Israeli Supreme Court (Demjanjuk) | 21Jul1993 | Volodymyr Katelnytsky
/tp/Demjanjuk2009/katelnytsky19930721IsraelSupremeCourt.html
КОМІТЕТ ЗАХИСТУ І. ДЕМ’ЯНЮКА в
КИЄВІ
DEMJANJUK DEFENSE COMMITTEE in
KIEV
25221 Київ; 212 З. Гайдай
2-34
212 Z. Hajdaj St, s. 2-34; Kiev, UKRAINE
тел.
413-4644
телезаписувач-fax 413-4644
ч.
u/supreme
21/07/93
day/month/year
Honorable Judges of the Israeli Supreme Court
Meir Danzing, Menahem Elon, Eliezer Goldberg, Aharon Barak and Ya’acov
Malz
Jerusalem, Israel
tel 011-972-275-9666; fax 011-972-275-9648
Honored Sirs:
We never communicated with you previously because until yesterday, we
had faith that John Demjanjuk will be acquitted. However, the July 20,
1993 issue of the New York Times reported that your verdict reached
weeks ago will be released on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the
Treblinka uprising and that it runs to "several hundred pages" in
length.
Because it is prudent to believe that an acquitting verdict mandating
the immediate release of the condemned prisoner would be short in
length, we feel obliged to forestall the imminent guilty verdict with a
petition for consideration of the following facts which may not have
previously been brought to this Court’s attention.
1.
After exhaustive research, the Polish Historical Society in the USA
named several candidates for the position of the Treblinka-II gasser,
e.g. Captain Sauer, Jan Rogoza, Ivan Brosh, a "Polish-speaking Sudeten
German, SS-Rottenfuhrer" and a number of variously described "Ivans"
without the sobriquet "The Terrible". These findings are almost certainly unknown to you, as
they were never brought to the attention of the Israeli or American
courts by Yoram Sheftel, Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer.
Please find more details about this in the enclosed article from the
November 2, 1992 issue of the Ukrainian Voice from Winnipeg and the
January 1993, issue of Zorya from Toronto and consider it in your
verdict (Encl. 1).
2.
In the about 700-page long verdict of the Jerusalem District Court on
Demjanjuk, a "huge" diesel engine was mentioned by judges, prosecution
expert witnesses and survivors on the witness stand as the tool of the
mass murder at the Treblinka-II camp, at least six times. This was
vital error, because it is impossible to kill anyone, even a laboratory
mouse, with diesel exhaust.
The lack of toxicity of diesel exhaust is a fact of which this court
may take judicial notice; it is described in the enclosed "A Report of
the Surgeon General to the U.S. Congress in Compliance with Public Law
86-493 The Schenck Act" from July 18, 1962 which indicates that diesel
exhaust contains a negligible concentration of carbon monoxide (Encl.
2). The enclosed letter from United Technologies-Connecticut Motor
Vehicle Inspection Program states that diesel-powered vehicles emit
only trace amounts of carbon monoxide (Encl. 3). This determination is
based on exhaustive research conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC in 1980. This
agency’s work revealed that even long-mileage and malfunctioning diesel
engines emit only trace amounts of lethal carbon monoxide.
Thus, John Demjanjuk (or Ivan Marchenko) could not have killed anyone,
much less 890,000 victims, with a nontoxic gas which (contrary to
lethal gasoline engine exhaust), in fact, contains life-supporting
quantities of oxygen. The correctness of these American reports might
be verified by a quick telephone call to any appropriate Israeli scientific expert.
The nonlethal nature of diesel exhaust indicates that Treblinka-II
survivors were wrong (or confabulated) about the murder weapon, i.e.
the type of engine and the method of gassings at their camp, and
renders defective the verdict of the Jerusalem District Court in the
Demjanjuk case. Please kindly incorporate the American scientific data into your verdict.
3.
