Apple podcast episode title, The Ghost of Treblinka,
Mistaken Identity, War Crimes, and the Search
for Ivan the Terrible. In this deep dive, we
explore one of the most complex, dramatic, and
haunting legal sagas in history. Who was Ivan
the Terrible, the notoriously cruel guard at
the Treblinka extermination camp? We examine
the shocking courtroom trials of John Dimchenjuk,
a suburban Cleveland auto worker accused of unimaginable
war crimes, and unpack the chaotic collision
of eyewitness memory, unearthed Soviet archives,
and international law. We'll also look at a controversial
U .S. Justice Department cover -up that a federal
judge compared to the Salem witch trials. Whether
you are a history buff or fascinated by the intricate
twists of the justice system, this deep dive
offers a thorough, impartial look at the quest
for truth amidst the darkest chapters of WWI.
Ivan the Terrible, Treblinka Guard, John Dimjunge,
Holocaust History, WWII War Crimes Trial, Office
of Special Investigations, Nazi Concentration
Camp, Mistaken Identity, Soviet Archives. Welcome
to the Deep Dive. I'm really glad you are joining
us today because the historical saga we have
in front of us is, and I really do not use this
word lightly, it's staggering. Staggering is
definitely the right word for this one. Yeah.
We are going to be unpacking this startling,
just... almost unbelievable premise. I want you
to imagine, uh... A retired suburban auto worker
living in Cleveland, Ohio. Why? Just a guy who
worked on a Ford assembly line. He raised a family,
went to church, and lived what appeared to be
just a completely ordinary, quiet American life.
The American dream, basically. Exactly. So how
does a man like that end up sitting in a courtroom
in Israel facing the death penalty and being
accused of being one of the most sadistic, terrifying
figures of the entire Holocaust? It's a huge
leap. It is. And our mission today is to sift
through the fog of war and really decades of
tangled evidence to understand the identity,
the crimes and the sprawling legal battles surrounding
a Treblinka guard known to history only as Ivan
the Terrible. Which is just a chilling moniker.
Very. We are going to look at the fragility of
human memory, the unbelievable complexities of
international law, and we're going to try to
make sense of a historical mystery that literally
spanned continents. And? You know, it is a profound
historical mystery, but I think it is vital to
establish right from the start that the events
we are exploring today go far, far beyond the
guilt or innocence of a single man. Right, it's
much bigger than that. Exactly. This is really
a story about how the justice system itself grapples
with historical atrocities decades after the
fact. I mean... when the crimes are this absolute
and the scale of the horror is this incomprehensible,
how does the machinery of modern law handle the
decay of physical evidence? How does it handle
the shifting geopolitical borders of nations
and maybe most importantly, the deeply human,
deeply flawed nature of trauma and memory? That's
a huge part of this. It is. Over the course of
this deep dive, we're going to be exploring the
very limits of the legal process and what happens
when the righteous pursuit of justice collides
with the messy, often contradictory realities
of history. OK. Let's unpack this, because to
even begin to understand how an auto worker in
Ohio gets dragged into an international war crimes
tribunal, we really have to understand the place
where the nightmare started. We have to go back
to the source. We do. We need to go back in time
and look at the dark architecture of Treblinka
itself, because looking through the historical
encyclopedic accounts of the camp, what immediately
struck me was the management hierarchy. It's
not what people expect. Not at all. I think when
you or I hear the phrase extermination camp,
our minds naturally populate it with an army
of guards. You picture thousands of German soldiers
blanketing the perimeter, running the operations,
but the records upend that assumption entirely.
Treblinka was managed by a shockingly small group
of German SS overseers. We are talking about
only 20 to 25 men in total. That number always
stops people in their tracks. 20 to 25 men. Yeah.
The sheer industrialized scale of the atrocity
orchestrated by such a small nucleus of SS officers
is always one of the most chilling, difficult
aspects of Holocaust history to process. How
is it even physically possible? Well, it wasn't.
They absolutely could not run a facility of that
size. specifically designed for mechanized mass
murder with just two dozen men. So to make the
camp function, the SS designed and relied upon
a highly structured, deeply cynical hierarchy
of coercion and collaboration. They outsourced
it. Precisely. They effectively outsourced the
daily hands -on brutality. And the records map
out exactly who they outsourced it to. Beneath
those 25 SS officers was a larger force of about
80 to 120, what they called, Hewie guards. H
-I -W -I Hill Swillage. Right. And these were
men of various Soviet ethnicities, including
Russian and Ukrainian Red Army prisoners of war.
