Demjanjuk was tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.  He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity but the conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

That decision came after Israel won access to Soviet archives, which had depositions given after the war by 37 Treblinka guards and forced laborers who said "Ivan" was a different Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko.

Demjanjuk has been fighting notoriety since 1977 when former inmates at the Treblinka death camp identified Demjanjuk as 'Ivan the Terrible' as part of a US Justice Department investigation.

He was extradited from the United States to Israel in 1986 and a court there sentenced him to death in 1988.  He was released in August 1993 when the case collapsed after statements by former guards assembled by the Soviet KGB identified another man, Ivan Marchenko, as being 'Ivan the Terrible'.

* He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel, where he was sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors said he was the notorious guard Ivan at Treblinka where 870,000 people died.

* The Israeli Supreme Court overturned his death sentence in 1993 and freed him after newly released records from the former Soviet Union showed another man, Ivan Marchenko, was probably the Treblinka guard.

Demjanjuk migrated to the US in 1952. In 1986, he was extradited from the US to Israel and sentenced to death for war crimes in 1988, after being identified by former inmates from the Treblinka death camp as "Ivan the Terrible" — a prison guard at the camp.

But the Israeli supreme court overturned his conviction, and he was released in August 1993 when new evidence emerged suggesting he was not the guard.

Statements by former guards assembled by the Soviet KGB identified another man, Ivan Marchenko, as being "Ivan the Terrible".

• 1988:  convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, sentenced to death.

• 1993:  Israel's Supreme Court unanimously rules Demjanjuk was not "Ivan the Terrible," overturning 1988 verdict and returning him to U.S.

In 1988, Mr Demjanjuk was sentenced to death by an Israeli court after he was identified as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka concentration camp.

The verdict was later overturned when fresh other evidence identified surfaced, naming another person as "Ivan the Terrible".

In 1986, Mr Demjanjuk was deported by the US to Israel, accused of being "Ivan the Terrible", the notorious prison guard at the Treblinka extermination camp.  [...]

One member of the unit, known as Ivan the Terrible, was a Wachmann (guard) for the Waffen SS at the Treblinka death camp.  There, he helped operate the gas chambers and personally murdered hundreds of prisoners, hacking many of his naked victims to death with a sword, according to witnesses.

In 1983, Israel issued an extradition request to the US, accusing Mr Demjanjuk of war crimes.  Prosecutors said he was the notorious Ivan the Terrible.

During his trial, Mr Demjanjuk's lawyers argued that he was the victim of mistaken identity and challenged the accuracy of the memories of five Treblinka survivors who identified him as Ivan the Terrible.

However, an ID card showing that he had been registered at the Trawniki training camp helped sway the judges in the prosecution's favour.  In 1988, he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.

His conviction was eventually quashed in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court, after evidence hidden in the archives of Russia's former KGB intelligence service until the previous year suggested that another Ukrainian man, named Ivan Marchenko, had been the true Ivan the Terrible.

He was stripped in 1986 of the U.S. citizenship granted in 1958 and extradited to Israel to face charges that he was the guard known as “Ivan the Terrible,” who tortured Jewish prisoners while herding them into gas chambers at the Treblinka concentration camp in German-occupied Poland.

Overturned

Demjanjuk’s 1988 conviction and death sentence were overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court in 1993.  The tribunal found reasonable doubt that Demjanjuk ever served in Treblinka.  Witness statements had shown that “Ivan the Terrible” was a man named Ivan Marchenko.

In 1987 Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker from Cleveland, Ohio, was accused of being Ivan the Terrible of the Nazi extermination camp, Treblinka. Identified by survivors, Demjanjuk was brought to trial in Jerusalem in 1988 and sentenced to hang.   [...]

[Toronto playwright Jonathan Garfinkel is quoted as saying:] “There were accusations of it being a show trial, but if it was a show trial or not, I believe that the fact he got off was remarkable.  He was acquitted because in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell, new evidence came out that had been suppressed by the KGB, that pointed to Demjanjuk not being Ivan.  Ivan the Terrible was supposedly Ivan Marchenko.”

Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 as the infamously sadistic Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, only to see the conviction overturned in 1993.  He was freed by Israel’s Supreme Court after evidence surfaced suggesting that another man was probably Ivan the Terrible.

However, after being extradited to and convicted in Israel, that country's Supreme Court ruled there was not enough evidence to prove he was the notorious guard.  Records from Soviet archives contained depositions from Treblinka guards who said Ivan the Terrible was another Ukrainian, Ivan Marchenko.

Demjanjuk had been tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.  He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity but the conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

That decision came after Israel won access to Soviet archives, which had depositions given after the war by 37 Treblinka guards and forced laborers who said "Ivan" was a different Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko.  Some even identified Marchenko in photographs.

A German court on Wednesday issued an arrest warrant for John Demjanjuk, 88, the alleged Nazi war criminal "Ivan the Terrible" suspected of killing thousands of Jews in World War II death camps.  [...]

