HY 150 BISK JEAN FRANÇOIS STEINER TREBLINKA http

HY 150 BISK
JEAN FRANÇOIS STEINER
TREBLINKA
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150bisktreblinka.htm

The crucial goal of all my courses is to create an environment where you, as the student, can begin to feel comfortable taking responsibility for your own education

Yiddish Glossary for Treblinka
Yiskaddal veyiskaddish: said in mourning or in memory of someone who has died.
Golem: a frightening creature that brings about doom
Sh’ma Yisroel: a prayer of dedication to God.
Maleh Rachamim: a memorial or mourning for a person
Nielah: part of the prayer service for Yom Kippur
Mitzvah: a good thing
Kaddish: glorifying something; a blessing prayer
Pilpul: a question about a text, a question about the Talmud, sacred Judaic documents (the Torah)

A Scholar's Legal Peril in Poland

Princeton Historian Could Face Criminal Charges Over Book

By Craig Whitlock

Washington Post Foreign Service

Friday, January 18, 2008; Page A14

WARSAW—Polish prosecutors are considering taking the unusual step of filing criminal charges against an Ivy League professor for "slandering the Polish nation" in a book that describes how Poles victimized Jewish survivors of the Holocaust after World War II.

Jan T. Gross, a Princeton University historian and native Polish Jew, has raised hackles here with the publication of Fear. The book recounts Poland's chaotic postwar years in which Jews, who barely survived the brutal Nazi occupation under the Germans, often went on to suffer further abuse at the hands of their Polish neighbors.

First published in 2006 in the United States, reviewers found it praiseworthy. Gross's work, however, generated bitter feelings among many Poles who accused him of using inflammatory language and unfairly stereotyping the entire population as anti-Semitic. When publishers released the Polish-language edition of his book here last Friday, prosecutors wasted no time in announcing that he was under investigation.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office in Krakow, which is handling the case, said she expected a decision this week on whether to press charges against Gross or summon him for questioning.

Poland adopted the law in question in 2006, around the time Fear appeared in English. Gross and some other historians say the law was partly a response to the book. The measure prohibits anyone from asserting that "the Polish nation" was complicit in crimes or atrocities committed by Nazis or Communists. The maximum penalty is three years' imprisonment.

The threat of legal action has not deterred Gross so far. He arrived in Warsaw on Monday for a nationwide tour to promote his book, which has already sold out in some stores. In an interview, he said he doubts prosecutors will charge him. "It's completely bizarre," he said, relishing the attention. "There's an old saying in Polish that if God wants to punish someone, he takes away their brains first."

Poland has prosecuted Gross for his views before. When a student in 1968, the Communist regime arrested him for participating in a free-speech movement, and he served five months in prison. He left for the United States a year later, taking advantage of a Polish government policy that encouraged Jews to leave the country. He enrolled at Yale University and ultimately became a US citizen.

In 2001, as a scholar, he provoked an intense public reckoning in Poland by publishing Neighbors, about a 1941 pogrom in the town of Jedwabne. Uncovering new evidence, he documented how Polish villagers massacred hundreds of Jews in an atrocity previously blamed on the Nazis. Although the book caused an uproar, an official historical commission endorsed by the government corroborated its findings.

Many Polish historians find Gross's most recent book less enamoring. But several have slammed the authorities for even thinking about taking the Princeton professor to court, saying it makes the country look backward. "As a historian, I simply consider it a scandal," said Pawel Machcewicz, a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences. "It jeopardizes the standing of Poland as a democratic nation. We must demonstrate that we are not afraid of any historical truths, no matter how devastating."

At the same time, Machcewicz and other scholars have strongly criticized Fear, arguing that Gross has sought to inflame public opinion by exaggerating the Polish attacks on Jews as "ethnic cleansing." They also said he ignored how ethnic and religious recriminations after the war w filled Polish society and that many Catholics, Poles, and Ukrainians also found themselves the target of violence. "I'm not going to say most of his facts are wrong," said Machcewicz. "It is true: Polish anti-Semitism existed. There were pogroms. Many Jews were killed. There is no reason to deny it or hide it. . . . But the language he used is counterproductive."