Yes, captured soldiers. And then beneath them,
at the very bottom of this horrific hierarchy,
there was a cadre of Jewish inmates known as
kapos. Prisoner functionaries. Yeah, who were
forced under threat of immediate death to assist
in the camp's operations. But what really fascinated
me in the research was the language dynamics
among all these different groups. It sounds like
Treblinka was operating in absolute linguistic
chaos. Linguistic chaos is the exact right way
to describe the environment. Yeah. And it was
a chaos that the SS intentionally managed and
exploited. How so? Well, the vast majority of
these Hiwi guards had been trained at a specific
SS facility called the Troniki concentration
camp. OK. because these men came from all over
the conquered Soviet territories, they faced
severe language barriers, they couldn't understand
the German SS, they often couldn't even understand
each other, depending on their regional dialects,
and they certainly could not understand the predominantly
Polish and Yiddish -speaking Jewish inmates.
So nobody can talk to anybody. Right. To bridge
this gap, A specific demographic became incredibly
valuable to the Nazi command structure, and those
were the Volkssteuch. I've seen that term pop
up a lot in World War II history. The ethnic
Germans, right? Precisely. The Volkssteuch were
ethnic Germans who had been living in Eastern
Europe, sometimes for generations. Okay. They
were highly valued in this horrific ecosystem
because they were polyglots. They were the linguistic
glue holding the camp's operations together.
Because they spoke German. They spoke German.
which allowed them to take orders directly from
the SS officers. But they also spoke Ukrainian,
Russian, and other Slavic languages. Which let
them command the hui guards. Exactly. And perhaps
most terrifyingly, many of them could understand
basic Yiddish or Polish. Giving them a direct
line to the inmates. Yes, a direct line of communication
and control over the Jewish inmates. Because
of this ability to bridge the language divide,
most of the squad commanders among the guards
were pulled from the Volkssteuch. And here is
where the seeds of our entire central mystery
are planted. The historical accounts point out
something so seemingly mundane, but so crucial
to everything that unfolds decades later in the
courtroom. The terminology. Yes. The German and
Austrian SS command, the local Polish population
outside the camp, and the Jewish inmates inside
the camp, they all tended to refer to these Hebe
guards universally as Ukrainians. Even though
they weren't all from Ukraine. Right, they didn't
use that label necessarily because every single
guard was actually from Ukraine, but because
the guards often spoke Ukrainian amongst themselves
as a common default language. It became a catch
-all term, a monolith. Exactly, and within that
massive monolithic group of guards labeled simply
as Ukrainians, there were names being thrown
around by the inmates. The name Ivan? was incredibly
common among Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians.
It's very common. In fact, I was reading the
testimony of a Treblinka survivor named Chil
Rashman. And he explicitly noted that he personally
knew of six different men named Ivan working
as guards at Treblinka at the exact same time.
Six. Six men, all named Ivan, all called Ukrainians.
If we pause and connect this to the bigger picture,
we really need to consider what this environment
meant for the victims and how it laid the groundwork
for future legal complexities. The SS deliberately
insulated themselves. By using Soviet POWs, men
who had often faced a stark choice between starving
to death in a frozen German POW camp or volunteering
for the Tronecky training program, the SS forced
the dirty, hands -on violence down the chain
of command. They kept their hands clean. relatively
speaking. Exactly. For the inmates experiencing
this, it created a blur of trauma. Imagine being
surrounded by men in various mismatched uniforms,
shouting in German, Ukrainian, Russian, and Yiddish.
It's overwhelming. When trauma of this magnitude
is inflicted day after day, the human brain simply
struggles to encode every specific granular detail
like a camera recording a video. You just go
into survival mode. Yes. Instead, the inmates
categorized their tormentors by the overarching
labels they heard shouted across the yard, the
Ukrainians, the Ivans. They're trying to track
where the danger is coming from? The sheer commonality
of the name Ivan, combined with this linguistic
blurring, created an environment where distinguishing
one guard from another 40 years later would become
a profound forensic challenge. But out of all
those guards, out of the half dozen men named
Ivan, there was one who did not blur into the
background. No, he did not. One who stood out
so starkly that his name became synonymous with
the camp itself. And that leads us perfectly
into his specific profile. We have to talk about
him. We have to talk about the man who actually
earned the nickname Ivan the Terrible. The historical
records detail this specific individual. He was
born in 1911, and the nickname, of course, was
an allusion to the infamous Russian czar Ivan
the Fourth. Right. But he wasn't given this name
by the inmates just because he was generally
cruel. It was because of his specific duties
in the camp and the unimaginable, personalized
way he carried them out. His primary function
at Treblinka was mechanical, but devastating.
He was tasked with operating the two tank engines
that fed the gas chambers. Just running the engines.
