230 --> 00:17:40.980 The accused monster. a man on trial for his life, 00:17:41.440 --> 00:17:43.720 smiling and offering a polite handshake to his 00:17:43.720 --> 00:17:45.880 alleged victim in front of the entire world. 00:17:46.119 --> 00:17:48.680 It's bizarre. Rosenberg recoils immediately. 00:17:48.839 --> 00:17:51.480 He shouts, Grozny, which is Russian for terrible. 00:17:51.759 --> 00:17:53.799 Ivan the Terrible. Right. And then Rosenberg 00:17:53.799 --> 00:17:56.039 turns and states to the court, and I am quoting 00:17:56.039 --> 00:17:59.839 his testimony exactly here. Ivan, I say it unhesitatingly 00:17:59.839 --> 00:18:01.859 without the slightest shadow of a doubt. It is 00:18:01.859 --> 00:18:04.119 Ivan from Treblinka, from the gas chambers, the 00:18:04.119 --> 00:18:06.700 man I am looking at now. Without a shadow of 00:18:06.700 --> 00:18:08.740 a doubt. He glares at Demjanjic and tells the 00:18:08.740 --> 00:18:11.400 court, I saw his eyes. I saw those murderous 00:18:11.400 --> 00:18:15.039 eyes. And then he turns directly back to Demjancik 00:18:15.039 --> 00:18:17.779 and exclaims, how dare you put out your hand, 00:18:18.099 --> 00:18:20.640 murderer that you are. It is impossible not to 00:18:20.640 --> 00:18:23.539 feel the absolute devastating power of that moment. 00:18:23.640 --> 00:18:26.880 It gives you chills. For Elihu Rosenberg, this 00:18:26.880 --> 00:18:31.200 was entirely real. The trauma, the pain, the 00:18:31.200 --> 00:18:33.180 absolute certainty he felt in his heart in that 00:18:33.180 --> 00:18:35.740 courtroom was a direct manifestation of the hell 00:18:35.740 --> 00:18:38.039 he survived. You can't fake that emotion. You 00:18:38.039 --> 00:18:40.039 can't. When a victim points a finger with that 00:18:40.039 --> 00:18:43.019 level of moral conviction, with that raw, unfiltered 00:18:43.019 --> 00:18:45.539 emotion pouring out of them, it is incredibly 00:18:45.539 --> 00:18:48.079 compelling to a judge and a jury. It is exactly 00:18:48.079 --> 00:18:50.279 the kind of testimony that secures convictions. 00:18:50.539 --> 00:18:53.140 And in this case it did. Based heavily on these 00:18:53.140 --> 00:18:55.880 emotional eyewitness identifications, Demjanjic 00:18:55.880 --> 00:18:58.220 was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging? 00:18:58.420 --> 00:19:00.380 He was put on death row. Here's where it gets 00:19:00.380 --> 00:19:03.519 really interesting. Because... I struggle to 00:19:03.519 --> 00:19:05.559 understand how the court justified what came 00:19:05.559 --> 00:19:08.359 next. The defense uncovered a massive glaring 00:19:08.359 --> 00:19:10.900 complication regarding that exact testimony. 00:19:11.140 --> 00:19:13.980 The deposition. Yes. The historical records reveal 00:19:13.980 --> 00:19:17.220 that this star witness, Eliyahu Rosenberg, the 00:19:17.220 --> 00:19:19.799 man who just confidently looked into Demjan Juk's 00:19:19.799 --> 00:19:22.779 eyes and identified him as Ivan without a shadow 00:19:22.779 --> 00:19:26.119 of a doubt, had given a sworn deposition decades 00:19:26.119 --> 00:19:28.960 earlier. Long before Demjan Juk was ever in the 00:19:28.960 --> 00:19:31.920 picture. Back in 1947, Rosenberg had formally 00:19:31.920 --> 00:19:34.200 testified to investigators that Ivan the Terrible 00:19:34.200 --> 00:19:36.279 had been killed during a prisoner uprising at 00:19:36.279 --> 00:19:39.460 Treblinka. And right there is the massive fault 00:19:39.460 --> 00:19:41.720 line in the entire prosecution's case. How does 00:19:41.720 --> 00:19:44.099 that even work? This is where the legal system 00:19:44.099 --> 00:19:47.900 has to balance deep, profound empathy for Rosenberg's 00:19:47.900 --> 00:19:51.059 unimaginable trauma with the strict, unyielding 00:19:51.059 --> 00:19:53.500 requirements of the legal burden of proof. But 00:19:53.500 --> 00:19:55.980 wait, how do we reconcile that? If you were portrait 00:19:55.980 --> 00:19:58.019 by someone, wouldn't you know if they were dead? 00:19:58.319 --> 00:20:00.920 How does a court just dismiss a 1947 statement 00:20:00.920 --> 00:20:04.099 that the man was killed and accept a 1988 identification 00:20:04.099 --> 00:20:05.779 that the man is sitting right there in the room? 00:20:06.000 --> 00:20:08.559 It's a fair question. Is it possible Rosenberg 00:20:08.559 --> 00:20:11.440 heard a rumor in 1947 that Ivan was killed during 00:20:11.440 --> 00:20:13.839 the chaos of the uprising and just believed it, 00:20:13.900 --> 00:20:16.160 but then decades later when confronted with a 00:20:16.160 --> 00:20:19.380 face, his memory overrode that old rumor? It 00:20:19.380 --> 00:20:22.180 is entirely possible and it speaks to the well 00:20:22.180 --> 00:20:25.000 -documented unreliability of eyewitness testimony 00:20:25.000 --> 00:20:28.539 decades after an event. The human mind is not 00:20:28.539 --> 00:20:31.299 a tape recorder. It doesn't just play back. No, 00:20:31.720 --> 00:20:34.109 memories degrade over time. They are influenced 00:20:34.109 --> 00:20:36.569 by suggestion, by seeing photographs in the news, 00:20:36.769 --> 00:20:39.670 and by the intense subconscious desire for closure. 