Not going to watch it, to be honest. But I see some ignorant commentary around it, namely that there's still some kind of a lingering unresolved mystery around Demjanjuk's identity.
There simply isn't. We know for a fact that he wasn't Ivan the Terrible. Period.
Already pointed this out here, but let's recap very briefly.
The two basic facts:
1. Ivan Demjanjuk, born in 1920 in Dubovi Makharyntsi, served in the camps, including Sobibor, under his own name. We know this from the original German documents (among other things). Which means that his name in the Trawniki registration system was Demjanjuk. That would be his name in all the camps he was sent to. Not some random "Marchenko" nickname. That alone settles it.
2. Ivan Marchenko was an entirely different person with a different biography, born in Dnepropetrovsk in 1911 and had at least one daughter, Kateryna Kovalenko, who was still alive in the 1990s. Unlike Demjanjuk, he was last seen in Yugoslavia, where his traces disappear. So this settles it too. Marchenko wasn't some kind of a fluke.
Sapienti sat.
Yet some pretty ignorant dudebros, like Eli Gabay, bring up Demjanjuk writing down "Marchenko" as his mother's maiden name on some application as evidence he used an alias... Except such folks apparently cannot keep two thoughts in their head at once, since in the official Nazi system he was Demjanjuk and thus quite obviously did not use an alias. There was simply no possibility of an "alias" within a centralized system like the one they used at Trawniki (i. e. having two different surnames at once in the same system). And the guards who met Demjanjuk also remembered him as Demjanjuk in their testimonies. "Marchenko" in Ukraine is like "Smith" in the US. Demjanjuk wrote it down as his mother's maiden name because he forgot the real one (Tabachuk). Anyway, what does anyone's mother's maiden name have to do with anything in the first place? It wasn't his mother that was being accused of being Ivan the Terrible last time I checked...
But I'm sure that even the objective fact, that Ivan Marchenko was not an alias but a real person, won't stop the dudebros from repeating this meme again and again, and again. Does Ivan the Terrible crave electrolytes?
And this Gabay guy even continues digging:
Yeah, let's just ignore the fact that Demjanjuk and Marchenko were different people and let's sentence the man to death because several (far from all) survivors allegely identified him 35-40 years after the fact, and let's forget that such identifications are not only untrustworthy in principle, but even worse, the "investigators" additionally completely mucked up the identification process thus actually tampering with the survivors' memories and making them unreliable identifiers in this case. Nevermind, off to the stake with him!
Demjanjuk was a guard in the extermination camp Sobibor (and also at Majdanek and Flossenbürg). He was sentenced for being an accomplice to the murder of about 28000 Jews that were killed in the camp in the months he served there (though it should be mentioned that due to him dying before the appeals process took place he is formally innocent according to the German law). Due to the rotation of posts he probably, at some point, directly took part in unloading of the transports and driving the Jews into the gas chambers, though we don't have specific evidence for specific cases. This was also confirmed by the Wachmann Ignat Danilchenko, whose statement the court found credible after a close analysis.
The court positively excluded the possibility that Demjanjuk was also in Treblinka (due to the reasons I also gave here).
That's basically what we know.
There simply isn't. We know for a fact that he wasn't Ivan the Terrible. Period.
Already pointed this out here, but let's recap very briefly.
The two basic facts:
1. Ivan Demjanjuk, born in 1920 in Dubovi Makharyntsi, served in the camps, including Sobibor, under his own name. We know this from the original German documents (among other things). Which means that his name in the Trawniki registration system was Demjanjuk. That would be his name in all the camps he was sent to. Not some random "Marchenko" nickname. That alone settles it.
 |
| Demjanjuk |
 |
| Marchenko. |
Yet some pretty ignorant dudebros, like Eli Gabay, bring up Demjanjuk writing down "Marchenko" as his mother's maiden name on some application as evidence he used an alias... Except such folks apparently cannot keep two thoughts in their head at once, since in the official Nazi system he was Demjanjuk and thus quite obviously did not use an alias. There was simply no possibility of an "alias" within a centralized system like the one they used at Trawniki (i. e. having two different surnames at once in the same system). And the guards who met Demjanjuk also remembered him as Demjanjuk in their testimonies. "Marchenko" in Ukraine is like "Smith" in the US. Demjanjuk wrote it down as his mother's maiden name because he forgot the real one (Tabachuk). Anyway, what does anyone's mother's maiden name have to do with anything in the first place? It wasn't his mother that was being accused of being Ivan the Terrible last time I checked...
But I'm sure that even the objective fact, that Ivan Marchenko was not an alias but a real person, won't stop the dudebros from repeating this meme again and again, and again. Does Ivan the Terrible crave electrolytes?
And this Gabay guy even continues digging:
"To me, the survivor testimony was holy," said Gabay. "That was good enough for us, and should be for the Jewish state when survivors are testifying."And in the documentary:
“How could you be in Jerusualem sitting in a court of law and say that the survivors' testimony is less than a reasonable doubt?" Israeli State Prosecutor Eli Gabay says in the documentary. "To say to that survivor, 'The man you saw outside of the gas chamber for months on end killing your family? We don’t believe you. We just don’t believe you that it’s him.'”What a mindset. With such "prosecutors" it becomes more clear why the initial shameful miscarriage of justice happened in the first place.
Yeah, let's just ignore the fact that Demjanjuk and Marchenko were different people and let's sentence the man to death because several (far from all) survivors allegely identified him 35-40 years after the fact, and let's forget that such identifications are not only untrustworthy in principle, but even worse, the "investigators" additionally completely mucked up the identification process thus actually tampering with the survivors' memories and making them unreliable identifiers in this case. Nevermind, off to the stake with him!
Demjanjuk was a guard in the extermination camp Sobibor (and also at Majdanek and Flossenbürg). He was sentenced for being an accomplice to the murder of about 28000 Jews that were killed in the camp in the months he served there (though it should be mentioned that due to him dying before the appeals process took place he is formally innocent according to the German law). Due to the rotation of posts he probably, at some point, directly took part in unloading of the transports and driving the Jews into the gas chambers, though we don't have specific evidence for specific cases. This was also confirmed by the Wachmann Ignat Danilchenko, whose statement the court found credible after a close analysis.
The court positively excluded the possibility that Demjanjuk was also in Treblinka (due to the reasons I also gave here).
That's basically what we know.