Poland's tragic wartime history remains a sensitive topic here. The Nazis exterminated an estimated three million Jews in Poland, or about 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population. But the Germans also killed three million other Poles, and many people see them as forgotten victims in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Many Poles are still reluctant to engage in an open discussion of those years. Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the archbishop of Krakow, suggested this week that the publisher of the Polish-language edition of Fear, a printing house with close ties to the church, had made a mistake. "Your task is to promulgate the truth on history and not to wake up demons of anti-Polishness and anti-Semitism at the same time," he said. "Reading the book filled me with pain."

Andrzej Paczkowski, a well-known Polish historian and board member of the Institute of National Remembrance, said Gross had succeeded in stirring up emotions but questioned whether the public debate would do much good. "This book is as much for psychologists as historians," he said. "I think in this case he's not a good teacher. If you want to persuade someone of your own opinion, in my view, you should avoid scandals and media circuses and instead slowly show the course of events by relying on facts."

As he prepared to launch his book tour, Gross said the hostile reaction had not surprised him. "The memories of the war here are fixed, of people being victims and heroes," he said. "The truth is that European societies during the war did not behave as they'd like to think toward Jews." He also said the risk of a legal backlash or any other dangers did not intimidate him. Next week, he is to make a public appearance in Krakow, the city where prosecutors are weighing legal action.

"People have warned me that I should worry and not walk at night alone, but I don't feel any threats," he said. At the same time, with his photograph in dozens of newspapers and magazines these days, he admitted to wearing a hat to disguise himself on the streets. "We'll see what happens," he said with a shrug.

Historian Pleads Guilty to Holocaust Denial
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 20, 2006

VIENNA, Austria (AP)—Right-wing British historian David Irving pleaded guilty Monday to denying the Holocaust and was sentenced to three years in prison, even after conceding he wrongly said there were no Nazi gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Irving, handcuffed and wearing a navy blue suit, arrived in court carrying a copy of one of his most controversial books –“Hitler's War,” which challenges the extent of the Holocaust.

“I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz,” Irving told the court before his sentencing, at which he faced up to 10 years in prison. He also expressed sorrow “for all the innocent people who died during the Second World War.” But he insisted he never wrote a book about the Holocaust, which he called “just a fragment of my area of interest. In no way did I deny the killings of millions of people by the Nazis,” testified Irving, who has written nearly 30 books.

The court said Irving had three days to appeal his sentence. His lawyer did not immediately say whether he planned to do so.

Irving, 67, has been in custody since his November arrest on charges stemming from two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989 in which he was accused of denying the Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews. He has contended that most of those who died at concentration camps such as Auschwitz succumbed to diseases such as typhus rather than execution.

The convicted Irving after his guilty plea under the 1992 law, which applies to “whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.”

Irving's trial came amid new—and fierce—debate over freedom of expression in Europe, where the printing and reprinting of unflattering caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad has triggered deadly protests worldwide.

Irving's lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, said last month the controversial Third Reich historian was getting up to 300 pieces of fan mail a week from supporters around the world and was writing his memoirs in detention under the working title “Irving's War.”

Irving was arrested Nov. 11 in the southern Austrian province of Styria on a warrant issued in 1989. He was charged under a federal law that makes it a crime to publicly diminish, deny or justify the Holocaust. Irving had tried to win his provisional release on $24,000 bail, but a Vienna court refused, saying it considered him a flight risk. Within two weeks of his arrest, he asserted through his lawyer that he had come to acknowledge the existence of Nazi-era gas chambers. Before the trial began, Irving told reporters he now acknowledges that the Nazis systematically slaughtered Jews during World War II. “History is like a constantly changing tree,” he said.

