The Trial Of Ivan The Terrible

Offers an account of the trial of John Demjanjuk, who was convicted of committing war crimes as "Ivan the Terrible," a sadistic guard at the Treblinka concentration camp

Now the subject of the Netflix documentary The Devil Next Door The incredible story of the most convoluted legal odyssey involving Nazi war crimes In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in Nazi genocide. In the years that followed, Demjanjuk was stripped of his American citizenship and sentenced to death by a Jerusalem court as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka—only to be cleared in one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in legal history. Finally, in 2011, after eighteen months of trial, a court in Munich convicted the native Ukrainian of assisting Hitler’s SS in the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern Poland. An award-winning novelist as well as legal scholar, Douglas offers a compulsively readable history of Demjanjuk’s bizarre case. The Right Wrong Man is both a gripping eyewitness account of the last major Holocaust trial to galvanize world attention and a vital meditation on the law’s effort to bring legal closure to the most horrific chapter in modern history.

Mistakenly identified as the Nazi war criminal Ivan of Treblinka, John Demjanjuk was extradited from the United States, spent over seven years in prison and was sentenced to death before being acquitted. This work, written by his lawyer, describes how a terrible miscarriage of justice was avoided.

Soon in their zeal to send to his death the man they claimed was Ivan, U.S. government officials were concealing evidence that proved Demjanjuk innocent so they could take away his citizenship and extradite him to Israel, all the while hiding the truth.

This is an examination of the law's response to the crimes of the Holocaust. It studies exemplary proceedings including the Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals and the Israeli trials of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk.

The author, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Leiden, gave evidence for the defense at the trial of John Demjanjuk in Jerusalem in 1987-88. Emphasizes that his main assertion at the trial was that the reliability of the witnesses who identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka forty years after the events could not be assessed because of the lack of scientific grounds for making such assessments. In fact, the Jerusalem court decided that expert evidence on identification problems was irrelevant, and based its judgment on other factors. Surveys the background to the trial, giving examples of cases, including war criminals, involving mistaken identification, and presents proposals for more accurate identification procedures.

Time Magazine Best American Novel (1993) In this fiendishly imaginative book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator. With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a cast of characters that includes Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.

Portrays Ivan the Terrible with his many contradictions: as an outstanding military leader, diplomat, and man of letters, and as a savage and almost insane tyrant. -- Author's introduction.