(This post is rough going, but I spat it out in a hurry and I don't feel like editing it. It's a sordid saga. Pat Buchanan, of all people, is the one of the few making any sense on the matter. What is the world coming to?)
Why am I upset about the deportation (now on hold again) of John Demjanjuk? Besides, of course, the sight of the banal evil of US immigration misdirecting its forces and public funds yet again -- seeing an 89-year-old who is quite possibly an innocent man ripped out of his bed by the State and wheeled to an airplane to be deported to Germany, where interest in trying him is lukewarm at best. Cui bono?
The main reason I'm upset because there is a hollow feeling of evil prevailing beyond the grave, far into the 21st century, that Hitler and Stalin are having a great laugh right now. Yes, Hitler and Stalin. Because there is nothing either of these dictators would like better than to pawn their crimes off on "beta" drones, Cossacks, subordinates, refugees. If there was a way to just blame the Jews and be done with it, they would jump at the chance.
The (very indirect) personal content is that like Demjanjuk, my grandfather was ethnically Ukrainian. He was older, better educated (and he was an Estonian citizen) but it could have been he, I always thought, back when Demjanjuk's legal troubles began. All we knew was that all of a sudden, lists of people had been drawn up, of people who were suspected war criminals. The lists were managed by the Department of Justice and yet they were largely seeded by the Soviets. Could someone like him be next? It didn't seem impossible. Hadn't he worked for Siemens before the war? The impression was that he had been all over central Europe in 1945 as the fronts closed around him and my grandmother. What if he hadn't accounted for a "resume gap" on his US immigration application? What if he had pissed off someone in the communist regime in 1940?
He died ten years ago to the day. One of the things that I regret was never really interviewing him. Sadly I am left with an increasingly simplistic memory of him as a staunch anticommunist, an Estonian patriot, a good grandfather, an amazingly handy person who built a working automobile from spare parts in occupied Germany, and many views that could be classified as politically incorrect/less than pluralistic, but above all a stoic calm.
What was the chance that this man, any man in World War II, had seen things that it was better to keep quiet about? I'm not even going to dignify that with an answer. There is a great quotation, which happens to be from a Soviet officer in Afghanistan, who was asked by a journalist to qualify how exactly war was hell or something, and the brunt of the answer was that you would have to be insane to even try to describe it. For a common man (as opposed to, say, an enamelware industrialist), manoeuvring without any traction, the morality is even more complicated.
There were two types of "quiet neighbours" in the US. One is of course the Eastern European the epithet was invented for -- the vast minority, the people with something evil in their past to hide. And then there are the other quiet neighbours, whose reputation was unfairly besmirched forever by the insinuation. These were people who did what they could to survive the war and its aftermath, some already with children, who came to the West, tried to make something of themselves.
They were a thorn in the side of the Soviet regime merely because they existed, because they weren't members of the elite and yet in this way they attested to the superiority of the capitalist way (at least in that era).
The Soviet Union never passed up a chance to make their life difficult in return. Remember, for all its military might, this was a small-minded regime that would not allow people to leave, that was aware early on that it was an economic fraud.
It is unfortunate that long after the admitted injustices of such episodes as Operation Keelhaul, they found a willing partner in the US Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations. Very real and justified outrage -- over the fact that so many high-level Nazis had managed to escape to places like South America and reinvent themselves -- was twisted maliciously and exploited.
Whatever Demjanjuk's role, this wasn't how it was supposed to turn out. It's not even some kind of atavistic eye-for-an-eye justice. I could almost understand and cheer, if a Holocaust survivor came knocking, like De Niro in Corleone, Sicily, to spoil some old nemesis's dotage.
Instead, now at the end of the road, with no one else left to prosecute, we have another 89-year-old (they're almost always 88 or 89), he's already been convicted and the conviction dismissed by the Supreme Court of Israel, and now faces some other charge. In the end he will be held for silver candlesticks. There's nothing to celebrate here but the blind unfeeling machinery that makes this sort of thing possible -- of the justice system, of modern medicine that makes it possible to continue to try and re-try a ghost for the same crime... And finally, it's anything but closure.
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Just about every Eastern European who came to the United States after WW2 was run through the government data bases in the mid 1980's with added information collected from the Soviets by OSI attorneys. In fact one of the OSI lawyers perished in the Pan Am 103 crash over Lockerbie, Scotland on his return from an information gathering mission to the Soviet Union. Every Eastern European who complained to their Representative or Senator about this witch hunt had his letter or name forwarded to the Justice Department for investigation by OSI. Having had access to all that information that the OSI threw out it's back door I saw my stepfather's name on the lists of Estonians being investigated, along with many older friends and relatives. Fortunately many of the elders escaped persecution having died before the government knocked on their door.
OSI also attempted to convince the FBI and Secret Service, among other things, not to make note of the OSI attorneys' visits to the Soviet Embassy. This corruption was evident from the exculpatory documents that were denied to the defense attorneys, including those for John Demjanjuk, and were thrown out with the trash for my collection.
