busch20110820Kyiv.html

Dr. Ulrich Busch's Speech, Ukrainian World Congress -- Human Rights -- Kyiv 20.08.2011

Ladies and Gentlemen,

My English is not very good. But I presume, that my English is still better than your good German. So I decided, not to torture you with my good German, but to bother you with my bad English.You are lucky, that I do not try my Ukrainian. It would be a poor speech:

Shcho, Shcho? Ya ne rosomiyu. Djakuyu. Do pobachynja.

Thank you very much for your inivitation and the opportunity, to talk about John Demjanjuk and the trial against him in Munich, Germany.

The trial has a very long history of 35 years of legal struggles against unfair and made up accusations, false and faked evidence, lying witnesses and corrupt prosecutors and judges. The fight began in 1976 and is still not finished in 2011, the year, John had to celebrate his 91st birthday in a cell in the Munich prison, where the mass murderer Hitler was sitting in the 1920ies.

Not only these 35 years were terrible for John; his whole life is a human tragedy, a nightmare.

Holodomor, World War II, Red Army soldier, serious war injuries, POW in a Nazi POW camp, loss of US citizenship, extradition to Israel, death sentence in Jerusalem, seven and a half years in prison, 5 years in a death cell, deportation to Germany, trial in Germany, two years in a German prison.

Each of these events means massive illegal and inhuman treatment.

For example: John was 12, when he was starving from a hunger, created by the Stalin artificial food shortage in Ukraine through the time of Holodomor, 1932-33.

About 8 million Ukrainians died from starvation, killed by the mass murderer Stalin. As a child, John experienced the cruelty of the misuse of state and police power, living in fear of his life and between mountains of dead bodies around him.

Or: In the German POW camps for Red Army soldiers 3.5 million men out of 5.3 million died from starvation, cannibalism and epidemics. More than a million victims were Ukrainians. The POW camps were nothing else than death camps, the Red Army soldiers were criminals in the eyes of the SS and "Wehrmacht", the Germany Army.

The latest inhuman treatment was John's deportation to Germany and the trial in Munich.

Deportation was chosen by the United States and Germany to avoid the principle of double jeopardy. An extradition, the legal way, was forbidden by Israelian, German and American law. Only the illegal deportation under the avoidance of extradition opened the possibility to reopen the Israelian trial and to overrule the decision of the Supreme Court of Israel, to acquit John from all charges and to dismiss the case concerning Sobibor.

The deportation itself was already the conviction in Germany: John has to stay in Germany until death under complete isolation and welfare conditions. He has no right to and no way of returning to his wife and children. For John there is no difference between a room in a nursing home and a prison cell. The deportation destroyed his life completely. John's legal situation after the deportation was already punishment for life, before the trial started or ended. Punished, if guilty or not.

Germany against John Demjanjuk: an unfair and inhuman trial of the German Government against an innocent man in his 90ies.

Why?

Let's go to Moscow, back in 1979.

It was the KGB, who offered copies of so called evidence, which was produced in secret trials and under torture of their victims. The "Dienstausweis Nr. 1393", (service card), was declared a fake of the KGB by the world's most famous expert, Dr. Grant. The German head office for criminal research, "Bundeskriminalamt", estimated the service card as a very simple falsification of the KGB. We all know, that the Soviet law and court system and all the KGB activities were never intended to achieve justice, they only served and supported the ruling dictator and mass murderer Stalin and his successors. The prosecutors and courts were political instruments, used to liquidate opponents and the freedom of people in the subjugated satellite states like Ukraine.

Let's go to Jerusalem, back in 1986 - 1993.

What do you think is the most remarkable event in the Israel trial against John Demjanjuk? I am sure, you will all say the acquittal of John by the Supreme Court from being Ivan the Terrible. What a great court! Excellent judges!

I contradict: For me the most remarkable event in Israel was the death sentence of the District Court against an innocent man. This result clearly shows evidence of the weakness, of the mistakes and errors of human court systems and their judges. The judges in Israel wanted to believe in the guilt of John as Ivan the Terrible. The world's mass media hysterically asked for a death sentence and there was only John, his son, his son in law and his lawyer, Sheftel, who believed in John's innocense. And there were these criminal and corrupt prosecutors, who fraudently misled the American and Israelian courts. The Office of Special Investigation (OSI) from the US Department of Justice and the Israelian prosecutor withheld existing evidence, that John was not Ivan the Terrible. They wanted the death sentence against a man, from whom they definitely knew, the he was innocent and not Ivan Grosny.

And it worked. They got, what they strictly wanted, the death sentence, by withholding the so called Danilchenko Statements. Ignat Danilchenko was a Trawniki, who was forced by the Nazis to be a guard in Sobibor. After the war he was repatriated to the Soviet Union and convicted as a traitor of his Motherland to 25 years in the Gulag.

After the manipulation was discovered, after it was established, that there was more material in the archives of the Russian KGB, the defense was able to find 36 statements of Treblinka guards, that Ivan Marchenko and not John Demjanjuk, was Ivan Grosny. The discovery of the manipulation was the reason for finding so much exculpatory material in the Moscow archive, that John had to be acquitted from being Ivan the Terrible. But for 5 years there had been only an inch between John and the gallows.

At first I did not believe, what I had read in a memo of the well known Polish historian Jacek Wilczur, adressed to the director of the Main Commisssion for Nazi Crimes in Poland, Prof. Dr. Kakol, dated April 21, 1987.