Demjanjuk has been fighting notoriety since 1977 when former inmates at the Treblinka death camp identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" as part of a US Justice Department investigation.

He was extradited from the United States to Israel in 1986 and a court there sentenced him to death in 1988.  He was released in August 1993 when the case collapsed after statements by former guards assembled by the Soviet KGB identified another man, Ivan Marchenko, as being "Ivan the Terrible".

Demjanjuk is the 73-year-old Cleveland autoworker who was arrested and stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981, was extradited to Israel and, after a highly emotional trial, was convicted of being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously brutal guard at the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, Poland.

Last week, however, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned that conviction, saying there was reasonable doubt as to Demjanjuk's guilt.

Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death in 1988 after Holocaust survivors said he was the sadistic guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka camp where 870,000 people died.

The Israeli Supreme Court overturned that conviction in 1993 and freed Demjanjuk after fresh evidence showed another man was probably the Treblinka guard.

The Ukrainian native has been fighting to stay in this country for over 30 years.  First charged with being brutal Treblinka concentration-camp guard “Ivan the Terrible,” Demjanjuk was stripped of his citizenship in 1981 and extradited to Israel where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death.

In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction, saying evidence available after the collapse of the Soviet Union showed someone else was Ivan the Terrible.

John Demjanjuk, once accused of being Ivan the Terrible, is literally being kicked out of the United States at the ripe old age of 89.  [...]

This is a man that was once accused in the murders of 29,000 people, again, 29,000 people, accused of being, as I said, Ivan the Terrible, the notorious S.S. guard at the Treblinka extermination camp that we all have known about from 1942 to 1943, accused of committing murders and acts of extraordinary savage violence against the camp prisoners there.  [...]

Do you get a sense, though, and I know you have followed this from that perspective as well, Avery — do you get a sense That many people still believe this guy really was Ivan the Terrible?

FRIEDMAN:  I think there's very little doubt, Rick, that many believe that Ivan Demjanjuk indeed is Ivan the Terrible.  [...]

BadiG says:  "Why has it taken so long to get the facts right on this so-called Ivan the Terrible?  He's 89 years old.  This is crazy."  [...]

The Israelis tried him, as I had told you earlier, for being Ivan the Terrible, a guard in Treblinka, which isn't obviously something that's going to be hammered out.  [...]

And we will continue to give you updates as we go, the man once referred to as Ivan the Terrible.

In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel, accused of being the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp.  He was convicted, sentenced to death - then freed when an Israeli court found that he was a victim of mistaken identity.

In 1988, Ukranian-born Demjanjuk was found guilty in Israel of being 'Ivan the Terrible', a guard who herded women and children into the gas chambers of the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.

However, five years later he walked free from an appeal court after his conviction was overturned.

Prosecutors accepted that recently released KGB archives cast reasonable doubt that Ivan was in fact someone else.

Demjanjuk was tried in the Israeli court in 1988 on charges that he was a guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka, a camp where 870,000 people died.  However, the conviction was overturned in 1993 when records from the former Soviet Union showed that another man was more likely the guard.

In the 1970s Demjanjuk was investigated by U.S. officials after Holocaust survivors identified him as “Ivan the Terrible,” a Nazi guard who operated the gas chambers at the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.  In 1981 a U.S. court revoked his citizenship.  Five years later he was extradited to Israel to stand trial for war crimes.  Prosecutors alleged that Demjanjuk, after becoming a prisoner of war, had volunteered to serve as a concentration camp guard and later worked at Treblinka, where his cruelty earned him the nickname Ivan the Terrible.  He denied the allegations, but in 1988 he was found guilty and sentenced to hang.  In 1993, however, the Israeli Supreme Court overruled the decision, based on evidence that another man was Ivan the Terrible.

Who was stripped of citizenship and shipped to Israel to face his accusers — brought to justice onstage in a concert hall converted into a courtroom for a yearlong trial broadcast on Israeli television and radio, meant to remind the younger Jews never to forget the evil done to them — and heard the survivors, in simultaneous translation, identify him across all the years and miles as the Ukrainian savage so bloodthirsty, so unforgettably depraved — with a whip or a sword or a drill, it was his pleasure to maim Jews only a few moments away from being gassed — that inmates called him Ivan Grozny: Ivan the Terrible.  [...]

Demjanjuk didn't hang, of course.  After five years alone on death row in Israel's Ayalon prison — where Adolf Eichmann, too, had sat, the desk jockey who saw to it that the trains groaning with doomed Jews ran on time, and who was strung up in 1962; Eichmann and Demjanjuk are the only men Israel has ever tried for the Nazi genocidal crimes — Demjanjuk presented evidence on appeal that another man, one Ivan Marchenko, was Ivan the Terrible, and that Israel was about to hang the wrong Ukrainian.

Funny thing: The Israeli Supreme Court decided to let Ivan Demjanjuk walk.

