CLEVELAND, Ohio — Federal prosecutors fired back Friday over claims an FBI memo from 1985 could weaken the case against John Demjanjuk.
A Cleveland FBI agent said in the memo that he believed a Nazi identification card linking Demjanjuk to German service “was quite likely fabricated by the KGB.” The recently discovered document prompted a federal public defender last week to question the government’s tactics against the 91-year-old from Seven Hills.
But prosecutors said in court papers filed in U.S. District Court in Cleveland that the FBI agent merely speculated about a Soviet forgery. They also said the agent’s claims came years after a government expert testified the card was authentic.
The decades-long question about the reliability of the card has been rekindled after the Associated Press last month uncovered the memo in declassified documents.
Dennis Terez, the federal public defender in Cleveland, filed documents that said all of Demjanjuk’s legal proceedings to date may have been tainted because defense attorneys may not have seen all the documents in the case. He cited the FBI report as an example and offered to assist Demjanjuk’s counsel in seeking whether there are more documents that have not been uncovered.
Demjanjuk is on trial in Germany on more than 27,000 counts of assisting in the deaths of Jews at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. A verdict in his trial is expected next week, and prosecutors have called for a six-year sentence if he is convicted. He was deported to Munich nearly two years ago after U.S. judges ruled he lied about his wartime past.
Prosecutors said the FBI agent, whose identity is not known, based his claims about the forgery “on the unsupported assertion” that the Soviet authorities, who provided the card to U.S. officials, were out to get Demjanjuk because he “was an outspoken dissident.”
The memo said Demjanjuk “has a reputation for being anti-Soviet” and cited the fact that he, like many of his fellow Ukrainians, opposed the Soviet regime during World War II. Prosecutors noted Friday that in a 1980 deposition that Demjanjuk acknowledged that he had never belonged to any anti-communist group.
They also said the memo claims that Soviets routinely refused U.S. authorities from inspecting Nazi documents they discovered. But the prosecutors said a government expert had examined it and defense experts had the same chance by at least 1981, some four years before the agent wrote the report. Investigators have tested the card several times in Demjanjuk’s three-decades legal odyssey.
Demjanjuk was first accused of being a Nazi guard in 1977, when authorities identified him as being a sadistic camp guard at the Treblinka death camp. Since then, he was extradited to Israel, convicted, sentenced to death and released after another man was identified as being the guard.
He returned home to Seven Hills. In 1999, prosecutors charged him again with documents that came to light after the first trial. They accused him of working as a Nazi guard at Sobibor and other camps. Based that case in Cleveland, he was deported to Germany.
Related articles
- Public defender in Cleveland seeks to help John Demjanjuk, says case may have been tainted (whitepower.com)
- Attorneys representing families of Nazi camp victims say Demjanjuk should be convicted (whitepower.com)
- Demjanjuk attorney says his client a victim (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Demjanjuk attorney says his client a victim (foxnews.com)
- US gov’t opposes public defender in Nazi case (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