In the past, however, he has claimed that Adolf Hitler knew little if anything about the Holocaust, and he has been quoted as saying there was “not one shred of evidence” the Nazis carried out their “Final Solution” to exterminate the Jewish population on such a massive scale.

Vienna's national court, where the trial is being held, ordered the balcony gallery closed to prevent projectiles from being thrown down at the bench, the newspaper Die Presse reported Sunday. It quoted officials as saying they were bracing for Irving's supporters to give him the Nazi salute or shout out pro-Hitler slogans during the trial.

In 2000, Irving sued American Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt for libel in a British court but lost. The presiding judge in that case, Charles Gray, wrote that Irving was “an active Holocaust denier ... anti-Semitic and racist.”

Irving has had numerous run-ins with the law over the years. In 1992, a judge in Germany fined him the equivalent of $6,000 for publicly insisting the Nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz were a hoax.

Also read the two articles below.
Remember what we’ve discussed about "Myth." Also, learn to beware of polemical pieces dressed in “academic regalia”—that is, they look and feel at first like objective, scholarly works with footnotes, bibliographies, and the seemingly objective tone we associate with scholarship. Readers must rigorously question everything they read. Then they can spot internal contradictions (that is, poor logic or contradictory or incompatible claims within the document) and external contradictions (that is, facts presented as true that are questionable because of information based on other sources).

Jean-François Steiner’s Bodyguard of Lies

Adapted from:
THE REVISIONIST
Encouraging an Open Debate on the Holocaust Question
By Orest Slepokura

Jean-François Steiner’s 1966 book Treblinka purports to be a factual account of what happened at the German concentration camp during the Second World War. It was, he says, based on the eyewitness testimony of 40 of the 600 inmates who escaped during the August 2, 1943 prisoner uprising. In the Afterword, Steiner explains that in order "To reconstruct the history of Treblinka we have relied almost solely on the testimony of the survivors." [1]

In the Preface, no less an authority than feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir vouches for the veracity of the content: "Written and oral testimony he has collected and compared substantiates each detail." [2] In the Introduction, Terrence Des Pres states that "Treblinka is as close to the facts as we are likely to come." [3]

Limited concessions Steiner owes to having made to fictional reconstructions include the dialogue between the prisoners. He did this, he said, to give a storyline momentum and sense of immediacy to the action. He used pseudonyms for the actual names of Treblinka survivors and reconstructed several scenes—but always, he says, based on eyewitness testimony he gathered from Treblinka survivors. Verbs like "relied...upon" and "substantiated," and phrases such as "close to the facts" and "reconstruct the history," all project an honest effort to reach for factual truth. But as Steiner informed OSI attorney, Betty Shave, the most important part of his book actually consisted of make-believe fantasies.

OSI stands for Office of Special Investigations, the Nazi-hunting arm of the US Justice Department. Steiner was corresponding with OSI lawyers in 1984, because he insisted he had written a factually accurate account of the Treblinka uprising; coming, "as close to the facts as we are likely to come." OSI lawyers were then seeking to extradite the retired Cleveland autoworker, John Demjanjuk, to Israel. They claimed Demjanjuk was a sadistic Treblinka guard going by the moniker of "Ivan the Terrible" and they were keenly interested in this pivotal scene in Steiner’s book, describing Ivan’s apparent murder at the hands of a Jewish prisoner:

Adolf is running toward the gas chambers. He is going to set fire to them. Suddenly Ivan, the sadistic giant, appears in his path. The Ukrainian seems a little bewildered, surprised, but not frightened. His black eyes stare at Adolf, Adolf’s hands, Adolf’s belt, looking for a possible weapon. They do not see one. Ivan decides not to draw his revolver. His knees slightly flexed, his hands open, he waits for the little Jew who keeps running toward him. Ivan smiles. He is completely at ease in his skin, in his body rich with blood, flesh and muscle. He blocks without flinching when Adolf tries to butt him in the stomach. Knotting both hands around Adolf’s throat, crushing him with his full weight, he begins to strangle him. He dies in the act. One minute later, when Djielo reaches his friend’s body, he will see first the wide back of the Ukrainian, and then the dagger planted in it with Adolf’s hand still clutching the handle. Adolf’s dead body is covered by Ivan’s, but in his eyes is an expression not usually found on the faces of strangled men. It is as if, at the very moment he died, Adolf felt only the immense joy of knowing that he had finally managed to unsheathe the Ukrainian’s dagger and had dealt him a mortal wound. [4]