The horribly funny thing — not to the Israelis, many of whom had doubts about prosecuting Demjanjuk from the start — was that some of the evidence that led to his release in 1993 had come to light years before and was withheld from the Israelis by the American government — the Office of Special Investigations of the Department of Justice, the very same cadre of Nazi hunters who had urged Israel to charge him with being Ivan the Terrible.

Why?  Because Ivan the Terrible was a trophy fish, and John Demjanjuk was small fry, and whatever doubt the OSI harbored about his true crimes — and the records show that some of its investigators there felt doubts galore — if the agency wanted to burnish its reputation and justify its budget, it needed a villain big and bad enough to convince the cautious Israelis to mount a show trial.

Mr Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in Israel 21 years ago for being the guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp - a verdict overturned in 1993 when Russian archives showed this to be a mistake.

Demjanjuk had been tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.  He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity but the conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

That decision came after Israel won access to Soviet archives, which had depositions given after the war by 37 Treblinka guards and forced laborers who said "Ivan" was a different Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko.  Some identified Marchenko in photographs.

John Demjanjuk finally won his freedom yesterday, ending a seven-year court fight in Israel against accusations he was the notorious Nazi gas chamber operator Ivan the Terrible.

The Supreme Court overturned Mr. Demjanjuk's 1988 conviction and death sentence seven weeks ago because of doubts he was the sadistic Ivan of Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where 870,000 Jews died.

The court based its ruling on evidence another man — Ivan Marchenko, whose whereabouts are unknown — was Ivan.

1988
Demjanjuk sentenced to death after being found to be "Ivan the terrible".

1993

The Israeli supreme court quashes his conviction after new evidence, some of it from Russia, contradicts death camp survivors. Freed from prison, he returns to his home near Cleveland.

In 1988, the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was sentenced in Israel to death, but then acquitted in 1993 by Israel's Supreme Court of being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp.  [...]

He was extradited to Israel, where he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.  However, the conviction was overturned after evidence emerged from Soviet archives that Ivan the Terrible was a different Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko.

In 1984, Allan A. Ryan Jr., now a top attorney for Harvard University, seemed quite sure that a man his Justice Department office prosecuted for denaturalization, John Demjanjuk, was 'Ivan the Terrible,' a Nazi guard at a death camp in Treblinka, Poland.  Since then, Ryan has been accused of suppressing evidence that might have cleared Demjanjuk. Today, Ryan himself is no longer sure.  [...]

After numerous appeals, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 to stand trial for murder.  He was convicted and sentenced to death in April 1988.  [...]

But in December 1991, Demjanjuk supporters got their first big break in the case.  More than two dozen statements from other Nazi death camps guards were released by the Soviet Union.  In the statements, the guards, who were tried and executed by the Soviets between 1944 and 1961, say Ivan the Terrible was another man, Ivan Marchenko.

This case has been going on for 32 years. The U.S. Justice Department first moved to revoke Demjanjuk's citizenship in 1977 and he was extradited to Israel nine years later.  At that time, he stood accused of being "Ivan the Terrible" — a particularly sadistic guard at Treblinka where some 850,000 people were murdered.  In 1987, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death.  The Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1993 when new information emerged casting doubt on his identification as Ivan.

In 1979, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) at Justice, goaded and guided by Yuri Andropov's KGB, was persuaded that Demjanjuk was "Ivan the Terrible," a huge, brutal, sadistic guard at Treblinka, who bashed in babies' heads and slashed off women's breasts, as he drove hundreds of thousands of Jews into the gas chambers.

Demjanjuk's defense was simple: I was never at Treblinka.

Yet, a dozen survivors, shown a photo spread, identified him as the beast of Treblinka.  In 1986, OSI had him extradited to Israel.  In 1988, he was convicted and sentenced to death.  The greatest Holocaust monster since Mengele was to be hanged.

His family, friends and lawyers did not give up. They scoured Europe and, in the last days of the Soviet Union, struck pay dirt.  In Moscow's files on Treblinka they discovered a photo of the real "Ivan," a far bigger, more mature man than the 23-year-old Demjanjuk in 1943.

Ivan Marchenko was positively identified as Ivan the Terrible.

HOW could both US and Israeli war crimes prosecutors have got the identity of 'Ivan the Terrible' so dramatically wrong?  And why did the US not produce evidence in its possession that could have helped identify the real monster of Treblinka, averting a potential legal fiasco on a huge scale?

These questions will demand answers today if, as expected, the Supreme Court in Jerusalem rules that John Demjanjuk is not Ivan the Terrible, operator of the gas chambers at Treblinka Nazi death camp in Poland.

In 1986 John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant living in the US, was extradited to Israel after investigation by US Nazi-hunters to face charges of being Ivan the Terrible.  In 1988 he was convicted and sentenced to hang.

Overwhelming evidence has since emerged to suggest the conviction was wrong, and that another man, Ivan Marchenko, was the real Treblinka monster — evidence which Israeli judges are today expected to acknowledge for the first time.