00:20:39.829 --> 00:20:41.829 Right, because he wants them to have caught the 00:20:41.829 --> 00:20:44.890 guy. Of course he does. When Rosenberg was shown 00:20:44.890 --> 00:20:47.609 photos of Dem Janjuk by investigators prior to 00:20:47.609 --> 00:20:50.029 the trial, and when he was placed in the highly 00:20:50.029 --> 00:20:53.250 charged, deeply emotional atmosphere of an Israeli 00:20:53.250 --> 00:20:56.250 courtroom, his brain may have genuinely convinced 00:20:56.250 --> 00:20:59.009 him that this was the man. Trauma is powerful. 00:20:59.130 --> 00:21:01.829 Trauma has a terrifying way of fusing the past 00:21:01.829 --> 00:21:04.299 and the present. It is crucial to understand 00:21:04.299 --> 00:21:06.400 that Rosenberg wasn't necessarily lying on the 00:21:06.400 --> 00:21:09.099 stand. He may have been experiencing a deeply 00:21:09.099 --> 00:21:11.720 felt psychological truth. He believed what he 00:21:11.720 --> 00:21:13.680 was saying. But believing it doesn't make it 00:21:13.680 --> 00:21:16.759 legally viable. Exactly. The justice system demands 00:21:16.759 --> 00:21:19.759 a different standard. Legal truth demands empirical 00:21:19.759 --> 00:21:23.049 evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. And As powerful 00:21:23.049 --> 00:21:26.269 as Rosenberg's testimony was, that 1947 deposition 00:21:26.269 --> 00:21:28.789 was just the first crack in the foundation of 00:21:28.789 --> 00:21:31.529 the case against John Demjonjic. Because while 00:21:31.529 --> 00:21:33.529 this emotional trial was playing out in Israel 00:21:33.529 --> 00:21:36.490 in the late 1980s, the geopolitical landscape 00:21:36.490 --> 00:21:39.230 of the entire world was shifting in a way no 00:21:39.230 --> 00:21:41.210 one could have predicted. The timing was incredible. 00:21:41.329 --> 00:21:43.869 It was about to cause an absolute archival earthquake. 00:21:44.349 --> 00:21:46.869 The Soviet Union was collapsing. The Iron Curtain 00:21:46.869 --> 00:21:50.170 was falling. The Cold War was ending. and vast 00:21:50.170 --> 00:21:52.890 previously impenetrable repositories of secret 00:21:52.890 --> 00:21:55.950 KGB and Soviet archives were suddenly being opened 00:21:55.950 --> 00:21:58.829 up to Western researchers and legal teams. And 00:21:58.829 --> 00:22:01.029 what was sitting inside those dusty archives 00:22:01.029 --> 00:22:04.250 changed everything about this case. If we connect 00:22:04.250 --> 00:22:06.190 this archival earthquake to the bigger picture, 00:22:06.710 --> 00:22:08.890 the fall of the Soviet Union radically altered 00:22:08.890 --> 00:22:11.009 Holocaust investigations globally. Because they 00:22:11.009 --> 00:22:13.609 had a monopoly on the Eastern Front data. Yes. 00:22:13.829 --> 00:22:16.710 For decades, Western investigators and prosecutors 00:22:16.710 --> 00:22:19.329 had to rely almost entirely on Western documents 00:22:19.329 --> 00:22:21.910 and survivor testimonies like Rosenberg's. They 00:22:21.910 --> 00:22:24.269 simply did not have access to the meticulous, 00:22:24.529 --> 00:22:27.029 often brutal, and highly detailed records kept 00:22:27.029 --> 00:22:29.410 by the Soviet authorities. Who are doing their 00:22:29.410 --> 00:22:32.509 own investigations. Right. The Soviets had captured 00:22:32.509 --> 00:22:34.829 and interrogated hundreds of Nazi collaborators 00:22:34.829 --> 00:22:37.829 and guards after the war. When those vaults in 00:22:37.829 --> 00:22:40.609 Moscow and Kiev finally opened, a tidal wave 00:22:40.609 --> 00:22:44.309 of new, contradictory documentary evidence flooded 00:22:44.309 --> 00:22:47.009 the international legal system. And that tidal 00:22:47.009 --> 00:22:50.009 wave hit the Demjanjic case directly. On July 00:22:50.009 --> 00:22:53.950 29, 1993, The Israeli Supreme Court did something 00:22:53.950 --> 00:22:56.930 monumental. They reversed it. They overturned 00:22:56.930 --> 00:22:59.170 John Jemjohn's guilty verdict and they threw 00:22:59.170 --> 00:23:02.049 out his death sentence. They ruled that, based 00:23:02.049 --> 00:23:03.910 on the new evidence, there was reasonable doubt 00:23:03.910 --> 00:23:06.240 that he was Ivan the Terrible. And we should 00:23:06.240 --> 00:23:08.319 talk about what that evidence was. The archives 00:23:08.319 --> 00:23:10.640 detailed exactly what this new evidence was. 00:23:11.220 --> 00:23:13.460 Investigators found the written, sworn statements 00:23:13.460 --> 00:23:17.380 of 37 former guards from Treblinka. 37? 37 men 00:23:17.380 --> 00:23:19.039 who had actually been there, who had worked in 00:23:19.039 --> 00:23:22.339 the camp alongside the monster. And these statements 00:23:22.339 --> 00:23:25.480 identified Ivan the Terrible, not as John Demjohnczyk, 00:23:25.740 --> 00:23:27.880 but as a completely different man named Ivan 00:23:27.880 --> 00:23:31.779 Marchenko. 