Running the engines. And I think it is important
to highlight a detail from the records. Those
specific motors had been installed and fine -tuned
by an SS Scharfuehrer named Eric Fuchs. That
detail really stopped me in my tracks when I
read it. The idea of an engineer meticulously
fine -tuning a tank engine. Not to make a vehicle
run smoother, but to maximize the deadly efficiency
of carbon monoxide exhaust for mass murder. It
is the absolute zenith of the mechanized, industrialized
death the Nazis perfected. It's horrifying. But
while Erich Fuchs was the mechanic who set it
up, Ivan was the operator. He was the man physically
running the engines, throwing the switches that
pumped the exhaust gas into the packed chamber.
He was the executioner. He was. Yet reading the
survivor accounts, it wasn't just the mechanical
killing that made him infamous. It was his intimate
personal cruelty outside the chambers. What's
fascinating here, and I use the word fascinating
in the darkest, most clinical sense, is how human
memory latches on to specific types of terror.
Yeah. The gas chambers represented a massive
system. It was an industrialized, almost faceless
bureaucracy of genocide. But what Ivan the Terrible
chose to do outside those chambers was intimate,
sadistic, and deeply personal. It was chaotic
violence. And that is what seared his face and
his name into the minds of the survivors. The
testimony of that survivor we mentioned earlier,
Chil Rochman, goes into agonizing detail about
this. He testified that Ivan was about 25 years
old at the time he worked in the camp. And Rochman
described a level of extreme specific cruelty
that is genuinely hard to even process. It really
is. He testified that Ivan used to stand by the
pathways and slice off the ears of passing workers
as they carried materials. Just as they walked
by. Yes. He would force these people to continue
working, carrying heavy loads as they bled profusely
from the sides of their heads. And then shortly
after, he would outright kill them. Unbelievable.
Rochman also testified that Ivan actively tortured
victims with pipes, a sword, and whips right
before they were forced into the gas chambers.
It is absolute unadulterated sadism. He wasn't
just following orders to run an engine. He was
actively reveling in the infliction of physical
pain. He brought a sword to an extermination
camp. He used a sword. He used whips. He used
heavy iron pipes. This wasn't the distant disconnected
push of a button from a control room, this required
physical exertion to destroy human beings before
they were ultimately murdered. It's so visceral.
And returning to the concept of memory encoding,
this is exactly why Ivan the Terrible became
legendary among these survivors. Amidst the mass
trauma of Treblinka, where thousands of people
were being systematically murdered daily in a
highly organized routine, Ivan's personal unpredictable
violence stood out. It broke the routine. It
was a localized, terrifying reign of terror within
an already unimaginable hell. And we know this
reputation wasn't something constructed decades
later during the trials. It was cemented very
early in survivor literature. By 1944, a cruel
guard named Ivan, who shared his violent duties
with another guard named Nicholas, was already
being written about. It was immediate. Specifically,
he was prominently mentioned in a 1945 translated
work by John Kuehl -Wernick called A Year in
Treblinka. So right after the war ends, the ghost
of this man is already haunting the surviving
Jewish community. His crimes are documented in
the very first drafts of Holocaust history. Exactly.
But the records are very clear on one frustrating
point. Ivan disappeared in 1945, and his fate
was entirely unknown. He simply vanished into
the ether. Like so many perpetrators in the chaotic,
completely destabilized aftermath of the war,
he slipped away. The Allies are advancing, the
camps are falling. The camps were either liberated
or dismantled by the retreating Nazis to hide
the evidence. He left behind no forwarding address,
no clear paper trail, nothing but the profoundly
traumatized memories of the few who survived
him. So I want you listening to Imagine Carrying
That Weight. Imagine holding on to those traumatic
memories for decades. Imagine having the image
of a man with a sword, a man who sliced off ears,
burned into your subconscious. You just never
forget it. You build a new life, maybe you move
to a new country, you try to move on, but you
are always waiting for justice. You are waiting
for the authorities to find the monster. Which
leads us to the explosive, headline -grabbing
trials of the 1970s and 80s, and to the accusation
that rocked the world. The breakthrough. Because
suddenly the justice system announced they had
finally found him and he wasn't hiding out in
a fortified bunker in South America or living
under an alias in a remote village. He was living
in suburban Cleveland. The shift from the absolute
horror of the Treblinka death camp to the quiet
manicured suburbs of Ohio is incredibly jarring.
And it introduces us to the central figure of
the legal saga. John Demjanjic. Right. John Demjanjic
was a retired autoworker of Ukrainian descent.
