This is a photograph of John (Ivan) Demjanjuk taken at his 1987 trial in Israel. Demjanjuk stood trial on counts of crimes against humanity and the Jewish people committed during the Holocaust. In the photograph, Demjanjuk is seated between a police officer and a woman who is probably a translator. Demjanjuk and the woman are both wearing headphones through the translation was transmitted. Demjanjuk is wearing a grey suit with a light blue shirt which is open at the neck. Demjanjuk is looking toward the camera with a serious look on his face.
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Ivan Demjanjuk – John Demjanjuk (1920-2012) was born Ivan Demjanjuk in the Ukraine. In 1940 he was conscripted into the Soviet Army and was captured by the Germans in 1942. In 1952, Demjanjuk immigrated to the United States, but after a while questions arose about his activities during World War II. The US government had reason to believe that Demjanjuk had lied about his background on his immigration papers and had actually worked at the Treblinka concentration camp. In 1977 his American citizenship was revoked, and in 1981 the State of Israel requested Demjanjuk’s extradition in order to stand trial in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity and the Jewish people. The trial began in 1987, and Demjanjuk was accused of volunteering to join the SS and being the notorious concentration camp guard at Treblinka known as “Ivan the Terrible.” After a long and publicised trial Demjanjuk was convicted of war crimes in 1988 and sentenced to death. However, following an appeal, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1993, and Demjanjuk was allowed to return to the United States where his citizenship was restored. This was not the end of the affair though, and requests for extradition and additional trials followed. Finally, in 2009, Demjanjuk stood trial in Germany on an indictment of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder at the Sobibor concentration camp. He was found guilty, but he died in a nursing home in Germany before the case could be appealed.
Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