37 separate statements. The sheer 00:23:31.779 --> 00:23:34.140 weight of that archival discovery is staggering. 00:23:34.559 --> 00:23:37.359 And we have to consider the nature of these statements 00:23:37.359 --> 00:23:40.960 to understand why the Israeli Supreme Court acted. 00:23:41.220 --> 00:23:42.980 Right, because why couldn't they just put these 00:23:42.980 --> 00:23:45.859 37 guys on the stand? Well, the records point 00:23:45.859 --> 00:23:48.859 out that many of these 37 former guards had either 00:23:48.859 --> 00:23:51.099 been executed by the Soviet Union shortly after 00:23:51.099 --> 00:23:53.960 giving these testimonies in the 1940s and 50s, 00:23:53.980 --> 00:23:56.680 or they had naturally died of old age by the 00:23:56.680 --> 00:23:58.859 time the 1990s rolled around. So they're gone. 00:23:59.220 --> 00:24:01.799 Yes. This meant they couldn't be brought into 00:24:01.799 --> 00:24:04.849 an Israeli courtroom. put on the stand, and cross 00:24:04.849 --> 00:24:07.390 -examined by the prosecution. But the paper remains. 00:24:07.650 --> 00:24:10.690 But in a legal sense, the volume and the consistency 00:24:10.690 --> 00:24:13.589 of their statements, taken decades before Dimjon 00:24:13.589 --> 00:24:16.569 Juk was ever a suspect, created an insurmountable 00:24:16.569 --> 00:24:18.690 wall of reasonable doubt. And it wasn't just 00:24:18.690 --> 00:24:21.509 that they named a guy called Marcenko. The physical 00:24:21.509 --> 00:24:24.390 descriptions in these Soviet documents were drastically 00:24:24.390 --> 00:24:26.529 different from John Dimjonjic. I was looking 00:24:26.529 --> 00:24:28.410 at the translated physical profiles. They don't 00:24:28.410 --> 00:24:31.430 match up. Not at all. One Soviet document described 00:24:31.430 --> 00:24:34.130 Ivan the Terrible Ivan Marchenko as having brown 00:24:34.130 --> 00:24:37.390 hair, hazel eyes, a square face, and a large 00:24:37.390 --> 00:24:40.109 prominent scar running down his neck. A mixed 00:24:40.109 --> 00:24:42.789 scar. A prominent one. Now let's look at the 00:24:42.789 --> 00:24:45.579 physical reality of John Dimjonjic. The records 00:24:45.579 --> 00:24:48.500 state he was dark blonde, he had gray eyes, a 00:24:48.500 --> 00:24:51.720 round face, and crucially, he lacked that prominent 00:24:51.720 --> 00:24:54.700 defining scar on his neck. They were physically 00:24:54.700 --> 00:24:59.440 completely different men. especially a defining 00:24:59.440 --> 00:25:02.359 permanent feature like a large neck scar, is 00:25:02.359 --> 00:25:04.859 exactly the kind of hard documentary evidence 00:25:04.859 --> 00:25:07.539 that shatters an eyewitness identification made 00:25:07.539 --> 00:25:10.440 40 years after the fact. You can't argue with 00:25:10.440 --> 00:25:13.079 a missing scar. The guards who gave those statements 00:25:13.079 --> 00:25:15.440 to the Soviet interrogators in the 1940s had 00:25:15.440 --> 00:25:17.519 absolutely no reason to invent a random scar 00:25:17.519 --> 00:25:19.859 or lie about his eye color. They were simply 00:25:19.859 --> 00:25:21.700 describing the man they worked with every day. 00:25:21.740 --> 00:25:23.480 They were just stating facts to save their own 00:25:23.480 --> 00:25:26.599 skin. Precisely. When the Israeli Supreme Court 00:25:26.599 --> 00:25:28.819 justices looked at this, they recognized the 00:25:28.819 --> 00:25:31.279 tragedy of the situation. They had the survivors' 00:25:31.839 --> 00:25:33.940 raw emotional certainty on one side of the scale 00:25:33.940 --> 00:25:37.539 and the cold, unyielding archival reality of 00:25:37.539 --> 00:25:40.900 37 separate confessions describing a physiologically 00:25:40.900 --> 00:25:43.519 different man on the other. And the law is clear. 00:25:43.819 --> 00:25:46.660 In a court of law, the archival evidence must 00:25:46.660 --> 00:25:49.539 introduce reasonable doubt. So this incredibly 00:25:49.539 --> 00:25:52.200 intense trial, the emotional climax of a survivor 00:25:52.200 --> 00:25:55.480 confronting the supposed monster, the death sentence, 00:25:56.240 --> 00:25:59.420 it was all a devastating case of mistaken identity. 00:25:59.579 --> 00:26:02.200 A complete misfire. John Demjanjic, the auto 00:26:02.200 --> 00:26:04.359 worker from Cleveland, was not Ivan the Terrible 00:26:04.359 --> 00:26:07.059 of Treblinka. But that realization immediately 00:26:07.059 --> 00:26:08.859 raises a massive question for you listening. 00:26:09.220 --> 00:26:11.940 If Demjanjic wasn't Ivan, what actually happened 00:26:11.940 --> 00:26:14.559 to the real Ivan? Where does Marchenko go? Right. 00:26:14.640 --> 00:26:16.799 What happened to Ivan Marchenko, the man who 00:26:16.799 --> 00:26:18.660 sliced off years, the man who ran the gas chamber 00:26:18.660 --> 00:26:21.259 engines? While an innocent man, at least innocent 00:26:21.259 --> 00:26:23.000 of the specific crime, was sitting in a cell 00:26:23.000 --> 00:26:25.640 on death row in Israel, the real monster had 00:26:25.640 --> 00:26:28.279 an entirely different story. And the historical 00:26:28.279 --> 00:26:31.039 archives actually trace the trail of Ivan Marchenko. 