He had emigrated to the United States after the
war, settled in Cleveland, got a job working
for Ford Motor Company, raised a family, went
to his local church. By all outward appearances,
an entirely normal, unremarkable pursuit of the
American dream. But throughout the 1970s and
80s, an investigation by the U .S. government
gains momentum, and John Demjanjic is formally
accused of being Ivan the Terrible. It made international
news instantly. The U .S. strips him of his citizenship
and he is extradited to Israel. In 1988, he is
put on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against
humanity. We need to understand the gravity of
that 1988 trial in Israel. It was a monumental
historic event. Everyone was watching. It was
broadcast publicly. It was highly publicized
across the globe and it carried the immense crushing
emotional weight of the Holocaust survivors seeking
justice in the Jewish state. It wasn't just a
trial of one autoworker from Ohio? No, it was
a societal attempt to put the Holocaust itself
on the stand again, very much echoing the famous
Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem decades earlier.
For Israel, this was about historical reckoning.
And the centerpiece of this trial, the moment
that the historical transcripts detail with incredible
cinematic precision, was the dramatic courtroom
confrontation with the prosecution's star witness.
This is the turning point. This was a Treblinka
survivor named Eliyahu Rosenberg. I want to paint
the picture of this courtroom scene because the
tension is palpable even just reading about it.
You can feel it through the pages. Rosenberg
is on the witness stand. The prosecution asks
him if he recognizes the man sitting at the defense
table. Rosenberg looks over and asks Demjanjuk
to remove his glasses. He says to the judge,
quote, So I can see his eyes. It is a request
deeply rooted in primal human instinct. We inherently
believe the eyes hold the immutable truth of
a person's identity, the core of who they are,
the window to the soul. Exactly. For a survivor
trying to bridge a gap of over 40 years, trying
to pierce through the aging process of a man
sitting in a suit. The eyes are the ultimate
identifier. So Demjanjuk obliges. He takes off
his glasses. Rosenberg physically approaches
him. He walks right up to the defense table and
peers closely into Demjanjuk's face. And according
to the transcripts, Demjanjuk smiles at him and
offers his hand for a handshake. Think about
the psychological dissonance in that single second.
The accused monster. a man on trial for his life,
smiling and offering a polite handshake to his
alleged victim in front of the entire world.
It's bizarre. Rosenberg recoils immediately.
He shouts, Grozny, which is Russian for terrible.
Ivan the Terrible. Right. And then Rosenberg
turns and states to the court, and I am quoting
his testimony exactly here. Ivan, I say it unhesitatingly
without the slightest shadow of a doubt. It is
Ivan from Treblinka, from the gas chambers, the
man I am looking at now. Without a shadow of
a doubt. He glares at Demjanjic and tells the
court, I saw his eyes. I saw those murderous
eyes. And then he turns directly back to Demjancik
and exclaims, how dare you put out your hand,
murderer that you are. It is impossible not to
feel the absolute devastating power of that moment.
It gives you chills. For Elihu Rosenberg, this
was entirely real. The trauma, the pain, the
absolute certainty he felt in his heart in that
courtroom was a direct manifestation of the hell
he survived. You can't fake that emotion. You
can't. When a victim points a finger with that
level of moral conviction, with that raw, unfiltered
emotion pouring out of them, it is incredibly
compelling to a judge and a jury. It is exactly
the kind of testimony that secures convictions.
And in this case it did. Based heavily on these
emotional eyewitness identifications, Demjanjic
was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging?
He was put on death row. Here's where it gets
really interesting. Because... I struggle to
understand how the court justified what came
next. The defense uncovered a massive glaring
complication regarding that exact testimony.
The deposition. Yes. The historical records reveal
that this star witness, Eliyahu Rosenberg, the
man who just confidently looked into Demjan Juk's
eyes and identified him as Ivan without a shadow
of a doubt, had given a sworn deposition decades
earlier. Long before Demjan Juk was ever in the
picture. Back in 1947, Rosenberg had formally
testified to investigators that Ivan the Terrible
had been killed during a prisoner uprising at
Treblinka. And right there is the massive fault
line in the entire prosecution's case. How does
that even work? This is where the legal system
has to balance deep, profound empathy for Rosenberg's
unimaginable trauma with the strict, unyielding
requirements of the legal burden of proof. But
wait, how do we reconcile that? If you were portrait
by someone, wouldn't you know if they were dead?
How does a court just dismiss a 1947 statement
that the man was killed and accept a 1988 identification
that the man is sitting right there in the room?
It's a fair question. Is it possible Rosenberg
heard a rumor in 1947 that Ivan was killed during
the chaos of the uprising and just believed it,
but then decades later when confronted with a
face, his memory overrode that old rumor? It
is entirely possible and it speaks to the well
-documented unreliability of eyewitness testimony
decades after an event. The human mind is not
a tape recorder. It doesn't just play back. No,
memories degrade over time. They are influenced
by suggestion, by seeing photographs in the news,
and by the intense subconscious desire for closure.