"On the 27. of March of this year (1987) I met Janusz Kobus from Rembertow by Warsaw. Kobus knew the SS guard team of Treblinka II very well. Among others, also Ivan the Terrible, with whom he drank Vodka and who once showed him - almost at the end of 1942 or beginning of 1943 - in a drunken condition, his SS Army card. Kobus states that he saw and could read the name Marczenko and the birth place, Dniepropietrowsk. Ivan the Terrible was supposed to have personally said to Kobus that his name is Marczenko. Kobus says that this Marczenko - Ivan the Terrible - was 185 cm tall with black hair and a yellowish face color. ...

Kobus was sure that the photo of Ivan Demjanjuk, which I showed him and on which John Demjanjuk is shown in the court room in Jerusalem, does not show Ivan the Terrible.

In a telephone conversation on the 5. of April 1987 the prosecutor Michael Horovitz of the Israel General Prosecution explained to me that all the information which I received from Janusz Kobus ... could complicate the situation of the Israel prosecution (in the case against John Demjanjuk) and urgently asked me not to officially transfer this information to the prosecution or to disperse it in any other way. I obliged to follow this demand of the Israelian prosecution."

This memo was hidden in a volume of 1,000 pages of Polish papers and it was pure luck, that I found it.

So now in 2011 we know that:

Moscow had all the evidence, that John was not Ivan the Terrible:
The United States had all the evidence, that John was not Ivan the Terrible:
Israel had all the evidence, that John was not Ivan the Terrible:
Poland had all the evidence, that John was not Ivan the Terrible.

Four countries, four governments, that knew the truth about John, that knew, that he was innocent, kept silent, when John was sentenced to death, they hid the evidence of John's innocence.

Now let's go to Munich.

In the first instance the trial lasted 93 days, beginning on Nov. 30. 2009 and ending on the 12. of May 2011. John was very ill the whole time, he suffered from gout, pre cancer, major back pain, heart and kidney problems and anxiety among others. In two years of imprisonment John was not living outside of the jail hospital or without pain.

The atmosphere in the court was full of pure hate against John and the defence. From the beginning John was a Nazi monster, a mass-murderer, the Ukrainian Hitler and Eichmann for the German media. The Simon Wiesenthal Center had placed John on top place of the most wanted Nazi criminals.

The Munich court delivered a political show trial, in which almost every human right of the European Convention was violated.

Some examples: Since John was never a German citizen, since Sobibor is in Poland (not on German territory), since the Jews, who were killed there, came from Holland and were not German citizens, Germany never had jurisdiction in the case. After the UN Resolution 3074 and International Law only Poland had jurisdiction in this case. Poland used this power of jurisdiction and started a case against John. With the decision of December 2007 the Polish prosecutors dropped the case with the final statement, that there is no existing evidence, that John committed any crime in Sobibor.

The German court had to respect this Polish decision according to Rule 54 of the Schengen Treaty. It ignored its duty.

The Ludwigsburg Special Forces for the Persecution of Nazi Crimes already found out in 2003, that there is no evidence, that John ever committed a crime during Nazi time and during his time as a POW.

The court in Munich kept silent, although knowing the result of the Ludwigsburg investigation.

Germany acquitted many of the Nazis or did not prosecute them. One of the high ranking Nazis, the SS "Hauptsturmführer" Streibel, who was the leader of all Trawnikis, who were sent by him to the three death camps, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, was acquitted by the Landgericht in Hamburg. With this decision Germany lost the right, to prosecute the simple Trawnikis, who Professor Christiaan F. Rüter from the Amsterdam University called the smallest of the small fish.

Germany changed its whole traditional jurisdiction for a conviction of John. For 70 years it was agreed by all German prosecutors, courts and the government, that those helpers of the Nazis, who had no power of command, should not be prosecuted. Around 100.000 German helpers met these conditions and were granted amnesty. The only one, who did not get this amnesty, was the foreigner, John Demjanjuk.

For 70 years it was a main principle of German law that being present at a death camp, does not lead to a conviction of being an accessory to murder. This very important rule was changed only for John Demjanjuk and nobody else, by the Munich court.

It would take hours to give you a full review of all the violations of the law and human rights of John in Munich.

The court gave him a sentence of 5 years in prison, knowing, that John already served more than seven and a half years in Israel for Treblinka and Sobibor. Another fulminant violation of German law, because the court had to deduct the years in prison in Israel from the German 5 years.

I appealed the sentence on the same day John was convicted. The legal consequence is the suspension of the sentence, until the Supreme Court of Germany will decide about the appeal, which will happen approximately in 2012.
But at least, the court followed my demand to release John from jail. John is now a free man.
The release from jail was a most important goal, the defence wanted to reach.

The release shows, that the Munich court is afraid, that its judgment will be lifted by the Supreme Court and that John will be acquitted from all charges by the "Bundesgerichtshof" in Karlsruhe.

The question is, why did Germany put John on trial. The answer is easy: The trial was an illegal political show case. Germany looked for a chance, to show the world, that not alone Germans are guilty of the Holocaust.

They wanted to send the message to the world, that without the help of 100,000 foreign helpers the Holocaust would have never happened. John Demjanjuk, a born Ukrainian, allegedly a member of the 5,000 Trawniki, who allegedly were all Ukrainians, was at the right time the scapegoat, to demonstrate, that Ukraine is as much responsible for the Holocaust as Germany, or even more responsible than Germany, because the sentence of 5 years against a 91 years old man for assumed crimes in 1943, more than 70 years back, is much stronger and brutal than the sentences against high ranking Nazi murderers in Germany in the last 70 years.

It will be the duty of the Ukrainian nation and the World Congress of Ukrainians, to watch the further development in the case against John and to take care, that Germany will not be released from its full responsibility for the Nazi crimes.

Thank you for your attention.

Dr. Ulrich Busch
2011.08.20, Kyiv