Please find enclosed a copy of an in-depth Treblinka-II report in ”On
Guard", an important Warsaw Ghetto underground newspaper from September
1942 (Encl. 4). It describes the investigation of the Treblinka-II camp
(then called Tremblinki) conducted by Zalman Friedrich, a former Polish
Army officer, along with Uziel Wallach, on the orders of the
underground authorities of BUND, the largest Jewish party in Poland.
This contemporary, authoritative and professional report written by a
fallen hero of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising contradicts the testimony
upon which Demjanjuk’s death sentence is based; however, it was not
introduced at his trial. Please consider Friedrich’s report and
additional Jewish underground documents from 1942 in your verdict.
4.
Please find enclosed a copy of the comprehensive official report of the
Polish Government-in-Exile in London on German concentration camps
prepared for the April 1943, Bermuda Conference of the Allies (Encl.
5). This report is based upon the investigation of the Treblinka camps
requested by the Western Allied governments and ordered by
"Grot"-Rowecki, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Home Army. It specified that
Treblinka-I was a "forced labor camp". The Treblinka-II camp, the
alleged site of Demjanjuk’s crimes, was denoted as a "concentration
camp proper", without the designation of "death camp". The
Treblinka-III camp was listed as "the death camp" for the Jews and was
reported to be located at Czerwony Bor. As late as in 1944, its
existence was also mentioned in the renowned wartime publication Ghetto
Speaks published in New York (Encl. 6). The remote Czerwony Bor (Red
Forest) was (and is) located forty kilometers north of the Treblinka-I
and Treblinka-II camps. Additional documents regarding Treblinka-III
are available from the Polish Historical Society in the USA (tel.
203--325--1079) and archives of the Polish Underground Study Trust in
London (tel. 011-4481-992-6057).
If Demjanjuk (or Marchenko) had been a mass murderer of Jews, he was
placed at the wrong Treblinka camp and location by the witnesses at his
Jerusalem trial. Thus, there is a conflict between wartime Underground
and Allied governmental reports on one hand, and the findings of the
Israeli trial court on the other hand. Therefore, please incorporate
the report of the Polish Government-in-Exile in your verdict.
5.
You might rightly ask why during Demjanjuk's trials nobody mentioned
the Treblinka-III camp, at which took place annihilation of deported
Jews. The answer is the following: no Jews who entered this place at
the sequestered Red Forest survived to tell of it.
Please remember that apparently only one reliable survivor survived the
Belzec camp. Mr. Rudolf Reder (see Encl. 7). lf he had perished, we
would also have never known about this camp, except for a
science-fiction-like story published in the 1946 and 1981 editions of
The Black Book. (This publication claims that transports of 10,000
persons each were led to underground buildings where they were
instantly exterminated with electricity in an underground water pool
and then within minutes cremated (Encl. 8).
6.
We want to bring to your attention that many Treblinka-II survivors
were deposed under oath on numerous occasions:
- in 1944 at Treblinka by a Soviet commission chaired by Nikita
Khrushchev;
- in 1945, 1947, 1950-53, 1961-63 and 1969 by various Soviet courts and
later
during Fedir Fedorenko's trial at Simferopol;
- in 1945 in Lodz by a Polish magistrate, Judge Zdzislaw Lukaszkiewicz
(in
preparation for the Nuremberg trials);
- in 1946 in Germany during the Nuremberg trial;
- in 1954 in Warsaw during the trial of four former Treblinka-II guards:
Melnyk, Dmyterenko, Osiczanski and Rudenko, all Ukrainians, who after
helping Jews at that camp were forced to desert it in 1942 and 1943;
- during at least three Treblinka-II trials in West Germany:
- in 1951 against H. Hitereiter et al,
- in 1964 against Treblinka-II’s second
commandant, Kurt Franz et al,
- in 1970 against Treblinka-II
commandant, Franz Stangl.