Right, because he wants them to have caught the
guy. Of course he does. When Rosenberg was shown
photos of Dem Janjuk by investigators prior to
the trial, and when he was placed in the highly
charged, deeply emotional atmosphere of an Israeli
courtroom, his brain may have genuinely convinced
him that this was the man. Trauma is powerful.
Trauma has a terrifying way of fusing the past
and the present. It is crucial to understand
that Rosenberg wasn't necessarily lying on the
stand. He may have been experiencing a deeply
felt psychological truth. He believed what he
was saying. But believing it doesn't make it
legally viable. Exactly. The justice system demands
a different standard. Legal truth demands empirical
evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. And As powerful
as Rosenberg's testimony was, that 1947 deposition
was just the first crack in the foundation of
the case against John Demjonjic. Because while
this emotional trial was playing out in Israel
in the late 1980s, the geopolitical landscape
of the entire world was shifting in a way no
one could have predicted. The timing was incredible.
It was about to cause an absolute archival earthquake.
The Soviet Union was collapsing. The Iron Curtain
was falling. The Cold War was ending. and vast
previously impenetrable repositories of secret
KGB and Soviet archives were suddenly being opened
up to Western researchers and legal teams. And
what was sitting inside those dusty archives
changed everything about this case. If we connect
this archival earthquake to the bigger picture,
the fall of the Soviet Union radically altered
Holocaust investigations globally. Because they
had a monopoly on the Eastern Front data. Yes.
For decades, Western investigators and prosecutors
had to rely almost entirely on Western documents
and survivor testimonies like Rosenberg's. They
simply did not have access to the meticulous,
often brutal, and highly detailed records kept
by the Soviet authorities. Who are doing their
own investigations. Right. The Soviets had captured
and interrogated hundreds of Nazi collaborators
and guards after the war. When those vaults in
Moscow and Kiev finally opened, a tidal wave
of new, contradictory documentary evidence flooded
the international legal system. And that tidal
wave hit the Demjanjic case directly. On July
29, 1993, The Israeli Supreme Court did something
monumental. They reversed it. They overturned
John Jemjohn's guilty verdict and they threw
out his death sentence. They ruled that, based
on the new evidence, there was reasonable doubt
that he was Ivan the Terrible. And we should
talk about what that evidence was. The archives
detailed exactly what this new evidence was.
Investigators found the written, sworn statements
of 37 former guards from Treblinka. 37? 37 men
who had actually been there, who had worked in
the camp alongside the monster. And these statements
identified Ivan the Terrible, not as John Demjohnczyk,
but as a completely different man named Ivan
Marchenko. 37 separate statements. The sheer
weight of that archival discovery is staggering.
And we have to consider the nature of these statements
to understand why the Israeli Supreme Court acted.
Right, because why couldn't they just put these
37 guys on the stand? Well, the records point
out that many of these 37 former guards had either
been executed by the Soviet Union shortly after
giving these testimonies in the 1940s and 50s,
or they had naturally died of old age by the
time the 1990s rolled around. So they're gone.
Yes. This meant they couldn't be brought into
an Israeli courtroom. put on the stand, and cross
-examined by the prosecution. But the paper remains.
But in a legal sense, the volume and the consistency
of their statements, taken decades before Dimjon
Juk was ever a suspect, created an insurmountable
wall of reasonable doubt. And it wasn't just
that they named a guy called Marcenko. The physical
descriptions in these Soviet documents were drastically
different from John Dimjonjic. I was looking
at the translated physical profiles. They don't
match up. Not at all. One Soviet document described
Ivan the Terrible Ivan Marchenko as having brown
hair, hazel eyes, a square face, and a large
prominent scar running down his neck. A mixed
scar. A prominent one. Now let's look at the
physical reality of John Dimjonjic. The records
state he was dark blonde, he had gray eyes, a
round face, and crucially, he lacked that prominent
defining scar on his neck. They were physically
completely different men. especially a defining
permanent feature like a large neck scar, is
exactly the kind of hard documentary evidence
that shatters an eyewitness identification made
40 years after the fact. You can't argue with
a missing scar. The guards who gave those statements
to the Soviet interrogators in the 1940s had
absolutely no reason to invent a random scar
or lie about his eye color. They were simply
describing the man they worked with every day.
They were just stating facts to save their own
skin. Precisely. When the Israeli Supreme Court
justices looked at this, they recognized the
tragedy of the situation. They had the survivors'
raw emotional certainty on one side of the scale
and the cold, unyielding archival reality of
37 separate confessions describing a physiologically
different man on the other. And the law is clear.