00:26:31.259 --> 00:26:33.980 They do. And tracing that trail relies heavily 00:26:33.980 --> 00:26:36.599 on the testimony of another guard found in those 00:26:36.599 --> 00:26:40.160 newly opened Soviet archives, a man named Nikolai 00:26:40.160 --> 00:26:42.880 Yagorovich Shelyaev. Shaleyev is a crucial figure 00:26:42.880 --> 00:26:45.240 here. Yes, Shaleyev was a Russian who actually 00:26:45.240 --> 00:26:48.180 worked directly alongside Marchenko. He was also 00:26:48.180 --> 00:26:51.779 a gas chamber operator at Treblinka. And Shaleyev's 00:26:51.779 --> 00:26:54.579 testimony maps out Marchenko's movements as the 00:26:54.579 --> 00:26:57.420 Nazi empire began to collapse in on itself. As 00:26:57.420 --> 00:27:00.119 the tide turned. According to Shaleyev, in July 00:27:00.119 --> 00:27:03.180 1943, he and Marchenko, along with two Germans 00:27:03.180 --> 00:27:05.759 and two Jewish inmates, were transferred away 00:27:05.759 --> 00:27:08.750 from Treblinka and sent to Trieste, Italy. moving 00:27:08.750 --> 00:27:11.809 them away from the front lines. In Trieste, Marchenko's 00:27:11.809 --> 00:27:14.549 duties shifted. The extermination camp was behind 00:27:14.549 --> 00:27:17.069 him, and he was now tasked with guarding German 00:27:17.069 --> 00:27:20.690 warehouses and a local prison. But then in 1944, 00:27:20.690 --> 00:27:23.049 as the Allied forces were approaching Italy and 00:27:23.049 --> 00:27:25.269 the writing was clearly on the wall for the Nazis, 00:27:25.829 --> 00:27:27.970 Marchenko makes his move. And this is where the 00:27:27.970 --> 00:27:30.130 historical narrative takes a cinematic, almost 00:27:30.130 --> 00:27:32.410 surreal turn. It's like a movie. The documents 00:27:32.410 --> 00:27:35.710 state that in 1944, Marchenko and a driver named 00:27:35.710 --> 00:27:38.839 Gregory, quote, fled in an armored car to the 00:27:38.839 --> 00:27:41.900 partisans in Yugoslavia. It is genuinely mind 00:27:41.900 --> 00:27:43.559 -blowing. Think about the trajectory of this 00:27:43.559 --> 00:27:45.859 man's life. It's a series of violent reinventions. 00:27:45.960 --> 00:27:48.859 He goes from being a Soviet prisoner of war to 00:27:48.859 --> 00:27:51.299 operating gas chambers at an extermination camp 00:27:51.299 --> 00:27:56.160 for the SS to guarding warehouses in Italy to... 00:27:55.869 --> 00:27:58.950 suddenly stealing an armored car and fleeing 00:27:58.950 --> 00:28:01.849 to join the anti -fascist Yugoslav partisans. 00:28:01.970 --> 00:28:04.529 Talk about switching sides to survive. That's 00:28:04.529 --> 00:28:07.490 not even the end of it. The final confirmed sighting 00:28:07.490 --> 00:28:10.210 of the real Ivan the Terrible, according to Shalayev's 00:28:10.210 --> 00:28:13.089 testimony, happened in the spring of 1945 in 00:28:13.089 --> 00:28:15.900 a city called Fiume. And what was he doing? Shalev 00:28:15.900 --> 00:28:17.720 says he ran into Marchenko, who was coming out 00:28:17.720 --> 00:28:20.099 of a brothel. Marchenko told him right then and 00:28:20.099 --> 00:28:22.059 there that he had officially joined the Yugoslav 00:28:22.059 --> 00:28:24.240 Partisans. Just a casual conversation on the 00:28:24.240 --> 00:28:26.180 street. After that moment outside the brothel 00:28:26.180 --> 00:28:29.420 in 1945, Ivan Marchenko vanishes completely into 00:28:29.420 --> 00:28:32.410 history. The records do note that Soviet authorities 00:28:32.410 --> 00:28:34.430 were actively hunting for him until at least 00:28:34.430 --> 00:28:37.329 1962, but they never caught him. It highlights 00:28:37.329 --> 00:28:39.869 the deeply frustrating, messy reality of history, 00:28:40.289 --> 00:28:42.509 and particularly the history of post -war Europe. 00:28:42.710 --> 00:28:45.549 It's just not neat. Not at all. As a society, 00:28:45.730 --> 00:28:48.509 we want a neat narrative where evil is unequivocally 00:28:48.509 --> 00:28:51.569 punished and the bad guy is caught. But the truth 00:28:51.569 --> 00:28:57.000 is... Europe in 1945 was a chaotic, fractured, 00:28:57.220 --> 00:28:59.539 apocalyptic landscape. It was totally destroyed. 00:28:59.799 --> 00:29:02.519 It was filled with millions of displaced persons, 00:29:03.119 --> 00:29:05.779 shifting borders, and desperate people constantly 00:29:05.779 --> 00:29:08.279 reinventing themselves to survive. Sometimes 00:29:08.279 --> 00:29:11.319 the absolute worst villains simply slipped through 00:29:11.319 --> 00:29:13.400 the cracks. They just melted into the crowd. 00:29:13.480 --> 00:29:15.819 They used the chaos of the post -war displacement 00:29:15.819 --> 00:29:18.680 as a shield, blending into partisan groups or 00:29:18.680 --> 00:29:20.940 refugee populations to completely erase their 00:29:20.940 --> 00:29:23.799 pasts. Marchenko leveraged the fog of war to 00:29:23.799 --> 00:29:26.059 disappear, leaving nothing but a ghost behind. 