We are certain that many of relevant testimonies from the above
mentioned proceedings were not submitted or considered by you or by the
District Court. T. Borowski from the Polish Historical Society
eloquently explained, why in the USSR accusations were heaped on Ivan
Marchenko, who in the Warsaw trial was described as Treblinka-II
playboy (Encl. 9). While during the Warsaw trial, the prosecution’s
witnesses described Ivan Marchenko as a rough womanizer, Ivan Demjanjuk
was never mentioned during this and all other above-mentioned judicial
proceedings. This omission is so remarkable as to be of significant
probative value in weighing the later testimony of the eyewitnesses
against Demjanjuk.
7.
Perhaps the most important and unknown to you is the documentation
gathered in 1945 by Judge Lukaszkiewicz, the Magistrate of the District
Court at Siedlce, Poland. On November 5, 1945 in Lodz, Poland, Judge
Lukaszkiewicz gathered over a dozen Jewish Treblinka-II survivors as a
group in one room (some of which eventually testified in Jerusalem),
with an explicit order to recall all possible perpetrators from the
Treblinka-II camp. During that meeting, they were able to recall five
leading "Ukrainians" (Encl. 10), but without assigning to any one of
them any crimes or atrocities. Even more significantly, the well known
leader of this group, Samuel Reizman, concluded under oath in the joint
report of his group that: “We were unable to recall last names of any
additional Ukrainians”. Neither the deeds or the sobriquet "Ivan the
Terrible" are mentioned in this comprehensive document. Two months
later, and identical determination was filed by Judge Lukaszkiewicz
(Encl. 10).
Lo and behold, jointly these Jewish survivors failed to recall the man
whom four decades later some of them, as eyewitnesses in the Jerusalem
courtroom, claimed to remember, recognized and dubbed as the greatest
mass killer of mankind. lnstead, in 1945 these Jewish Treblinka-II
survivors remembered the commander of the guards, Jan Rogoza. In later years, the latter`s name
was transposed via Rogozin then Rogozny to Grozny meaning "Terrible".
Thus, "Jan Rogoza" (Polish Jan translates into Ukrainian Ivan)
developed into the nickname "Ivan the Terrible", which was recently
appended onto different men, initially John Demjanjuk and lately Ivan
Marchenko.
It is inconceivable that these Jewish survivors, with their ordeals
fresh in their minds after the passage of only two years, could jointly
have all forgotten "Ivan the Terrible" if he had truly been operating
at the Treblinka-II camp. Nor would they have forgotten Ivan Demjanjuk
or Marchenko if one of them had really been a mass murderer at
Treblinka-II, especially since witnesses and affiants on average
managed to survive for eleven months, nearly the full term of the
existence of that camp, while they claimed that the usual survival time
for working Jews was only two weeks.
The enclosed copies of the lists of Treblinka-II perpetrators prepared
by the Magistrate and that camp’s survivors and the transcript from
that meeting indicate that these Jews incarcerated at Treblinka-II knew
their supervising personnel quite well. They must have been even
friendly with their oppressors, as they were able to relate details of
the pre-war personal life of the SS-personnel. Thus, the surviving Jews
could not have been so forgetful about any "Ivan the Terrible”, the
(alleged) greatest killer of mankind. Please consider the enclosed,
exonerating documents of Polish Magistrate Lukaszkiewicz in your
verdict.
8.
Certain physical photographic evidence strongly contradicts the
testimony of the witnesses against Demjanjuk. Please familiarize
yourself with the enclosed wartime air photos of the Treblinka-II camp
(Encl. 11).
About 1,100,000 Luftwaffe air photos were captured by the Americans in
Germany. They are presently stored at the National Archives in
Washington, DC. These air photos show that the mass grave at the
Treblinka-II camp measured about 60 by 6 meters. Moreover, in November
1945, Judge Lukaszkiewicz's forensic-archeological exhumation of this mass burial site revealed
that it measured less than 6.00 meters in depth (Encl. 12). Thus, the
volume of the Treblinka-II mass grave (6 x 6 x 60 meters) could not
hold more that a small fraction of the victims that Demjanjuk is
claimed by the prosecution’s witnesses to have murdered.