It was during its investigation of Fedorenko that the OSI had obtained copies of court transcripts of the Treblinka trials in the USSR that referred to the Ivan of Treblinka.  These papers, which were not made available to the defense in Demjanjuk's denaturalization hearings in Cleveland, include the testimony of 18 former Treblinka guards who confirmed that the "Ivan of Treblinka" was a man named Ivan Marchenko (or Marczenko).  These documents had been in the hands of the OSI since 1978, so these US government officials knew very well that John Demjanjuk was not "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka.

One of the names Hanusiak brought to the United States was that of John Demianiuk (Demjanjuk).  His name was given to the United States Justice Department, which began an investigation of the retired Ohio auto worker.  Soon, Demianiuk was accused of being "Ivan the Terrible," a brutal guard at the Nazi Treblinka death camp.

In the horrors that took place in that camp, "Ivan the Terrible" became a legend as the cruelest of all the murderers.  After undergoing a long legal ordeal, Demianiuk was extradited to Israel where he was convicted and sentenced to death.  The collapse of the Soviet Union allowed access to KGB files in Ukraine and probably saved the man's life.  The evidence showed that "Ivan the Terrible" was Ivan Marchenko, not Demianiuk.  The Israeli court, after examining the new evidence, reversed the conviction of Demianiuk and allowed him to return to the United States.

The question is - Who was Marchenko?  He was a Soviet prisoner of war who had volunteered to work for the Nazis as a camp guard.  A 1961 KGB report on the interrogation of Sergey Vasylyenko revealed that Marchenko was the man the Jews in the camp called "Ivan the Terrible."

According to Vasylyenko, "He exhibited special savagery in dealing with people in the killing process, he killed people with an obvious satisfaction and beat them with whatever was at hand and however he fancied."  More importantly, the KGB knew that toward the end of the war that Marchenko had gone to Yugoslavia and joined with Tito's communist partisans.  He remained in Yugoslavia after the war and the KGB knew of his whereabouts in 1948-1949.

Cleared by Israel of being Treblinka's 'Ivan the Terrible,' John Demjanjuk has now been indicted in Germany for mass murder at Sobibor.  [...]

"That's Ivan," gasped Josef Czarny more than 30 years ago, when he was first shown a photograph of John Demjanjuk, a big, round-faced Ukrainian-born American, who was then in his mid-50s. "My God, he lives."

Czarny, a survivor of Treblinka, first identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible," who ran the death camp's gas chambers, from a selection of photographs of Ukrainian immigrants to America, sent to Israel by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service.  [...]

Pinhas Epstein, another Treblinka survivor, also testified against Demjanjuk, emphatic that here was the sadistic "Ivan" who took "satisfaction and gratification" from breaking the bones of his victims.

Eliahu Rosenberg described "Ivan" Demjanjuk whipping and chopping noses, ears and other bits of flesh off Jews with his sword.  He, too, when Demjanjuk was desperately appealing conviction and sentence — a sentence that would have made Demjanjuk the second man, after Hitler's Final Solution "architect" Adolf Eichmann, to be executed by Israel for Nazi war crimes — insisted that this was no case of mistaken identity.

There were others.  Other survivors who identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan" and testified to his acts of terrible, sadistic cruelty — the way he would smash his victims' skulls with a piece of iron piping, the relish with which he pumped carbon monoxide into the gas chambers.

But Czarny was wrong, and Epstein was wrong, and Rosenberg was wrong.  The "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka notoriety was a man named Ivan Marchenko.  [...]

And so the court overturned Demjanjuk's conviction as "Ivan the Terrible," ruled that he had already served the seven-year jail sentence due a member of a Nazi organization — as a guard who had served at Sobibor as a cog in the genocidal machine — and ordered him deported.

"The Supreme Court lost its nerve," says Efraim Zuroff, the Nazi-hunter who heads the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel office and who vainly appealed to the Supreme Court to try Demjanjuk for his Sobibor crimes.  "No, John Demjanjuk was not 'Ivan the Terrible,'" says Zuroff.  "He was another terrible Ivan."

He was deported to Israel where he was identified by survivors in Israel as "Ivan the Terrible," a Ukrainian staff member at Treblinka.

Demjanjuk was found guilty of crimes against humanity at both Sobibor and Treblinka.  He was sentenced to death in Israel in 1987.

He spent seven years in prison but after launching an appeal, claiming mistaken identity, he was acquitted in 1993.

Demjanjuk has already been the victim of mistaken identify once, when he was tried in the 1980s in Israel on accusations he was the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp.

His conviction and death sentence were overturned when it was determined someone else was that guard.

Traficant advocated on behalf of Demjanjuk when the retired autoworker was jailed in Israel from 1986 to 1993 on charges that he was "Ivan the Terrible," a mass murderer at Treblinka.

After initially convicting him, the Israeli prosecution later uncovered compelling evidence that another man was Ivan and shared this with the court, which released Demjanjuk.

The prosecution claimed that Demjanjuk was a notorious prison guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp during World War II. On this basis, Demjanjuk was convicted by the Israeli court of crimes against humanity.  However, in August 1993, the conviction overturned by Israel's Supreme Court on a finding of reasonable doubt.

