On Monday, October 10, at 7:30 pm, in Textor 101, Dr. Lawrence Douglas will speak about John (Ivan) Demjanjuk, who was the subject of the lengthiest and most bizarre criminal case to arise out of the Holocaust. On Monday, October 10, at 7:30 pm, in Textor 101, Dr. Lawrence Douglas will speak about John (Ivan) Demjanjuk, who was the subject of the lengthiest and most bizarre criminal case to arise out of the Holocaust.
Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian who served in the Red Army, was captured by the Germans and then worked for them as a concentration camp guard. After the end of World War II, he made his way to the United States, where he spent most of his adult life in Cleveland. He was eventually accused of being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously vicious guard at the Treblinka death camp. He was tried four times: twice in the United States on immigration charges; once, in Israel, where his initial conviction was thrown out when the Israeli Supreme Court examined new evidence and found that it could not be proven that he had worked at Treblinka; and finally in Germany, where a Munich court convicted him in 2011 of having served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp. He was convicted on the charge of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder, and sentenced to five years in prison, but he died in March, 2012, before his appeals had been exhausted, and so did not serve a prison term.
Lawrence Douglas, the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought at Amherst College, covered Demjanjuk’s Munich trial for Harper’s and his recently published book, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial, builds on that reportage to show the historic importance of the enormous effort to bring Demjanjuk to justice.
Professor Douglas's talk is cosponsored by Legal Studies, History, and Hillel, and is funded by generous alumni donors.
Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Rebecca Lesses at rlesses@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3556. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.
Interview on New England Public Radio with Professor Douglas: http://nepr.net/news/2012/04/06/lawrence-douglas-case-john-demjanjuk/
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20160926155349337