Instead of being 200 (two hundred) times larger, Treblinka-II mass
burial was about 10% smaller than the combined volume of the graves at
Katyn Forest, which contained bodies of about 4,500 Polish officers.
Please incorporate the enclosed air photos of Treblinka-II, showing
that it was a deadly transit camp, (but not a "death camp") into your
verdict.
9.
The small size of the mass grave at the Treblinka-II camp is further
confirmed by the eye level photos taken in mid-August of 1944 by the
Soviet investigating commission (Encl. 11). These photos were
discovered in 1990 at the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute
in Warsaw, and the originals and the negatives of them are available there to this day.
The air photos and the eye level photos confirm each other's accuracy
and authenticity. They provide incontrovertible physical evidence that
Treblinka-II was a deadly transit camp and not a death camp. This
wartime photographic evidence and the results of the 1945 exhumations
refute the most crucial parts of the testimony of prosecution
witnesses. The information contained in the air photos or even
eye-level photos might not be apparent to an average person, but a
brief consultation with air photoreconnaissance interpreters of the
world famous Israeli Air Force will quickly confirm our and a CIA
expert's interpretation. Please incorporate the enclosed photos, an
exonerating physical evidence, into your verdict.
10.
An attempt might be made to try to counter the above-mentioned physical
and historical evidence by pointing to perpetrators who confessed to
the mass annihilations during the World War ll and at the Treblinka-II
camp. However, it should be remembered that testimony of imprisoned
perpetrators is not always reliable, as in the following examples:
- In April of 1945, SS- physician Dr. W. G. Schuebbe, captured by the
Americans, confessed to killing 21,000 victims with injections (Encl.
13). He also admitted that he was the Director of the German
Annihilation Institute at Kiev, where 140,000 Jews, Gypsies and others
“unworthy to live" were killed with morphine tartarate injections. This
alleged mass murderer was released in 1948, when a confidential SS-
personnel dossier was discovered which revealed that Dr. Schuebbe he
had never been stationed in Ukraine or Kiev, after some obviously
ill-informed 12th US Army Group interrogator, in 1945, nearly
successfully implicated Schuebbe in an imaginary Babi Yar-like massacre.
- In the summer of 1945, a SS- officer presently revered for his
pro-Jewish stance, Kurt Gerstein, confessed repeatedly while in a
French prison, that 25,000,000 (sic) Jews, Poles and Czechs had already
been annihilated by the Nazis in 1942. Several days later, while still
incarcerated, he committed suicide. To avoid embarrassment, Gerstein’s
highly unrealistic number of Nazi victims is never discussed in public
writings by the pundits of the Holocaust (Encl. 14).
- While in an NKVD prison and then at a public trial, nine German
officers confessed to killing "10,000 Polish officers at Katyn". Four
days later, on January 30, 1946, all were hanged in Leningrad, in front
of 20,000 onlookers. However, recently President Yeltsin confirmed that
the killing at the Katyn Forest had been done by the NKVD on Stalin’s
orders.
- Before he was hanged in 1948, Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Hoess was
forced to confess that 3,500,000 had perished at his camp. Recently,
the Auschwitz victim count has been greatly reduced by the Polish
Government and Israeli scholars while still subject to further revision
(see: Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, by Princeton Professor A. Mayer).
- In the mid-1960s, two Treblinka-II suspects/perpetrators, Otto Horn
and F. Suchomel, were provided immunity from prosecution for confessing
and implicating their colleagues. However, their confessions contradict
above-mentioned physical evidence and are thus also unreliable.
In your verdict please consider the unreliability of the testimony of
Otto Horn and his identification of John Demjanjuk.
11.
