Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 10, 2016

How Justice Caught Up with Ivan Demjanjuk

The Right Wrong Man.

In 1984, a U.S. court, having concluded that John (né Ivan) Demjanjuk had served as a guard at the Sobibor and Treblinka death camps, stripped him of his citizenship and extradited him to Israel. There he was tried and convicted of being the notoriously sadistic guard known to Treblinka’s prisoners as “Ivan the Terrible.” But when new evidence came to light that Ivan the Terrible was someone else, Demjanjuk was returned to the U.S. and given back his citizenship—until a new case was built against him and he was sent to stand trial in Germany. Reviewing Lawrence Douglas’s book about Demjanjuk, titled The Right Wrong Man, Kevin P. Spicer explains what made the second trial different:

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