Steiner assured OSI lawyers that the "story of his [Ivan’s] death, during the insurrection, was completely imaginary." [5] Likewise, almost completely imaginary were the details surrounding his portrayal of the August 1943 Jewish prisoners’ uprising: "Being unable, in the course of my investigation, to gather but very few accounts of the final insurrection [Steiner wrote}, I found myself ... restricted to imagining the details of its unfolding." "The death of Ivan," he reiterated, "is purely the product of my imagination," explaining that wishful thinking had driven him to lie. Later, he blamed co-author, Gilles Perrault, for leaning on him to crank up the melodrama in the book’s climactic scenes. [6] What he and others insisted in the book’s Introduction, Preface, and Afterword was a scholarly chronicle of certain tragic events had, in fact, been a melodramatic novel. When he wrote the most important part of his book, describing the August 2nd uprising, including a portrayal of the death of Ivan ("the Terrible"), Steiner had finally to confess that he relied almost solely on his own imagination.

Interviewed in 1986 by a French newspaper, Steiner said that his most reliable informant for all that happened at Treblinka had been a Holocaust survivor named Eliyahu Rosenberg. [7] In the interview, he noted that Rosenberg had sworn an affidavit saying prisoners had beaten Ivan to death with shovels as he slept on his bunk bed. In other words, not knifed to death standing up in an open place as described in Steiner’s book. He added that if Rosenberg claimed Ivan had been killed, there was a 99 percent likelihood that Ivan was dead. The following year, at John Demjanjuk’s trial in Jerusalem, Rosenberg, a witness for the prosecution, identified Demjanjuk as having been "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, flatly contradicting his own sworn affidavits of 1945 and 1947.

An article reevaluating Steiner’s book Treblinka recently appeared in the French journal Revue d’histoire de la Shoah. The journal made it abundantly plain that Treblinka was nothing less than a deliberate attempt to hoodwink the reader into believing the book was a real work of history: "...this false novel which was presented as a real document [chronicling] the daily reality of an extermination camp." [8]

Two words used by the resolutely anti-revisionist historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet to denounce Steiner’s imposture include "fabrication" and "forgery." [9] Vidal-Naquet, obviously angry at having been duped, also uncharitably qualified Steiner’s book as "un piège tendu," meaning a booby-trap. Other readers, including many formerly sympathetic and supportive scholars and journalists now, of course, complain bitterly of having been intentionally deceived by Steiner and his novel-as-true-history on the Treblinka concentration camp. Shades of Binjamin Wilkomirski and his allegedly, till recently much ballyhooed, genuine book of "memoirs," Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood!

Notes:
1. Jean-François Steiner, Treblinka, Mentor: New York, 1979, p. 303.
2. Ibid., p. xxii.
3. Ibid., p. xiv.
4. Ibid., pp. 296-297
5. Letter from Jean-François Steiner to OSI lawyer Betty Shave, dated February 2, 1984.
6. "J’ai fait mourir Ivan le terrible," Jean-Noel Fournier, Le Journal du Dimanche, March 30, 1986, p. 5.
7. "De ‘Treblinka’ À Bordeaux...," Didier Daeninckx, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, mai-août, 1999, pp. 98-99.
8. Ibid., p. 90.
9. Ibid.