Your Court’s guilty verdict must have been facilitated by the omissions
of Demjanjuk's Israeli lawyer, who failed in his prime duty of looking
for his client’s alibi and providing you with all available physical
exonerating evidence. Instead, he merely struggled to transpose the
alleged guilt of Demjanjuk onto another innocent Ukrainian.
Nevertheless, this incomplete defense work can be excused, considering
that Mr. Sheftel’s eyes and face were sprayed with acid, while your
respected colleague, Dov Eitan, unexpectedly fell out of a very high
window onto a Jerusalem sidewalk on the eve of Demjanjuk's appeal
(Encl. I5).
In short, please consider that the simple and uneducated Demjanjuk was
incapable of presenting to the courts a strong defense or mentioning
the facts from this letter. However, that is no reason for Israel to
imprison, convict and hang an innocent man for political purposes.
Yours sincerely,
[Signature]
Volodymyr Katelnytsky
President, Demjanjuk Defense Committee
cc:
- S. Weizman, President of Israel,
- S. Weiss, Chairman of the Knesset
- Minister of Justice, Israel
- H. Cohn, former Israeli Supreme Court Judge
- E. Meyer, President of Israel Bar of Advocates, 1 Chopin St.,
Jerusalem
- L. Kravchuk, President of Ukraine
- I. Pliushch, Chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament
- L. Walesa, President of Poland
- H. Kohl, Chancellor of Germany
- Clerk, U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Cincinnati, OH
- J. Biden, Justice Department Oversight Committee
- T. Foley, Speaker of the House, U.S. Congress
- J. Traficant, Jr. U.S. Congressman, Youngstown, OH
- R. Clark, Esq., New York City, NY, former U.S. Attorney General
- P. Buchanan, former U.S. presidential candidate
- United Nations Human Rights Commission, New York, NY
- Secretariat, Amnesty International, London
- American Civil Liberties Union, New York, NY
- International Association of Jewish Attorneys and Lawyers,
Washington, DC
- E. Bronfman, President, World Jewish Congress, New York, NY
- I. Levitas, Chairman of the Congress of Jewish Organizations in
Ukraine, Kyyiv.
- Dr. Y. Arad, Director, Yad Vashem, Holocaust Remembrance Authority,
Jerusalem, Israel
- Prof. B. Berenbaum, Director, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Washington, DC
- A. Shlayen, Director, The "Babiy Yar" Historical Centre Kyyiv, Ukraine
- R. Juszkiewich, Director, Main Commission of Investigation of
Hitlerite Crimes
- IPN, Warsaw, Poland
- Jewish Telegraphic Agency, New York, NY
- Ukrinform, Kyyiv, Ukraine and New York, NY
- Associated Press, New York, NY
- Reuters, Kyyiv, Ukraine and New York, NY
- Polish Press Agency, Washington, DC and Warsaw, Poland
Editors in:
- Israel: Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Maariv, Ydeiot Akhronot, Viedomosti
Niedeli
- USA: The New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, Cleveland
Plain Dealer, Time Magazine, Atlantic Magazine, Commentary, The
Midstream, Reformed Judaism, The Jewish Press, The New Russian Word,
The Jewish Life, Polish Daily News, The American Lawyer
- Ukraine: Pravda Ukrainy, Sil`ski Visti, Demokratychna Ukraina, Nash
Chas, Literaturnaya Ukraina, Kyievski Viedomosti - in Kyyiv, Poklyk
Sumlinya, Klych Natsiyi - in Lviv
- Canada: Toronto Star, Ukrainian Voice, Ukrainian News, Jewish Life,
Ukraina I Svit, Zorya
- Poland; Gazeta Wyborcza, Dziennik Wybrzeza, Panorama, Nashe Slovo,
Folkshtyme
- England: Daily Telegraph, Jewish Chronicle
- Germany: Der Spiegel, Bunte Illustrierte