Ivan the Terrible (Treblinka guard)

Background

Treblinka was managed by 20 to 25 SS overseers (Germans and Austrians) and 80 to 120 Hiwi guards of various Soviet ethnicities, including Russian and the majority of Ukrainian Red army prisoners of war. They were assisted by a cadre of Jewish inmates known as Kapos, who were prisoner functionaries. The name Ivan was not an uncommon name in the camp. Ivan (also Iwan in Polish and German) is a common Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian given name. Volksdeutsche were known to have Slavic given names. An example would be Ivan Klatt, a Volksdeutscher who served in the Sobibor extermination camp, as the Ukrainian guard leader. According to Rajchman six men called Ivan worked at Treblinka. The vast majority of Hiwi guards who were trained at the Trawniki concentration camp facility had to contend with the language barrier. However, there were a number of Volksdeutsche among them, valued because they spoke German, Ukrainian, Russian and other languages. They could also understand basic Yiddish. The German and Austrian SS command, local Poles, and Jewish inmates often referred to guards as Ukrainians not only because of their ethnicity, or because they originated from Ukraine, but because they spoke Ukrainian between themselves. Most of the squad commanders however were Volksdeutsche.

Duties

Although there were more guards known as Ivan at Treblinka, Ivan the Terrible was also referred to as Ukrainian. His function at the camp was to operate the two tank engines that fed the gas chambers. The motors had been installed and fine-tuned by SS-Scharführer Erich Fuchs. Holocaust survivor Chil Rajchman testified that Ivan was about 25 years old at the time he worked in the camp. He was also known for his extreme cruelty. Ivan the Terrible used to cut off the ears of workers as they walked by, and these people were forced to continue working as they bled. Shortly after, he would proceed to killing them outright. He tortured victims with pipes, a sword, and whips before they entered the gas chambers.

Identity

Ivan's true identity has not been conclusively discovered, however. Throughout the 1970s and eighties John Demjanjuk, a retired suburban Cleveland autoworker of Ukrainian descent, was accused of being Ivan. He was tried in Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death, but the conviction was overturned due to lack of evidence.

One remarkable event during the trial in Israel, involved a star witness for the prosecution, Eliyahu Rosenberg. Asked by the prosecution if he recognized Demjanjuk, Rosenberg asked Demjanjuk to remove his glasses "so I can see his eyes." Rosenberg approached and peered closely at Demjanjuk's face. When Demjanjuk smiled and offered his hand, Rosenberg recoiled and shouted "Grozny!" meaning "Terrible" in Polish and Russian. "Ivan," Rosenberg said. "I say it unhesitatingly, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. It is Ivan from Treblinka, from the gas chambers, the man I am looking at now." "I saw his eyes, I saw those murderous eyes," Rosenberg told the court, glaring at Demjanjuk. Rosenberg then exclaimed directly to Demjanjuk: "How dare you put out your hand, murderer that you are!" It was later revealed -- to the great embarrassment of the prosecution -- that Eliyahu Rosenberg had previously testified in a 1947 deposition that “Ivan the Terrible” had been killed during a prisoner uprising.

On July 29, 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict on appeal. The ruling was based on new evidence, the written statements of 37 former guards at Treblinka (some of whom had been executed by the Soviet Union, others died of old age, and could therefore not be cross-examined) that identified Ivan the Terrible as another man named, Ivan Marchenko (possibly Marshenko, or Marczenko). One document described Ivan the Terrible as having brown hair, hazel eyes, a square face, and a large scar down to his neck; (Demjanjuk was blond with grayish-blue eyes, a round face, and no such scar.) According to one testimony, Marchenko was last seen in Yugoslavia in 1944. According to the testimony of Nikolai Yegorovich Shelayev, a Russian Treblinka gas chamber operator, he and Marchenko together with two Germans and two Jews, operated the motor which produced the exhaust gas which was fed into gas chambers. Shelayev and Marchenko were transferred from Treblinka to Trieste in July 1943 where Marchenko guarded German warehouses and a local prison. In 1944, as Allied forces approached, Marchenko and a driver named Gregory "fled in an armored car to the partisans in Yugoslavia." Shelayev last saw Marchenko in the spring of 1945, in Fiume, where he saw him coming out of a brothel. Marchenko told Shelayev that he had joined the Yugoslav partisans. As late as 1962, the Soviet authorities were looking for him. The Soviet documents created enough reasonable doubt to disqualify Demjanjuk, and his previous conviction was overturned. Some of the exculpatory evidence that led to Demjanjuk's release in 1993 had come to light years before and was deliberately withheld from the Israelis by the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the US Department of Justice, which had urged Israel to charge him with being Ivan the Terrible.

Gilbert S. Merritt Jr., judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, had this to say about the OSI's handling of the Demjanjuk case: "Today we know that they — the OSI, the prosecution in the case and the State Department — lied through their teeth. Even then they knew without a doubt that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, but they hid the information from us. I am sorry that I did not have the information at the time. If I did, we would never have ruled in favor of his extradition to Israel." Merritt claimed that what happened in his courtroom was "nothing short of a witch hunt. In retrospect, it reminds me of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts 300 years ago. The prosecution, counseled by the OSI, presented documents and witnesses whose testimony was based on emotions and hysteria, but not hard evidence. To my regret, we believed them. This instance is a prime example of how justice can be distorted."

John Demjanjuk was later extradited to Germany on charges that he was another guard by the name of Ivan Demjanjuk, who served at the Sobibor extermination camp. During the trial, the problem of identity again became a key issue. Demjanjuk claimed he was not the Ivan Demjanjuk alleged to be a guard at Sobibor, and that the Trawnicki identification card supplied by the OSI to Germany, and on which the prosecution based its case, was a Soviet KGB forgery. On 12 May 2011, Demjanjuk was convicted pending appeal by a German criminal court of being a guard at Sobibor extermination camp. Demjanjuk's appeal had not yet been heard by the German Appellate Court when he died in March 2012. As a consequence, the German Munich District Court declared him "presumed innocent." The court also confirmed that Demjanjuk's previous interim conviction was invalidated, and that Demjanuk was cleared of any criminal record.

Ivan Marchenko is not on the Most Wanted Nazis list. Marchenko, if he were to be caught, would be 106 years old as of 2017, and therefore unlikely to be brought to trial.