Defending "Ivan the Terrible"

by Yoram Sheftel

Here is the true story of the infamous show-trial of John Demjanjuk, the man falsely accused of being one of the most monstrous Nazi war criminals, Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. Now for the first time, Demjanjuk's lawyer, Yoram Sheftel, one of Israel's most prominent attorneys and a fervent Israeli nationalist, tells the story of a horrible miscarriage of justice motivated more by his beloved nation's desire for retribution for the Holocaust than by the evidence. This real-life courtroom drama starts in the Soviet Union, where the "evidence" against Demjanjuk was first forged by the KGB as part of an international diplomatic "sting." Among the "stung" was the U.S. Justice Department. There the Office of Special Investigations, in charge of finding Nazi war criminals, and with a record of failure and a fading future, lost no time in pouncing on the hapless Demjanjuk. Soon in their zeal to send to his death the man they claimed was Ivan, U.S. government officials were concealing eviden