00:29:26.240 --> 00:29:28.420 A ghost that eventually haunted John Demjanjic 00:29:28.420 --> 00:29:31.279 all the way to death row. But as we pivot back 00:29:31.279 --> 00:29:34.539 to Demjanjic's story, there is a deeply disturbing 00:29:34.539 --> 00:29:37.059 element to this mistaken identity that we have 00:29:37.059 --> 00:29:39.680 to address. The cover -up. Yes. Because you might 00:29:39.680 --> 00:29:41.980 be thinking to yourself, well, the Soviet archives 00:29:41.980 --> 00:29:45.079 were closed. The US and Israel simply didn't 00:29:45.079 --> 00:29:48.000 know about Ivan Marchenko until the 1990s when 00:29:48.000 --> 00:29:50.500 the wall fell. It was an honest mistake. I would 00:29:50.500 --> 00:29:52.920 hope it was an honest mistake. But the historical 00:29:52.920 --> 00:29:56.539 investigations reveal a scandalous, dark twist. 00:29:57.299 --> 00:29:59.759 Some of that exculpatory evidence, the evidence 00:29:59.759 --> 00:30:02.460 clearing Demjanjuk and pointing to Marchenko, 00:30:02.779 --> 00:30:05.450 had actually been known years earlier. before 00:30:05.450 --> 00:30:07.809 the trial. And it was deliberately withheld from 00:30:07.809 --> 00:30:09.710 the Israelis by the United States government, 00:30:10.230 --> 00:30:13.230 specifically by the Department of Justice's Office 00:30:13.230 --> 00:30:16.430 of Special Investigations or the OSI, which was 00:30:16.430 --> 00:30:19.309 the very office that had urged Israel to charge 00:30:19.309 --> 00:30:21.190 him with being Ivan the Terrible in the first 00:30:21.190 --> 00:30:23.529 place. This is where the legal missteps evolve 00:30:23.529 --> 00:30:25.650 into something much darker and more systemic. 00:30:26.089 --> 00:30:28.829 The OSI was established with a noble mandate 00:30:28.829 --> 00:30:31.849 to hunt down Nazi war criminals who were hiding 00:30:31.849 --> 00:30:34.289 in the United States. A completely justified 00:30:34.289 --> 00:30:38.049 mission. Absolutely. But in the Demjenjuk case, 00:30:38.890 --> 00:30:41.829 the zeal to secure a high -profile conviction 00:30:41.829 --> 00:30:44.750 superseded the fundamental tenets of justice. 00:30:45.589 --> 00:30:48.430 Withholding exculpatory evidence, which is evidence 00:30:48.430 --> 00:30:50.869 that points to a defendant's innocence, is one 00:30:50.869 --> 00:30:53.309 of the most severe ethical breaches a prosecutor 00:30:53.309 --> 00:30:55.980 can commit. It's rigging the game. It is. The 00:30:55.980 --> 00:30:58.319 condemnation of the OSI's actions wasn't just 00:30:58.319 --> 00:31:00.960 a quiet behind closed doors reprimand either. 00:31:01.380 --> 00:31:04.599 The records provide direct scorching quotes from 00:31:04.599 --> 00:31:07.299 Judge Gilbert S. Merritt Jr., who was a judge 00:31:07.299 --> 00:31:09.140 on the United States Court of Appeals for the 00:31:09.140 --> 00:31:11.279 Sixth Circuit. And judges do not speak lightly 00:31:11.279 --> 00:31:13.460 about other branches of the justice system. No, 00:31:13.460 --> 00:31:15.180 they don't. I want to read his exact language 00:31:15.180 --> 00:31:17.059 because it is incredibly strong for a federal 00:31:17.059 --> 00:31:20.019 judge. Judge Merritt said of the OSI's handling 00:31:20.019 --> 00:31:23.819 of the case. Today we know that they, the OSI, 00:31:23.920 --> 00:31:26.380 the prosecution in the case, and the State Department 00:31:26.380 --> 00:31:28.740 lied through their teeth. Lied through their 00:31:28.740 --> 00:31:31.700 teeth. He went on. Even then they knew without 00:31:31.700 --> 00:31:34.619 a doubt that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, 00:31:34.799 --> 00:31:37.680 but they hid the information from us. He went 00:31:37.680 --> 00:31:39.480 on to say that if he had known the truth, the 00:31:39.480 --> 00:31:41.400 court never would have ruled in favor of his 00:31:41.400 --> 00:31:43.380 extradition to Israel in the first place. So 00:31:43.380 --> 00:31:45.519 a whole trial shouldn't have happened. But the 00:31:45.519 --> 00:31:47.920 judge didn't stop there. He compared the trial 00:31:47.920 --> 00:31:52.319 to a witch hunt. He explicitly said, In retrospect, 00:31:52.539 --> 00:31:55.160 it reminds me of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts 00:31:55.160 --> 00:31:58.539 300 years ago. The prosecution, counseled by 00:31:58.539 --> 00:32:01.400 the OSI, presented documents and witnesses whose 00:32:01.400 --> 00:32:04.400 testimony was based on emotions and hysteria, 00:32:04.539 --> 00:32:07.269 but not hard evidence. That's a massive indictment 00:32:07.269 --> 00:32:09.950 of the process. He finished by saying, this instance 00:32:09.950 --> 00:32:12.730 is a prime example of how justice can be distorted. 00:32:12.890 --> 00:32:15.789 That is an astonishing, unprecedented rebuke 00:32:15.789 --> 00:32:18.009 from a federal appellate judge. And I think it 00:32:18.009 --> 00:32:20.589 is crucial to analyze the specific words he uses. 00:32:21.170 --> 00:32:23.930 Emotions and hysteria. Witch hunt. He is pointing 00:32:23.930 --> 00:32:26.150 directly to the phenomenon we discussed earlier 00:32:26.150 --> 00:32:28.230 regarding the trial in Israel. The reliance on 00:32:28.230 --> 00:32:32.509 the survivor's pain. The OSI allowed the profound 00:32:33.380 --> 00:32:35.839 justifiable emotional pain of the survivors. 