Adapted from:
Justice Served , At Last
by Katherine Notley
http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/pakistan/83/demjanjuk/demanuk028.html
Review of Defending "Ivan the Terrible": The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk
by Yoram Sheftel
Regnery Publishing, Washington, DC 1996

Notice the language used. Sobibor, for example, is a “concentration” camp, not a “death” camp. The “Independent Hearings to Investigate the Misconduct of the US Department of Justice” was nothing more than a group of guys gathered together to promote their opinions. Notice when the author uses pejorative adjectives and verbs. When does she use positive adjectives and verbs?

There are two major facets of this book, written by John Demjanjuk’s Israeli defense attorney. First, and most prominent in Sheftel’s book is the corruption within the Israeli justice system that led it to conduct a show-trial with the sole purpose of convicting Demjanjuk as the Nazi war criminal "Ivan the Terrible." Second, but more important, is that the book reveals the depravity deep within the US Justice Department. The permanent bureaucracy accused a US citizen, known to be innocent, of being Ivan the Terrible. It stripped him of his citizenship and extradited him to Israel to stand trial on the only charges for which Israel invokes the death penalty: Nazi crimes of genocide.

The permanent bureaucracy was given a sort of formal existence with the creation of the "Nazi-hunting" agency, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), going back to its beginnings in 1978. As later described by Lyndon LaRouche, during Independent Hearings to Investigate the Misconduct of the US Department of Justice from August 31 to September 1, 1995, this permanent bureaucracy acted as a mobile political hit-squad. This is the same hearing at which Sheftel presented his riveting testimony on the Demjanjuk case. The permanent bureaucracy acted beyond any law-enforcement mission of the department or particular political appointees to neutralize opponents of the hit-squad’s employers. It was this permanent bureaucracy, in lockstep with the OSI’s collaborators in the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, that was to take LaRouche "out of action" by jailing him.

The OSI’s Geopolitical Mission
The OSI was established under the patronage of Henry Kissinger in the late 1970’s, as part of his geopolitical "condominium" with the Soviet regime. Under the arrangements between the OSI and the Soviet Procurator General’s office, US courts could accept evidence without dispute targeting US citizens from eastern Europe as Nazi war criminals. The brazenness with which the OSI collaborated with the KGB—as in the cases of Tscherim Soobzokov and Karl Linnas—were beginning to tarnish its "Nazi-hunting" image. In the former, the OSI shopped out KGB-manufactured evidence to the New York Times, which pilloried Soobzokov, who was able to prove his innocence in a suit against the Times. Notwithstanding, the Jewish Defense League subjected Soobzokov to demonstrations outside his Paterson, New Jersey home, and shortly thereafter he was killed when a pipe-bomb exploded on his front porch.

The Soviets accused Linnas of committing war crimes in his homeland, Estonia. Nonetheless, the OSI had him deported to the Soviet Union, even though the United States had never recognized Soviet rule over the Baltic States—the "the captive nations." Linnas, who had consistently claimed his innocence, conveniently died in a Soviet prison, before trial. Therefore, the OSI turned to Israel, a US ally, offering it a "really big Nazi" to try, to bolster the OSI’s flagging credibility. With the usual contribution of forged documents from the Soviet KGB, the OSI sought to have retired Cleveland auto worker John Demjanjuk denaturalized and deported to Israel to stand trial as "Ivan the Terrible." This "Ivan the Terrible" was a Ukrainian who relished his job running the diesel motor that pumped gas into the gas chambers at Treblinka, where some 870,000 Jews died.

Yoram Sheftel’s Odyssey
This is the terrain onto which Yoram Sheftel, an Israeli criminal defense attorney, stepped, when he offered to Demjanjuk’s American defense team to be his Israeli attorney. He did know then that the trial of John Demjanjuk for the crimes of "Ivan the Terrible" was "first and foremost, an American story, a story of a travesty of justice on an almost unprecedented scale."