He was sentenced to death by an Israeli court two decades ago after he was convicted of being the feared death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible" who would hack at naked prisoners with a sword and inflict cruel and sadistic punishments on them.

That ruling was overturned in 1993 when statements from other guards identified another man as the Ivan.

I once met John Demjanjuk.  We did not speak but the memory will haunt me for ever.  It was July 1993, five years after the Ukrainian peasant-turned-SS trooper was sentenced to death in Israel for being “Ivan the Terrible”, a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp, where 870,000 Jews were gassed.  [...]

But in 1981 Israeli war crime investigators supplied US immigration with evidence of his deception and he was stripped of his US citizenship, extradited to Israel in 1986, and tried and convicted two years later.  Then, as Demjanjuk's lawyer appealed, the prosecution took advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the opening of Soviet archives.  They went to Russia expecting to find the smoking gun that would finally put an end to Ivan the Terrible.

The wartime papers confirmed that Demjanjuk had indeed gone over to the dark side but there was nothing about Treblinka.  The prosecutor felt duty bound to hand the exculpatory evidence to the defence; at the 1993 trial, the judges set Demjanjuk free.

In 1986, he was sent to Israel, tried, convicted and sentenced to death for being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously cruel guard who ran the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp, also in Poland.  But evidence from Soviet files indicated that another man, Ivan Marchenko, was Ivan the Terrible.  Demjanjuk's conviction was overturned in 1993, and he returned to the United States.

Demjanjuk was stripped of his US citizenship and extradited to Israel in 1986, when the US Justice Department believed he was the sadistic Nazi guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” from Treblinka.  Eighteen survivors, five of whom testified at his trial, identified him as a guard at the camp, where an estimated 850,000 prisoners died.  He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1988.

That conviction and death sentence were overturned by the Supreme Court in August 1993 after it received newly available evidence from Soviet archives that another Ukrainian, Ivan Marchenko, was “Ivan the Terrible.”

Mr. Demjanjuk was extradited from the United States to Israel in 1986, accused of being "Ivan the Terrible", a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.  He was sentenced to death in 1988 but his conviction was overturned when new evidence showed another man was probably "Ivan".

It was intended as an object lesson for Israelis too young to remember the Holocaust.  On national television four years ago, an Israeli court tried a retired Cleveland autoworker as the sadistic "Ivan the Terrible" who had gassed thousands of Jews at Treblinka.  John Demjanjuk was convicted and ordered hanged.  But now new evidence suggests Israel may have the wrong man — a suspected low-level collaborator instead of a major war criminal.  "It would have been a lot better if this trial had never taken place," wrote an Israeli columnist last week as the country's Supreme Court finished hearing testimony at Demjanjuk's appeal.  Some of the new evidence:

Witnesses:

In the original trial, five Treblinka survivors identified Demjanjuk as the guard who had hacked at victims with a sword as they filed into the carbon-monoxide chambers.  But Demjanjuk's son later unearthed contradictory testimony from 37 Red Army troops who had served as Nazi death-camp guards after being taken prisoner.  Soviet archives revealed that under interrogation after the war they had identified Ivan the Terrible as Ivan Marchenko, a man nine years older than Demjanjuk.  "Identity is the heart of the case," says Demjanjuk's attorney, Yoram Sheftel.  "Everything else is irrelevant."

This is the man who was prosecuted as Ivan the Terrible, a notorious concentration-camp guard, and sentenced to death, only to have Israel’s Supreme Court overturn the conviction, saying that it had been a case of mistaken identity.

Clearly skeptical judges of Israel's Supreme Court heard the defense charge today that John Demjanjuk was the victim of a conspiracy by United States and Israeli authorities intent on convicting him as the barbarous "Ivan the Terrible" of the Treblinka death camp.  [...]

From the Soviet files, Mr. Sheftel has produced statements from 21 former Treblinka guards who identified "Ivan" as one Ivan Marchenko, who was older and more dark-haired than Mr. Demjanjuk and who had a scar on his cheek or neck.  In their accounts, there was no mention of Mr. Demjanjuk, who had been identified as "Ivan" at his 1988 trial by five Treblinka survivors.

Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 for being "Ivan the Terrible", a sadistic Nazi guard, but after five years on death row the conviction was overturned when Israel established it had the wrong man.

He was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 after being identified as the camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" in the Treblinka death camp.  But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction five years later on the basis of new evidence.

In 1977, Demjanjuk was accused of being "Ivan the Terrible," a sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp, and was deported to Israel.  [...]

The retired autoworker was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to hang for his role at Treblinka.

In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction, based on new, conflicting evidence that pointed to another man as being Ivan the Terrible.

Demjanjuk has been fighting notoriety since 1977 when former inmates at the Treblinka death camp identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" as part of a U.S. Justice Department investigation.