00:32:36.539 --> 00:32:40.119 The tears, the anger, the visceral trauma broadcast 00:32:40.119 --> 00:32:43.000 from the courtroom to act as a substitute for 00:32:43.000 --> 00:32:45.880 hard, objective forensic evidence. They let the 00:32:45.880 --> 00:32:48.339 emotion drive the car. They knew the paper trail 00:32:48.339 --> 00:32:51.220 pointed to a man with a giant neck scar. But 00:32:51.220 --> 00:32:53.839 they leaned into the emotional narrative because 00:32:53.839 --> 00:32:56.359 it was powerful. It resonated with the public. 00:32:56.650 --> 00:32:59.009 and it's a cure to win. So what does this all 00:32:59.009 --> 00:33:01.509 mean for us listening today? I want to be very 00:33:01.509 --> 00:33:03.849 clear with our audience. We are not taking a 00:33:03.849 --> 00:33:06.009 political stance here on the US Justice Department. 00:33:06.190 --> 00:33:08.309 No, we are looking at the historical legal record. 00:33:08.480 --> 00:33:10.720 We are strictly reporting the federal judge's 00:33:10.720 --> 00:33:12.720 scathing assessment of the government's handling 00:33:12.720 --> 00:33:14.759 of the evidence as detailed in the historical 00:33:14.759 --> 00:33:17.359 record. We aren't endorsing a viewpoint, just 00:33:17.359 --> 00:33:20.200 conveying the facts of the ruling. But the implications 00:33:20.200 --> 00:33:22.259 of a federal judge saying the Justice Department 00:33:22.259 --> 00:33:24.759 lied through their teeth in a death penalty case 00:33:24.759 --> 00:33:27.680 are absolutely massive. This raises an important 00:33:27.680 --> 00:33:30.259 question, an incredibly difficult philosophical 00:33:30.259 --> 00:33:33.440 and legal question, about the danger of righteous 00:33:33.440 --> 00:33:35.900 crusades. It's a slippery slope. The Holocaust 00:33:35.900 --> 00:33:39.220 is universally understood as the ultimate historical 00:33:39.220 --> 00:33:42.720 evil. The desire to track down and punish those 00:33:42.720 --> 00:33:46.859 responsible is morally necessary. However, when 00:33:46.859 --> 00:33:49.319 the desire to punish historical evil overrides 00:33:49.319 --> 00:33:52.640 the strict adherence to legal truth, when prosecutors 00:33:52.640 --> 00:33:55.019 decide internally that getting a bad guy is more 00:33:55.019 --> 00:33:57.119 important than ensuring they have the right guy, 00:33:58.180 --> 00:33:59.980 the justice system itself becomes corrupted. 00:34:00.420 --> 00:34:02.359 It undermines the whole point of a trial. Judge 00:34:02.359 --> 00:34:04.180 Merritt is warning us that even in the pursuit 00:34:04.180 --> 00:34:06.960 of the most righteous cause imaginable, abandoning 00:34:06.960 --> 00:34:09.440 due process turns a trial into a Salem witch 00:34:09.440 --> 00:34:12.099 hunt. The integrity of the law has to remain 00:34:12.099 --> 00:34:15.000 absolute, regardless of how heinous the accused 00:34:15.000 --> 00:34:17.579 crimes are, or else the system fails everyone. 00:34:17.760 --> 00:34:19.920 It's a sobering thought. The system broke down 00:34:19.920 --> 00:34:21.920 because it wanted justice so badly it was willing 00:34:21.920 --> 00:34:23.900 to manufacture it by omitting the truth. And 00:34:23.900 --> 00:34:26.219 that almost cost a man his life. But for John 00:34:26.219 --> 00:34:29.119 Demjanjic, surviving the hangman's noose in Israel, 00:34:29.199 --> 00:34:31.599 returning to the U .S., and exposing this government 00:34:31.599 --> 00:34:33.920 cover -up wasn't the end of his legal saga. Not 00:34:33.920 --> 00:34:37.610 even close. Not by long shot? Because his story 00:34:37.610 --> 00:34:40.510 has a final chapter that is just as legally complex 00:34:40.510 --> 00:34:42.989 and cyclical as the rest of it. He gets his U 00:34:42.989 --> 00:34:46.010 .S. citizenship back for a time, but the investigations 00:34:46.010 --> 00:34:49.110 into his past do not stop. They keep digging. 00:34:49.289 --> 00:34:51.530 Because while the newly opened archives proved 00:34:51.530 --> 00:34:54.550 he wasn't Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka, investigators 00:34:54.550 --> 00:34:56.610 started looking closely at the documents to figure 00:34:56.610 --> 00:34:59.070 out where he actually was during the war. And 00:34:59.070 --> 00:35:01.510 this leads to his subsequent final extradition, 00:35:01.710 --> 00:35:04.769 this time to Germany. The focus of the investigation 00:35:04.769 --> 00:35:07.269 shifts entirely away from Treblinka and moves 00:35:07.269 --> 00:35:09.510 to a completely different extermination camp. 00:35:10.050 --> 00:35:12.650 Sobobor. Right. The new charge brought by German 00:35:12.650 --> 00:35:15.150 prosecutors isn't that he was the sadistic Ivan 00:35:15.150 --> 00:35:17.630 the Terrible who cut off ears. No. The scale 00:35:17.630 --> 00:35:20.150 of the accusation changes. The new charge