Sheftel became interested in the Demjanjuk case in 1986. From press reports alone, he became convinced that the Israeli court intended to conduct a show-trial (of course, ending in conviction and hanging). This would be the only other Nazi war crimes trial since that of Adolf Eichmann. His suspicions of the evidence against Demjanjuk centered on two features. First, the Soviets found and kept from both the US and Israeli authorities the photo ID spread from which Treblinka survivor Elihu Rosenberg had identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. Likewise, the Soviets found the famous "Travniki document," an SS identity card bearing the photo and signature of Ivan Demjanjuk.

The questionable court evidence aside, Sheftel became convinced that the Demjanjuk case would be a show-trial because the court had rented a theater in which to conduct the trial and that it was televised live. It hardly bespeaks the impartiality of the three-judge panel (there are no jury trials in Israel), whose interest would lie in having sent Ivan the Terrible to a deserving death. Only well into the trial itself, did Sheftel discover that the judges had also retained a news-clipping service. They daily perused the news coverage in chambers—the US equivalent of having the jury reach a verdict based on TV news reports.

But Sheftel’s central focus was to discredit the contradictory testimony surrounding the photo spread identification of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, and the Travniki document. It was the two key pieces of evidence that led Sheftel, via Poland and the Soviet Union, back to the doorstep of the Office of Special Investigations. In 1976, the OSI had sent Israeli authorities the photo spread of eight men. Six were poor-quality photos of the same size. The other two were very clear and much larger photos of John Demjanjuk and Fyodor Federenko—the latter was deported to the Soviet Union and hanged in 1986. The OSI asked the Israelis to show the spread to survivors of the Sobibor concentration camp. None of the ten Israeli survivors could identify any of the men. Yet, Treblinka survivor Elihu Rosenberg tentatively identified the 1951 photo of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. In 1981, at Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial in Cleveland, Rosenberg made his identification positive. But, in 1978, Rosenberg had failed to identify any of the same photos as Ukrainian guards from Treblinka.

The tale of the so-called Travniki document is even more fascinating. Travniki was an SS training camp for Ukrainians, many of whom openly joined the Nazis. Demjanjuk had not been at Travniki: He had been a prisoner of war who was recruited into a Ukrainian division under SS command to fight the Soviets—the well-known Vlasov’s Army.

Demjanjuk’s photo and signature on the Travniki document were damning enough: The problem was, that, at the time that Ivan the Terrible was at Treblinka, the bearer of the Travniki document (presumably Ivan Demjanjuk) was some 60 miles away. Ultimately, as part of his defense, Sheftel brought in expert testimony proving the document to be a KGB forgery, that Demjanjuk’s signature had been forged, and his photo affixed after the war.

As expected, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death in April 1988.

The Supreme Court Appeal
The appellate process in Israel, in contrast to the United States, hears the facts of the case and can accept new evidence. All things being equal, Sheftel would have had to prove no more than the lower court had blatantly ignored all the evidence toward "reasonable doubt," that John Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. Sheftel knew that proving "reasonable doubt," would not be enough. He would have to find the real Ivan the Terrible. Ultimately he found that the trial led back to the United States. There the Office of Special Investigations had the proof that one Ivan Marchenko was the sadistic gas chamber diesel motor operator. But the OSI, to evade detection, had been throwing the incriminating files into a dumpster belonging to a McDonald’s restaurant across the street from their offices!

Meanwhile, the appeal went through a series of lengthy delays, because Sheftel’s co-counsel for the appeal, Dov Eitan, committed suicide and Sheftel was nearly blinded when an assailant threw acid in his face as he was leaving Eitan’s funeral. But as the delays piled up, more and more evidence came into the defense’s hands, from authorities in Poland and the Soviet Union—then undergoing the upheavals that ended in the collapse of communism—proving that Ivan Marchenko was Ivan the Terrible. Back in the United States, Demjanjuk’s family, were sifting through the files the OSI had thrown into a McDonald’s dumpster. They found a reference to a telegram from the US embassy in Moscow to the State Department on testimony about Fyodor Federenko’s activities at Treblinka. When the full cable came to light as a result of Freedom of Information Action (FOIA) requests by Rep. James Traficant (D-Ohio) to the State Department, it revealed that, in August 1978, the Office of Special Investigations had over 100 pages worth of testimony from Treblinka guards identifying Nikolai Shelaiev and Ivan Marchenko as the gas chamber operators.