In a court of law, the archival evidence must
introduce reasonable doubt. So this incredibly
intense trial, the emotional climax of a survivor
confronting the supposed monster, the death sentence,
it was all a devastating case of mistaken identity.
A complete misfire. John Demjanjic, the auto
worker from Cleveland, was not Ivan the Terrible
of Treblinka. But that realization immediately
raises a massive question for you listening.
If Demjanjic wasn't Ivan, what actually happened
to the real Ivan? Where does Marchenko go? Right.
What happened to Ivan Marchenko, the man who
sliced off years, the man who ran the gas chamber
engines? While an innocent man, at least innocent
of the specific crime, was sitting in a cell
on death row in Israel, the real monster had
an entirely different story. And the historical
archives actually trace the trail of Ivan Marchenko.
They do. And tracing that trail relies heavily
on the testimony of another guard found in those
newly opened Soviet archives, a man named Nikolai
Yagorovich Shelyaev. Shaleyev is a crucial figure
here. Yes, Shaleyev was a Russian who actually
worked directly alongside Marchenko. He was also
a gas chamber operator at Treblinka. And Shaleyev's
testimony maps out Marchenko's movements as the
Nazi empire began to collapse in on itself. As
the tide turned. According to Shaleyev, in July
1943, he and Marchenko, along with two Germans
and two Jewish inmates, were transferred away
from Treblinka and sent to Trieste, Italy. moving
them away from the front lines. In Trieste, Marchenko's
duties shifted. The extermination camp was behind
him, and he was now tasked with guarding German
warehouses and a local prison. But then in 1944,
as the Allied forces were approaching Italy and
the writing was clearly on the wall for the Nazis,
Marchenko makes his move. And this is where the
historical narrative takes a cinematic, almost
surreal turn. It's like a movie. The documents
state that in 1944, Marchenko and a driver named
Gregory, quote, fled in an armored car to the
partisans in Yugoslavia. It is genuinely mind
-blowing. Think about the trajectory of this
man's life. It's a series of violent reinventions.
He goes from being a Soviet prisoner of war to
operating gas chambers at an extermination camp
for the SS to guarding warehouses in Italy to...
suddenly stealing an armored car and fleeing
to join the anti -fascist Yugoslav partisans.
Talk about switching sides to survive. That's
not even the end of it. The final confirmed sighting
of the real Ivan the Terrible, according to Shalayev's
testimony, happened in the spring of 1945 in
a city called Fiume. And what was he doing? Shalev
says he ran into Marchenko, who was coming out
of a brothel. Marchenko told him right then and
there that he had officially joined the Yugoslav
Partisans. Just a casual conversation on the
street. After that moment outside the brothel
in 1945, Ivan Marchenko vanishes completely into
history. The records do note that Soviet authorities
were actively hunting for him until at least
1962, but they never caught him. It highlights
the deeply frustrating, messy reality of history,
and particularly the history of post -war Europe.
It's just not neat. Not at all. As a society,
we want a neat narrative where evil is unequivocally
punished and the bad guy is caught. But the truth
is... Europe in 1945 was a chaotic, fractured,
apocalyptic landscape. It was totally destroyed.
It was filled with millions of displaced persons,
shifting borders, and desperate people constantly
reinventing themselves to survive. Sometimes
the absolute worst villains simply slipped through
the cracks. They just melted into the crowd.
They used the chaos of the post -war displacement
as a shield, blending into partisan groups or
refugee populations to completely erase their
pasts. Marchenko leveraged the fog of war to
disappear, leaving nothing but a ghost behind.
A ghost that eventually haunted John Demjanjic
all the way to death row. But as we pivot back
to Demjanjic's story, there is a deeply disturbing
element to this mistaken identity that we have
to address. The cover -up. Yes. Because you might
be thinking to yourself, well, the Soviet archives
were closed. The US and Israel simply didn't
know about Ivan Marchenko until the 1990s when
the wall fell. It was an honest mistake. I would
hope it was an honest mistake. But the historical
investigations reveal a scandalous, dark twist.
Some of that exculpatory evidence, the evidence
clearing Demjanjuk and pointing to Marchenko,
had actually been known years earlier. before
the trial. And it was deliberately withheld from
the Israelis by the United States government,
specifically by the Department of Justice's Office
of Special Investigations or the OSI, which was
the very office that had urged Israel to charge
him with being Ivan the Terrible in the first
place. This is where the legal missteps evolve
into something much darker and more systemic.
The OSI was established with a noble mandate
to hunt down Nazi war criminals who were hiding
in the United States. A completely justified
mission. Absolutely. But in the Demjenjuk case,
the zeal to secure a high -profile conviction
superseded the fundamental tenets of justice.