is 00:35:20.150 --> 00:35:22.909 that he served as a low -level guard named Ivan 00:35:22.909 --> 00:35:25.570 Demjanjuk at the Sobobor extermination camp. 00:35:25.889 --> 00:35:28.829 And the key piece of evidence this time was a 00:35:28.829 --> 00:35:33.090 single document. an identification card. Specifically, 00:35:33.829 --> 00:35:37.250 a Tronecky identification card that was somewhat 00:35:37.250 --> 00:35:39.929 ironically given the previous history supplied 00:35:39.929 --> 00:35:43.250 by the OSI to the German prosecutors. I think 00:35:43.250 --> 00:35:45.230 we need to break down what this card actually 00:35:45.230 --> 00:35:48.389 is because the entire German trial hinged on 00:35:48.389 --> 00:35:50.849 it. A Tronecki card was essentially a personnel 00:35:50.849 --> 00:35:54.309 ID issued by the SS to the auxiliary guards trained 00:35:54.309 --> 00:35:56.449 at the Tronecki facility we mentioned earlier. 00:35:56.710 --> 00:35:59.750 Like a military ID badge. Very similar. It typically 00:35:59.750 --> 00:36:02.210 included a photograph of the guard, their name, 00:36:02.429 --> 00:36:04.949 their service number, and various stamps detailing 00:36:04.949 --> 00:36:07.789 their deployments. In this case, the card allegedly 00:36:07.789 --> 00:36:11.150 placed John Dimjandjuk at Sobibor. It was the 00:36:11.150 --> 00:36:14.030 absolute documentary anchor for the German prosecution's 00:36:14.030 --> 00:36:16.010 case. So without this card, they have nothing. 00:36:16.130 --> 00:36:17.909 Without it, they had no physical evidence tying 00:36:17.909 --> 00:36:20.550 him to the camp. But Demjanjuk's defense was 00:36:20.550 --> 00:36:22.670 consistent, and they fought this card fiercely. 00:36:22.929 --> 00:36:25.329 He claimed he was not the Ivan Demjanjuk, who 00:36:25.329 --> 00:36:28.150 was a guard at Sobibor. He argued that the Troniki 00:36:28.150 --> 00:36:30.710 ID card was a highly sophisticated forgery created 00:36:30.710 --> 00:36:33.730 by the Soviet KGB. Which sounds like a wild conspiracy 00:36:33.730 --> 00:36:36.070 theory at first glance. It does sound like a 00:36:36.070 --> 00:36:38.610 movie plot, but to understand why that was a 00:36:38.610 --> 00:36:40.570 plausible defense, you have to look at the history 00:36:40.570 --> 00:36:43.929 of the KGB during the Cold War. Yes. The Soviet 00:36:43.929 --> 00:36:46.610 intelligence services had a known documented 00:36:46.610 --> 00:36:50.329 program of forging World War Two documents specifically 00:36:50.329 --> 00:36:53.369 to frame and discredit anti -communist emigres 00:36:53.369 --> 00:36:55.949 living in the West. It was a standard tactic 00:36:55.949 --> 00:36:59.010 to disrupt expatriate communities. Since Demjan 00:36:59.010 --> 00:37:01.610 Juk was a Ukrainian emigre living in America, 00:37:01.949 --> 00:37:05.010 his defense argued he was a target of this KGB 00:37:05.010 --> 00:37:07.889 forgery program. The prosecution, of course, 00:37:08.030 --> 00:37:10.170 brought in forensic experts to test the ink, 00:37:10.369 --> 00:37:13.130 the paper, and the stamps, arguing it was entirely 00:37:13.130 --> 00:37:15.889 authentic. It became a battle of forensic document 00:37:15.889 --> 00:37:18.929 analysis. Once again, it comes down to identity, 00:37:19.170 --> 00:37:21.570 fated documents, and the labyrinth of Soviet 00:37:21.570 --> 00:37:24.369 and KGB archives. And he fought this in the German 00:37:24.369 --> 00:37:27.010 courts for years. But ultimately, the legal outcome 00:37:27.010 --> 00:37:30.679 arrived. On May 12, 2011, a German criminal court 00:37:30.679 --> 00:37:33.019 convicted him of being an accessory to the murder 00:37:33.019 --> 00:37:36.280 of over 28 ,000 Jews based on his service as 00:37:36.280 --> 00:37:38.679 a guard at Sobibor. He was convicted. He was 00:37:38.679 --> 00:37:41.519 convicted, but it was pending appeal. And the 00:37:41.519 --> 00:37:44.159 appeal process in the German legal system has 00:37:44.159 --> 00:37:47.699 a very specific, strict procedural rule. regarding 00:37:47.699 --> 00:37:49.920 the presumption of innocence. And this is where 00:37:49.920 --> 00:37:53.340 the story gets its final bizarre twist. John 00:37:53.340 --> 00:37:56.179 Dumjoniuk was in his 90s by this point. His health 00:37:56.179 --> 00:37:58.920 was failing rapidly. He was living in a nursing 00:37:58.920 --> 00:38:01.260 home in Germany while his lawyers were diligently 00:38:01.260 --> 00:38:03.579 working on the appeal of the Sobibor conviction. 00:38:03.659 --> 00:38:05.659 He was running out of time. And in March 2012, 00:38:05.820 --> 00:38:08.039 at the age of 91, before the German Appellate 00:38:08.039 --> 00:38:10.780 Court could ever hear his case, John Dumjoniuk 00:38:10.780 --> 00:38:13.099 died. And because of that quirk of German law 00:38:13.099 --> 00:38:16.420 you alluded to, the historical record is explicitly 00:38:16.420 --> 00:38:18.780 clear on what happened next. It erases it. Because 00:38:18.780 --> 00:38:20.940 he died before the appeal was fully heard and 00:38:20.940 --> 00:38:23.179 exhausted, his conviction never entered into 00:38:23.179 --> 00:38:25.760 force. Under German law, the Munich District 00:38:25.760 --> 00:38:28.760 Court legally invalidated the interim conviction. 