Demjanjuk was deported to Israel for trial and subsequent execution for his supposed crimes. I believe the exculpatory information thrown out the back door by OSI served to exonerate him in the Israeli court.
You seem well versed in those happenings twenty some years ago, and unfortunately still going on. I don't know if you know that your mom and I took a truck load of OSI "trash" to the Demjanjuk home in Cleveland when one of your mom's friends caring for it got cold feet and was ready to spill. Anyway John Jr. and his brother in law Ed arranged for an attorney for me when I could least afford it during the divorce. They were about to be arrested by the FBI for possession of government documents and needed to clarify the source. Immunity from prosecution was arranged for my testimony. The Justice Department internal affairs people were left with their mouths hanging open when they learned all that information was thrown out by their own attorneys, including top secret and classified military and other agency documents. Oddly enough Fish and Wildlife and Labor Relations who shared the same building with OSI were shredding everything, while OSI threw it all out intact. That's how I knew which bags to collect.
A side note of the OSI saga is that even Arthur Rudolph and Dr. von Braun, not being Eastern Europeans, were also under scrutiny for eventual deportation. Dr. von Braun had already passed on, but Rudolph opted to voluntarily return to Germany rather than be financially ruined defending himself after these scientists' contribution to the US space program.
You guys should cooperate and write a book about all this.
Two things spring to my mind concerning this:
1) I thought there was this thing called a "statute of limitations", that basically worked on the idea that everything - even crimes - died after a length of time. You hear about it all the time - where does it fit in with something like this?
2) He's an old man. If he's innocent, this is completely unnecessary torture. If he's guilty... who does this vindicate? Who's getting justice, here?
This is indeed getting to be the real rest of the story, or at least a good start. No, I do not know many of the details. We don't talk about those times.
A balanced book would be good. I suspect and am aware that Israel, many Jewish diplomats are privately embarrassed by the monster that the prosecution effort became, but it's not like there will be an special effort made to redress the situation. Too bad the whole sector is so infested with crazies and anti-Semites too.
Cooperation = good, but I would say we need a crack legal team as well. :)
1) I thought there was this thing called a "statute of limitations", that basically worked on the idea that everything - even crimes - died after a length of time. You hear about it all the time - where does it fit in with something like this? The position of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre is very clear that there should be no statute of limitations on genocide. I do agree with them.
2) He's an old man. If he's innocent, this is completely unnecessary torture. If he's guilty... who does this vindicate? Who's getting justice, here?Agree completely. I swear, I am going to let my readers do the executive summaries, or just ghost the post itself -- they're more concise than I am. :)
No, actually, my main objection is related to double jeopardy.
I do believe if there was solid evidence (I don't know what it would be, though, a newsreel procured by an independent source?) that Demjanjuk should have received a speedy trial under due process and been prosecuted and punished.
That's neither here nor there, now.
Why a "crack legal team"? It could be a book of memoirs for the one who observed and participated in that bit of history (with your excellent writing skills). I think it would be very interesting.
"We don't talk about those times". And why not? Pat Buchanan obviously still does. I had a lot of admiration for his courage to speak out about the injustices of the Justice Department orchestrated by OSI. He made the connection that the effort was a Soviet orchestrated attempt to discredit the strongly anti-Communist sentiment of the Eastern Europeans in this country. OSI also attempted to have other countries establish similar offices wherever these anti-Communist Eastern Europeans had emigrated.
As for a statute of limitations, there probably should be one, but for some reason not revealing some possible events that you knew would prevent you from escaping oppression, there is no limitation. A connection with Germany (a pretty difficult event to escape if you were from Eastern Europe) was one thing that would have denied access to freedom. What choice did these then late teens/early twenties young people have when they were conscripted into service--serve , follow orders or die.
These émigrés were all hard working decent people, just like your grandparents and my parents, who led clean lives. I don't think my parents ever even had a traffic violation. But they all were staunch anti-Communists.
Somehow even my mother knew that revealing some information might affect my future success in our new home in the US.. I suppose with this writing the Defense Department will soon arrive and strip my citations from my office wall. My mother never revealed to me, until much later, that my father was alive in Estonia. Had this fact surfaced in my background check by the FBI, I would have been booted from officer candidate school. A Latvian candidate in my class was not commissioned because he had a relative behind the Iron Curtain.
As far a I know, there is no Statute of limitations for murder and tax fraud. OSI, however, was not building their cases based on murder, but on omissions in the immigration applications.
Why a "crack legal team"? I just meant that there is a person who deals with the legal issues that come up in publishing any kind of book. Because this is a sensitive topic, asses would have to be extremely well-covered.
Writing the truth is not libelous
Under British law, the defendant has the burden of proving truth. The UK is becoming a destination for "libel tourism".
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