Withholding exculpatory evidence, which is evidence
that points to a defendant's innocence, is one
of the most severe ethical breaches a prosecutor
can commit. It's rigging the game. It is. The
condemnation of the OSI's actions wasn't just
a quiet behind closed doors reprimand either.
The records provide direct scorching quotes from
Judge Gilbert S. Merritt Jr., who was a judge
on the United States Court of Appeals for the
Sixth Circuit. And judges do not speak lightly
about other branches of the justice system. No,
they don't. I want to read his exact language
because it is incredibly strong for a federal
judge. Judge Merritt said of the OSI's handling
of the case. Today we know that they, the OSI,
the prosecution in the case, and the State Department
lied through their teeth. Lied through their
teeth. He went on. Even then they knew without
a doubt that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible,
but they hid the information from us. He went
on to say that if he had known the truth, the
court never would have ruled in favor of his
extradition to Israel in the first place. So
a whole trial shouldn't have happened. But the
judge didn't stop there. He compared the trial
to a witch hunt. He explicitly said, In retrospect,
it reminds me of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts
300 years ago. The prosecution, counseled by
the OSI, presented documents and witnesses whose
testimony was based on emotions and hysteria,
but not hard evidence. That's a massive indictment
of the process. He finished by saying, this instance
is a prime example of how justice can be distorted.
That is an astonishing, unprecedented rebuke
from a federal appellate judge. And I think it
is crucial to analyze the specific words he uses.
Emotions and hysteria. Witch hunt. He is pointing
directly to the phenomenon we discussed earlier
regarding the trial in Israel. The reliance on
the survivor's pain. The OSI allowed the profound
justifiable emotional pain of the survivors.
The tears, the anger, the visceral trauma broadcast
from the courtroom to act as a substitute for
hard, objective forensic evidence. They let the
emotion drive the car. They knew the paper trail
pointed to a man with a giant neck scar. But
they leaned into the emotional narrative because
it was powerful. It resonated with the public.
and it's a cure to win. So what does this all
mean for us listening today? I want to be very
clear with our audience. We are not taking a
political stance here on the US Justice Department.
No, we are looking at the historical legal record.
We are strictly reporting the federal judge's
scathing assessment of the government's handling
of the evidence as detailed in the historical
record. We aren't endorsing a viewpoint, just
conveying the facts of the ruling. But the implications
of a federal judge saying the Justice Department
lied through their teeth in a death penalty case
are absolutely massive. This raises an important
question, an incredibly difficult philosophical
and legal question, about the danger of righteous
crusades. It's a slippery slope. The Holocaust
is universally understood as the ultimate historical
evil. The desire to track down and punish those
responsible is morally necessary. However, when
the desire to punish historical evil overrides
the strict adherence to legal truth, when prosecutors
decide internally that getting a bad guy is more
important than ensuring they have the right guy,
the justice system itself becomes corrupted.
It undermines the whole point of a trial. Judge
Merritt is warning us that even in the pursuit
of the most righteous cause imaginable, abandoning
due process turns a trial into a Salem witch
hunt. The integrity of the law has to remain
absolute, regardless of how heinous the accused
crimes are, or else the system fails everyone.
It's a sobering thought. The system broke down
because it wanted justice so badly it was willing
to manufacture it by omitting the truth. And
that almost cost a man his life. But for John
Demjanjic, surviving the hangman's noose in Israel,
returning to the U .S., and exposing this government
cover -up wasn't the end of his legal saga. Not
even close. Not by long shot? Because his story
has a final chapter that is just as legally complex
and cyclical as the rest of it. He gets his U
.S. citizenship back for a time, but the investigations
into his past do not stop. They keep digging.
Because while the newly opened archives proved
he wasn't Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka, investigators
started looking closely at the documents to figure
out where he actually was during the war. And
this leads to his subsequent final extradition,
this time to Germany. The focus of the investigation
shifts entirely away from Treblinka and moves
to a completely different extermination camp.
Sobobor. Right. The new charge brought by German
prosecutors isn't that he was the sadistic Ivan
the Terrible who cut off ears. No. The scale
of the accusation changes. The new charge is
that he served as a low -level guard named Ivan
Demjanjuk at the Sobobor extermination camp.
And the key piece of evidence this time was a
single document. an identification card. Specifically,
a Tronecky identification card that was somewhat
ironically given the previous history supplied
by the OSI to the German prosecutors. I think
we need to break down what this card actually
is because the entire German trial hinged on
it. A Tronecki card was essentially a personnel
ID issued by the SS to the auxiliary guards trained
at the Tronecki facility we mentioned earlier.
Like a military ID badge. Very similar. It typically
included a photograph of the guard, their name,
their service number, and various stamps detailing
their deployments. In this case, the card allegedly
placed John Dimjandjuk at Sobibor. It was the
absolute documentary anchor for the German prosecution's
case. So without this card, they have nothing.