00:38:29.659 --> 00:38:31.500 They cleared his criminal record completely, 00:38:32.179 --> 00:38:34.500 and they legally declared him presumed innocent. 00:38:34.800 --> 00:38:38.179 It is the ultimate display of the cyclical, almost 00:38:38.179 --> 00:38:41.639 absurd nature of this entire decades -long saga. 00:38:41.900 --> 00:38:44.300 It begins with an absolute lack of due process 00:38:44.300 --> 00:38:46.739 in the chaotic, murderous environment of a war 00:38:46.739 --> 00:38:49.360 zone. Then it moves through the profound emotional 00:38:49.360 --> 00:38:52.539 turbulence of a mistaken identity trial in Israel. 00:38:52.639 --> 00:38:55.739 It exposes deep systemic corruption within the 00:38:55.739 --> 00:38:58.559 U .S. investigative process regarding withheld 00:38:58.559 --> 00:39:01.460 evidence. And finally, it ends in Germany, the 00:39:01.460 --> 00:39:03.440 very nation that orchestrated the Holocaust, 00:39:04.099 --> 00:39:06.349 where a strict unbending adherence to modern 00:39:06.349 --> 00:39:09.230 legal procedure forces history to leave John 00:39:09.230 --> 00:39:11.989 Demjanjic in a perpetual state of legal ambiguity. 00:39:12.309 --> 00:39:15.269 The law, by its own rigid rules, erases the conviction. 00:39:15.329 --> 00:39:17.670 Exactly. It is just mind -blowing when you zoom 00:39:17.670 --> 00:39:19.989 out and look at the whole timeline, from the 00:39:19.989 --> 00:39:22.510 agonizing, bloody reality of Treblinka's gas 00:39:22.510 --> 00:39:25.469 chamber engines, to an incredibly emotional, 00:39:25.650 --> 00:39:28.570 tear -filled courtroom in Jerusalem, then to 00:39:28.570 --> 00:39:31.409 the shock of opening cold Soviet archives, to 00:39:31.409 --> 00:39:33.869 a federal judge's blistering anger over cover 00:39:33.869 --> 00:39:36.469 up all the way to a quiet German nursing home 00:39:36.469 --> 00:39:39.369 where a 91 year old man passes away wiping the 00:39:39.369 --> 00:39:42.130 legal slate completely clean. It spans the entire 00:39:42.130 --> 00:39:44.489 spectrum of human failure and legal process. 00:39:44.789 --> 00:39:47.670 It really does. So I have to ask you the listener 00:39:47.670 --> 00:39:51.289 as we wrap up this deep dive. How does this story 00:39:51.289 --> 00:39:53.710 change your understanding of how we write history 00:39:53.710 --> 00:39:56.869 and how we administer justice? When we are hunting 00:39:56.869 --> 00:39:59.610 monsters from our darkest past does finding a 00:39:59.610 --> 00:40:01.849 culprit matter more than finding the right culprit? 00:40:02.420 --> 00:40:04.659 We've seen exactly what happens when the system 00:40:04.659 --> 00:40:07.239 tries to cut corners to satisfy an overwhelming 00:40:07.239 --> 00:40:09.539 emotional need for closure. And I want to leave 00:40:09.539 --> 00:40:11.500 you with one final lingering thought that sits 00:40:11.500 --> 00:40:13.099 at the very heart of everything we've discussed 00:40:13.099 --> 00:40:17.599 today. Go ahead. If John Demianjoke died legally 00:40:17.599 --> 00:40:20.659 presumed innocent due to a technicality of German 00:40:20.659 --> 00:40:24.940 law, and if the real Ivan the Terrible Ivan Marchenko 00:40:24.940 --> 00:40:27.420 vanished out of a brothel and into the Yugoslavian 00:40:27.420 --> 00:40:30.519 partisans in 1945, never to be seen again. It 00:40:30.519 --> 00:40:32.519 means that Ivan the Terrible, one of the most 00:40:32.519 --> 00:40:34.980 documented, recognized, and feared monsters of 00:40:34.980 --> 00:40:37.400 the entire Holocaust, ultimately escaped the 00:40:37.400 --> 00:40:39.800 justice of the courts entirely. Neither man was 00:40:39.800 --> 00:40:42.460 punished for it. Neither man was definitively 00:40:42.460 --> 00:40:45.099 punished by the legal system for the crimes of 00:40:45.099 --> 00:40:47.679 Ivan the Terrible. What does it say about human 00:40:47.679 --> 00:40:50.260 history that our deepest, most profound desire 00:40:50.260 --> 00:40:53.099 for absolute justice is so often thwarted by 00:40:53.099 --> 00:40:56.139 the messy, chaotic reality of time, the fragility 00:40:56.139 --> 00:40:58.719 of memory, and a simple loss of missing paperwork? 00:40:59.420 --> 00:41:01.760 We desperately want the scales to balance, but 00:41:01.760 --> 00:41:04.619 history often refuses to cooperate. That is a 00:41:04.619 --> 00:41:06.760 deeply haunting thought to leave on. The ghost 00:41:06.760 --> 00:41:09.510 of Treblinka remains a ghost. Thank you so much 00:41:09.510 --> 00:41:11.889 for joining us on this incredibly complex, heavy 00:41:11.889 --> 00:41:14.349 deep dive today. Keep questioning the historical 00:41:14.349 --> 00:41:16.369 narrative you encounter, keep looking for the 00:41:16.369 --> 00:41:18.110 truth behind the archives, and we'll see you 00:41:18.110 --> 00:41:18.550 next time.