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Patrick Buchanan   Tribune Media Services   1988?   John Demjanjuk may be a greater victim than Alfred Dreyfus
What has given Mr. Demjanjuk's family new hope is that a Phoenix lawyer, William Wolf, has unearthed what the Arizona Republic's Richard Lessner calls "a disturbing pattern of witness intimidation, obstruction of justice and concealment of evidence" and, perhaps, "criminal conduct on the part of the Israeli prosecutors."
The Buchanan article below constitutes Exhibit G in Edward W. Nishnic's 2 Feb 1989 letter to all members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, which provides an excellent overview of the chief reasons for believing that the US Office of Special Investigations (OSI) suppressed or destroyed evidence that was exculpatory of accused John Demjanjuk. � Patrick Buchanan

Investigate OSI role
in miscarriage of justice

John Demjanjuk may be a greater victim than Alfred Dreyfus

PATRICK BUCHANAN
Tribune Media Services

Washington
Unless Israel's Supreme Court overturns his death sentence, John Demjanjuk will hang in 1989, entering history as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, the greatest mass murderer of World War II.
Last month, Mr. Demjanjuk got a reprieve.  It seems his attorney, Dov Eitan, full of high spirits a day before he was to argue the appeal, secretly made his way to the 15th floor of a Jerusalem hotel and jumped to his death, without leaving a suicide note.  After his funeral, co-counsel Yoram Sheftel had acid thrown into his eyes.  The court graciously consented to postpone Mr. Demjanjuk's appeal until May 4.

What has given Mr. Demjanjuk's family new hope is that a Phoenix lawyer, William Wolf, has unearthed what the Arizona Republic's Richard Lessner calls "a disturbing pattern of witness intimidation, obstruction of justice and concealment of evidence" and, perhaps, "criminal conduct on the part of the Israeli prosecutors."

Case in point.  Mr. Wolf contacted in Switzerland one Richard Glazer, Treblinka survivor, and recorded the conversation.  During it, Mr. Glazer conceded he had been pressed by Israeli officials to keep his mouth shut until Mr. Demjanjuk's trial was over.  Asked by Mr. Wolf if he had known Mr. Demjanjuk at Treblinka, Mr. Glazer hedged: "Listen, maybe, maybe, maybe, you know, maybe he didn't murder in Treblinka, he murdered in Sobibor, maybe, maybe."

What makes Mr. Glazer's comment critical is that there is powerful evidence the Office of Special Investigations of the Department of Justice itself questioned Mr. Glazer, in 1979.  Asked to produce notes of that 1979 conversation, OSI has thus far stonewalled.

What is going on here?  Material lately extracted from OSI through the Freedom of Information Act also shows that the Soviets took testimony, years ago, from one Ignat Danilchenko, who said Mr. Demjanjuk was a member of his guard platoon at Sobibor camp from March 1943 until well into 1944.  Yet at Mr. Demjanjuk's trial, the witnesses against him all testified he was at Treblinka until September 1943.  Can a man be two places at once?

According to Mr. Demjanjuk's son-in-law, Edward Nishnic, OSI is also withholding from the defense 1979 statements by Kurt Franz and Franz Suchomel, both of whom served at Treblinka, both of whom are said to have stated specifically that John Demjanjuk is not "Ivan the Terrible."  A newly uncovered March '78 letter from Mr. Suchomel (he was an SS sergeant at Treblinka) says "Ivan the Terrible" was sent to Trieste and "probably shot."

There would seem to be only three reasons why the defense is being denied these documents.

If the second or third point is true Mr. Demjanjuk may be the victim of a greater miscarriage of justice than Alfred Dreyfus.

The central point here is for OSI to stop playing games, and for Attorney General Thornburgh to insist that it stop playing games.

Was Mr. Glazer interviewed by OSI?  If so, where are the notes?  Why did the Israelis try to silence this Treblinka survivor?  Did Messrs. Franz and Suchomel say that Mr. Demjanjuk was not Ivan?  If so, why was this exculpatory material not given to the defense, nor to the Israelis before they were pressured into prosecuting Mr. Demjanjuk � something former OSI employee Efriam Zuroff says, in Occupation, Nazi Hunter, they never wanted to do.

Surely, it is time Congress summoned the moxie to take a hard public look a OSI and Mr. Thornburgh took control of this office from people who have run it like a fiefdom for 10 years.  Recent events would seem to make this imperative.

First is publication of Red Horizons by former Romanian spy chief, Ion Pacepa.  Mr. Pacepa writes of how Nicolai Ceausescu, the Stalin of Bucharest, put him "on the job of destroying the filthy reactionary," Archbishop Valerian Trifa, a militant anti-communist who had emigrated to the United States.  When Mr. Pacepa found nothing in his files of Bishop Trifa indicating he had engaged in any pogroms against Jews (Bishop Trifa had been a young member of the fascist Iron Guard), the Romanian secret service fabricated a case against him, using Jewish agents in Europe and the United States, a suborned Romanian rabbi and altered documents.

"The framing of Trifa as a war criminal," Mr. Pacepa writes, "was a long process that followed to the letter the guidelines received from the KGB on how to go about such an operation."  Now if the KGB was framing anti-communists as Nazi war criminals 15 years ago, to what extent has OSI relied upon the Soviets since?

Congress should also look at OSI's role in the case of Arthur Rudolph, the German rocket scientist and collaborator of Von Braun, who built the Saturn, and was stripped of his citizenship and sent, stateless, to Germany as a Nazi criminal.  In An American in Exile, journalist Thomas Franklin claims that a thorough West German investigation has found OSI's charges baseless and exonerated Mr. Rudolph totally.  His German citizenship has been restored.  Further, writes Mr. Franklin, OSI, in bullying an innocent old man with a heart condition, behaved like "vigilantes riding hell-for-leather for a necktie party," threatening Mr. Rudolph with loss of pension if he didn't surrender his citizenship and claiming "to have evidence they didn't have, and to have witnesses they didn't have."

Critics of OSI are willing to make their case in a public forum, under oath; it's time OSI was brought out into the sunlight.

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