Without it, they had no physical evidence tying
him to the camp. But Demjanjuk's defense was
consistent, and they fought this card fiercely.
He claimed he was not the Ivan Demjanjuk, who
was a guard at Sobibor. He argued that the Troniki
ID card was a highly sophisticated forgery created
by the Soviet KGB. Which sounds like a wild conspiracy
theory at first glance. It does sound like a
movie plot, but to understand why that was a
plausible defense, you have to look at the history
of the KGB during the Cold War. Yes. The Soviet
intelligence services had a known documented
program of forging World War Two documents specifically
to frame and discredit anti -communist emigres
living in the West. It was a standard tactic
to disrupt expatriate communities. Since Demjan
Juk was a Ukrainian emigre living in America,
his defense argued he was a target of this KGB
forgery program. The prosecution, of course,
brought in forensic experts to test the ink,
the paper, and the stamps, arguing it was entirely
authentic. It became a battle of forensic document
analysis. Once again, it comes down to identity,
fated documents, and the labyrinth of Soviet
and KGB archives. And he fought this in the German
courts for years. But ultimately, the legal outcome
arrived. On May 12, 2011, a German criminal court
convicted him of being an accessory to the murder
of over 28 ,000 Jews based on his service as
a guard at Sobibor. He was convicted. He was
convicted, but it was pending appeal. And the
appeal process in the German legal system has
a very specific, strict procedural rule. regarding
the presumption of innocence. And this is where
the story gets its final bizarre twist. John
Dumjoniuk was in his 90s by this point. His health
was failing rapidly. He was living in a nursing
home in Germany while his lawyers were diligently
working on the appeal of the Sobibor conviction.
He was running out of time. And in March 2012,
at the age of 91, before the German Appellate
Court could ever hear his case, John Dumjoniuk
died. And because of that quirk of German law
you alluded to, the historical record is explicitly
clear on what happened next. It erases it. Because
he died before the appeal was fully heard and
exhausted, his conviction never entered into
force. Under German law, the Munich District
Court legally invalidated the interim conviction.
They cleared his criminal record completely,
and they legally declared him presumed innocent.
It is the ultimate display of the cyclical, almost
absurd nature of this entire decades -long saga.
It begins with an absolute lack of due process
in the chaotic, murderous environment of a war
zone. Then it moves through the profound emotional
turbulence of a mistaken identity trial in Israel.
It exposes deep systemic corruption within the
U .S. investigative process regarding withheld
evidence. And finally, it ends in Germany, the
very nation that orchestrated the Holocaust,
where a strict unbending adherence to modern
legal procedure forces history to leave John
Demjanjic in a perpetual state of legal ambiguity.
The law, by its own rigid rules, erases the conviction.
Exactly. It is just mind -blowing when you zoom
out and look at the whole timeline, from the
agonizing, bloody reality of Treblinka's gas
chamber engines, to an incredibly emotional,
tear -filled courtroom in Jerusalem, then to
the shock of opening cold Soviet archives, to
a federal judge's blistering anger over cover
up all the way to a quiet German nursing home
where a 91 year old man passes away wiping the
legal slate completely clean. It spans the entire
spectrum of human failure and legal process.
It really does. So I have to ask you the listener
as we wrap up this deep dive. How does this story
change your understanding of how we write history
and how we administer justice? When we are hunting
monsters from our darkest past does finding a
culprit matter more than finding the right culprit?
We've seen exactly what happens when the system
tries to cut corners to satisfy an overwhelming
emotional need for closure. And I want to leave
you with one final lingering thought that sits
at the very heart of everything we've discussed
today. Go ahead. If John Demianjoke died legally
presumed innocent due to a technicality of German
law, and if the real Ivan the Terrible Ivan Marchenko
vanished out of a brothel and into the Yugoslavian
partisans in 1945, never to be seen again. It
means that Ivan the Terrible, one of the most
documented, recognized, and feared monsters of
the entire Holocaust, ultimately escaped the
justice of the courts entirely. Neither man was
punished for it. Neither man was definitively
punished by the legal system for the crimes of
Ivan the Terrible. What does it say about human
history that our deepest, most profound desire
for absolute justice is so often thwarted by
the messy, chaotic reality of time, the fragility
of memory, and a simple loss of missing paperwork?
We desperately want the scales to balance, but
history often refuses to cooperate. That is a
deeply haunting thought to leave on. The ghost
of Treblinka remains a ghost. Thank you so much
for joining us on this incredibly complex, heavy
deep dive today. Keep questioning the historical
narrative you encounter, keep looking for the
truth behind the archives, and we'll see you
next time.