He was extradited from the United States to Israel in 1986 and a court there sentenced him to death in 1988.  He was released in August 1993 when the case collapsed after statements by former guards assembled by the Soviet KGB identified another man, Ivan Marchenko, as being "Ivan the Terrible".

RT:  You have been typecast as Satan’s lawyer and sometimes described as “the most hated man in Israel”.  How do you respond to these accusations?  Did you not feel that in some way you were perhaps a traitor to your own people for defending someone like him?

YS:  I defended him because I was convinced that he isn’t a Nazi.  I didn’t dispute the Holocaust, I didn’t dispute that 900,000 Jews were slaughtered in Treblinka and I didn’t dispute any of the crimes attributed to Ivan the Terrible.  I disputed only one fact — the man is not Ivan the Terrible.  That was my case, nothing else.  [...]

RT:  Why?  Why was it so important for them to convict him?

YS:  Very simple.  This is a typical bureaucratic blunder.  The OSI was established in 1976, very short time afterwards they discovered Ivan the Terrible.  Within months they became a whole big apparatus with big government funding, employees, bosses and whatever.  And when twelve months later the Soviets told them: Look, you got it all wrong.  And they sent them the material which proves that Ivan the Terrible is not Ivan Demjanjuk.  Then they simply concealed it because they simply didn't what to decrease the size of their bureaucratic empire.  It’s as simple as that.  And then other bodies for political and other reasons collaborated with them, and specifically of course Israel, which thought that the Demjanjuk case would be the second Eichmann trial.

RT:  Yes, the only person ever to be hanged in Israel was Adolf Eichmann.  Do you think that in this case Israel was seeking justice with Demjanjuk or do you think it was just another Nazi show trial?

YS:  Maybe both at the beginning, but when they found out that there is a mistake instead of admitting the mistake and asking forgiveness of all those who were hurt and injured because of this mistake, they chose to proceed with this farce.

RT:  Why do you think Israel decided to proceed?

YS:  Because they, our legal establishment, could not and were not able to admit the mistake.  I state in the book as one of the reasons I took the case was in order to take on our legal establishment which I was sick and tired of already over twenty years ago.  [...]

RT:  How did you win the case?  Was it based on the technicality?

YS:  Not at all.  I don’t think there has ever been a conviction in a major trial in the 20th century completely crushed as the new evidence which consisted of 80 statements in real time from 1944 till 1955 of 37 watchmen of Treblinka, interviewed and interrogated by the Soviet Union.  All of them pointed at Ivan Marchenko as one of the two operators of the gas chambers.  We have a picture of him, we have his Nazi ID card and there is no resemblance, not in the way they look, not in their age, not in their personal status, not in the place they lived.  It’s two totally different individuals that have nothing to do one with the other.

RT:  Who do you think is Ivan the Terrible? Marchenko?

YS:  We know exactly.  We know exactly not only who Ivan the Terrible is, but we also know exactly where to look for him.  Because, with the evidence I produced, there was one testimony of Treblinka watchman who saw Ivan the Terrible in the north of Italy, north of Yugoslavia — the border of Italy and Yugoslavia — in April 1945 saying he has no intention whatsoever to go back to the Soviet Union.  He had a Yugoslavian ex-partisan girlfriend and he planned to settle in one of the villages around of the city of Fiome.  And since we produced this evidence, no one tried to look for him there.

RT:  But that seems absurd.

YS:  You know why?  As long as we don’t have the blood and the flesh or the body or the bones of Ivan the Terrible, people can say “Yes, it’s technicalities and so on and actually Demjanjuk is actually Ivan the Terrible”.  Once you found Ivan Marchenko even dead, you can’t say so anymore.  Therefore no one looks for him.

Demjanjuk had his U.S. citizenship revoked in 1981 after the Justice Department alleged he hid his past as the notorious Treblinka guard "Ivan the Terrible."  He was extradited to Israel, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1988, only to have the conviction overturned five years later as a case of mistaken identity.

In 1987, Demjanjuk was put on trial in Israel after being extradited by US authorities.  Survivors of the Treblinka death camp had recognized him in a photograph and identified him as a guard nicknamed “Ivan the Terrible.”  Even in Treblinka, a hellish place where 900,000 people died, the guard had stood out as a monster.  He used his bayonet to slice off the breasts of doomed women, and he started the motor from which the exhaust gases were piped into the gas chambers.

But the case ended in an acquittal on appeal, after a lower court had already sentenced Demjanjuk to death by hanging.  A TV reporter for the American CBS network tracked down a woman in a village near Treblinka who admitted to having been a lover of Ivan the Terrible.  The woman claimed that the sadistic guard’s surname was Marchenko, and both guards and survivors from the camp later confirmed that this was true.  The Israeli prosecutor Michael Shaked found evidence in Russian and German archives that destroyed his own case.  The survivors had been mistaken. Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible.

In 1993, after several years in solitary confinement, he was acquitted and returned to the United States, which reinstated his citizenship, setting a precedent in the history of American public administration.