One guard, Sergei Vasilienko, had identified "Marchenko Ivan, the operator of the motor of the gas chambers in Treblinka camp. The Jews in the work crews called him Ivan the Terrible. He was noted for his cruelty to the people, during the process of their extermination. He beat them with obvious enjoyment, with whatever came to his hand, however he wanted."

OSI’s ‘Fraud on the Court’
This is just a glimpse of the mountain of evidence that Sheftel presented to the Supreme Court. He showed that his client was not Ivan the Terrible and that Ivan Marchenko was. He showed that the US Justice Department had proof in its possession before it had begun denaturalization proceedings against Demjanjuk, and in full knowledge that should Demjanjuk be extradited to Israel to stand trial, he would receive the death sentence. The US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, concerned that it had upheld the extradition and denaturalization of a man whom the prosecution knew to be innocent, appointed a Special Master, Judge Thomas Wiseman, whose judgment on June 28, 1993, read: "The statements of former Treblinka guards and laborers recently obtained from the Soviet Union constitute an harmonious chorus which inculpate a man named Ivan Marchenko as the Ivan who worked at the gas chambers, and thus exculpate Mr. Demjanjuk from those specific crimes." He added that from 1978 on, the Department of Justice possessed this evidence.

On July 29, 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court handed down its 400-page decision: "We acquit the appellant by reason of doubt of all charges in the charge sheet, which involve his identification and his activity in the Treblinka extermination camp, as the man known in the camp as a guard called Ivan the Terrible .... For the reasons set out in the judgment, we did not find it appropriate to convict the appellant of any other charge at this point in the matter."

The court had no choice but to acquit. It did so, however, while rubber-stamping not only the highly questionable identification procedures carried out in Israel, but also the open collusion between the OSI and the Israeli prosecution to knowingly convict and execute an innocent man. Demjanjuk, who had been in an Israeli prison for seven years, continued to sit on death row, while the prosecution fished desperately for an excuse to try him as another guard from another camp. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio broke impasse on August 3, 1993, when it "decided to allow Demjanjuk to return to the United States, to take part personally in the inquiry into the legality of his extradition." Still it was not until September 22, 1993 that Demjanjuk would return home.

The Sixth Circuit’s Special Master had excoriated the OSI for withholding exculpating documents from the defense and the court, saying that "OSI attorneys acted with reckless disregard for the truth," and committed "fraud on the court." Even so, the permanent bureaucracy within the US Department of Justice to this day, remains unrepentant, and unpunished.

Search the WWW for "Treblinka," "Ivan (or John) Demjanjuk," "David Irving," "Historical Revisionism," and "Holocaust Denial."

JOURNAL 16 QUESTIONS

After reading Treblinka and the material above, please answer the following questions in your journal:
1. Why did Steiner write this book?
2. What was the nature of the holocaust? How did the final solution evolve? Define the phrase, “banality of evil.” How does this phrase help us understand the nature and evolution of the Holocaust?
3. Why did many Jews in Eastern Europe refuse to believe that the Holocaust was taking place?
4. What evidences of resistance to the Holocaust can you find in Treblinka? What is the significance of this resistance? What powers of resistance to the ultimate of totalitarian control (that is, death camps) do individuals have?
5. What have been the postwar consequences of the Holocaust? What other holocausts have there been in twentieth century and already in the twenty-first?
6. This book is a novelized text of history. What are the advantages and dangers of this format?
7. How does the issue of the Holocaust continue to reverberate today?
8. Briefly describe the "academic regalia" of Holocaust Denial. What purposes does "Holocaust Denial" serve? How does "History" serve political positions? The case of Ivan Demjanjuk has stirred controversy in this country—give some examples. Who is David Irving and why is he important?

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