It was a bitter setback for the US Justice Department.  Its Office of Special Investigations (OSI), created in 1979 “to investigate and prosecute participants in World War II-era acts of Nazi-sponsored persecution,” had spearheaded Demjanjuk’s extradition to Israel.  Now the OSI investigators were forced to admit, in a court investigation, that they had “acted on a preconception” and had “deceived” the courts by withholding two pieces of testimony and a list of camp guards that documented the true identity of Ivan the Terrible.

In 1987, Demjanjuk was put on trial in Israel after being extradited by US authorities.  Survivors of the Treblinka death camp had recognized him in a photograph and identified him as a guard nicknamed "Ivan the Terrible."  Even in Treblinka, a hellish place where 900,000 people died, the guard had stood out as a monster.  He used his bayonet to slice off the breasts of doomed women, and he started the motor from which the exhaust gases were piped into the gas chambers.

But the case ended in an acquittal on appeal, after a lower court had already sentenced Demjanjuk to death by hanging.  A TV reporter for the American CBS network tracked down a woman in a village near Treblinka who admitted to having been a lover of Ivan the Terrible.  The woman claimed that the sadistic guard's surname was Marchenko, and both guards and survivors from the camp later confirmed that this was true.  The Israeli prosecutor Michael Shaked found evidence in Russian and German archives that destroyed his own case.  The survivors had been mistaken.  Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible.

Former inmates at the Treblinka death camp identified Mr Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible" at the end of the 1970s.

He was extradited from the United States to Israel in 1986 after being accused of being the infamous "Ivan the Terrible".

Sentenced to death by an Israeli court in 1988, he was released in August 1993 when the case collapsed after statements by former guards assembled by the Soviet KGB identified another man, Ivan Marchenko, as being "Ivan the Terrible".

The wanted man was one of the most loathsome creatures of modern times: "Ivan the Terrible," who hacked at his naked victims with a sword as he herded them by the thousands into the gas chambers he operated at the Nazi death camp Treblinka.  American and Israeli officials were certain they had found him in John, formerly Ivan, Demjanjuk, a retired suburban Cleveland autoworker of Ukrainian descent.  He was extradited to Israel in 1986, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and condemned to hang after a dramatic trial that transfixed the nation.  [...]

Doubts about the case intensified last month when a U.S. federal judge, appointed to investigate where Justice Department officials had mishandled their prosecution of Demjanjuk concluded that there was "substantial doubt" he was Ivan the Terrible.  [...]

At the time of Demjanjuk's denaturalization, extradition and conviction, they did not have the full body of evidence available today: statements made to Soviet authorities by 32 former guards and five forced laborers at Treblinka, all hailing from what was then the Soviet Union.  They said a man named Ivan Marchenko was the Ivan of Treblinka.

Demjanjuk had his U.S. citizenship revoked in 1981 after the Justice Department alleged he hid his past as the notorious Treblinka guard "Ivan the Terrible." He was extradited to Israel, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1988, only to have the conviction overturned five years later as a case of mistaken identity.

I've periodically written about Demjanjuk for 25 years, and was upset when he was deported to Israel where he was put on trial in 1988 as the sadistic guard, "Ivan the Terrible," at Treblinka death camp.  Demjanjuk was sentenced to be hanged.

Upsetting was evidence that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible — that witnesses were wrong, and that one Ivan Marchenko was the Treblinka guard, and he had died in Trieste.

In the horrors that took place in that camp, "Ivan the Terrible" became a legend as the cruelest of all the murderers.  After undergoing a long legal ordeal, Demianiuk was extradited to Israel where he was convicted and sentenced to death.  The collapse of the Soviet Union allowed access to KGB files in Ukraine and probably saved the man's life.  The evidence showed that "Ivan the Terrible" was Ivan Marchenko, not Demianiuk.  The Israeli court, after examining the new evidence, reversed the conviction of Demianiuk and allowed him to return to the United States.

The question is — Who was Marchenko? He was a Soviet prisoner of war who had volunteered to work for the Nazis as a camp guard.  A 1961 KGB report on the interrogation of Sergey Vasylyenko revealed that Marchenko was the man the Jews in the camp called "Ivan the Terrible."

According to Vasylyenko, "He exhibited special savagery in dealing with people in the killing process, he killed people with an obvious satisfaction and beat them with whatever was at hand and however he fancied."  More importantly, the KGB knew that toward the end of the war that Marchenko had gone to Yugoslavia and joined with Tito's communist partisans.  He remained in Yugoslavia after the war and the KGB knew of his whereabouts in 1948-1949.

In the summer of 1948, Stalin broke with Tito.  Soviet propaganda accused Tito, who remained a committed communist, of being a fascist.  In October 1949, the New York County Communist Party issued a Discussion Outline and Study Guide entitled The Struggle Against the Tito Fascists — Agents of Imperialism.

This theme permeated worldwide Soviet propaganda.  However, KGB propaganda never pointed out that the Tito government was harboring Ivan Marchenko, the Nazi war criminal known as "Ivan the Terrible."  This issue raises the question as to whether Marchenko was not in fact a Soviet agent carrying out his atrocities on the order of the NKVD (KGB).  We know of other cases where KGB operatives pretended to be anti-communists and carried out atrocities to blame them on their enemies and seize the moral high ground.

The five judges said Mr. Demjanjuk is not the notorious Treblinka death camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" — thus supporting Mr. Demjanjuk's steadfast claim that he was a victim of mistaken identity — and overturned his 1988 death sentence.

Chief Justice Meir Shamgar read the verdict, which stated that there now is "reasonable doubt" that Mr. Demjanjuk was "Ivan" due to recently unearthed evidence that implicates another man, Ivan Marchenko, as the brutal wachmann.

In 1986, he was extradited to Israel where he was convicted and sentenced to death for being "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious guard at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.

After the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1993, Demjanjuk was allowed to return to his home near Cleveland and his U.S. citizenship was restored.

Demjanjuk was tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.  He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity but the conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

That decision came after Israel won access to Soviet archives, which had depositions given after the war by 37 Treblinka guards and forced laborers who said "Ivan" was a different Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko.

In 1981, Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker living in Cleveland, was stripped of his citizenship because of suspected crimes committed at Treblinka.  It was alleged that he was "Ivan the Terrible," the sadistic operator of the gas chambers where 850,000 people died from 1942-43.  Ivan was one of the most notorious war criminals, the ultimate collaborator who tortured, raped and maimed victims prior to their gassing.

Extradited to Israel, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death in 1988.  The main evidence during the 14-month trial was the testimony of five Holocaust survivors.

Not since the trial of Adolph Eichmann had the world's attention been so riveted on a court case.  Sessions were well attended and publicized in the international media.

It was on appeal to Israel's Supreme Court that new evidence surfaced.  Depositions by Treblinka guards which came to light after the demise of the Soviet Union pointed to another man, whereabouts unknown, as the real Ivan the Terrible.  Finding reasonable doubt, a unanimous Israeli court set Demjanjuk free and spared his life.

From the outset, Demjanjuk's defence was mistaken identity.  It was a unique case which turned on the issue of the identity of a war criminal, Ivan the Terrible, acknowledged to have committed atrocities.  The acquittal rested on particular evidence and a particular defence — it is not indicative of the result in other cases given different facts.

Nor does the decision suggest a weakness in Israel's justice system, but a great strength.  The outcome demonstrates the independence of the Israeli judiciary, regardless of social or political pressure.

Mr. Demjanjuk had been extradited in the 1980s by the U.S. for trial in Israel on charges that he was the brutal guard at Treblinka nicknamed "Ivan the Terrible."  He was convicted in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and spent seven years in prison until Israel's Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1993 — ruling that another person was "Ivan the Terrible."

1988: Demjanjuk sentenced to death after being found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

1993: Israel's Supreme Court rules 5-0 that Demjanjuk was not "Ivan the Terrible."

On April 18, 1988, a three-judge Israeli court found John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born former autoworker from Cleveland, guilty of being "Ivan the Terrible," the sadistic executioner at the Nazi death camp of Treblinka.  He was sentenced to death.  [...]

Now, however, Demjanjuk's defenders argue they have overwhelming proof that, whatever his record during the Nazis' extermination of European Jewry, he was not the savage operator of the gas chambers, whom prisoners at Treblinka called Ivan the Terrible.

The testimony, obtained by the Israeli prosecutors in March and submitted to the Supreme Court in August, consists of 21 statements by former guards at Treblinka, a camp in eastern Poland where the Nazis killed at least 900,000 Jews.

The guards, who were interrogated by the Soviet KGB, then tried and convicted of war crimes, all identified Ivan the Terrible as being a Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko — a man whose appearance, age, birthplace, war record and eventual fate all differ substantially from Demjanjuk's.

He was deported to Israel in 1986 and later sentenced to death there in 1988 for war crimes, based on his identification by Israeli Holocaust survivors as "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious SS guard at the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps during the period 1942–1943 who committed murder and acts of extraordinarily savage violence against camp prisoners.  His conviction for crimes against humanity was later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993 due to a finding of reasonable doubt based on evidence suggesting that Demjanjuk was not "Ivan the Terrible" and had, in fact, been a guard at camps besides the one at Treblinka.  [...]

The principal allegation was that Demjanjuk was "Ivan Grozny" or "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, who operated the diesel engines sending gas to the death chamber.  [...]

On July 29, 1993, five Israeli Supreme Court judges overturned the guilty verdict on appeal.  Their ruling was based on the written statements of former guards at Treblinka that identified Ivan the Terrible as "Ivan Marchenko."

He was sentenced to death in Israel in 1988 after being identified as the camp guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" in the Treblinka death camp.  But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction five years later on the basis of new evidence.

He was previously found guilty in Israel of being "Ivan the Terrible", a particularly sadistic death camp guard at Treblinka, but released after the Israeli Supreme Court established they had the wrong man.