"Ivan the Terrible" (born 1911) is the nickname given to a notorious guard at the Treblinka extermination camp during the Holocaust.
[2] Demjanjuk was later extradited to Germany where he was convicted in 2011 of war crimes for having served at Sobibor extermination camp.
Treblinka was managed by 20 to 25 SS overseers (Germans) and 80 to 120 Hiwi guards of various Soviet ethnicities, including Russian and Ukrainian Red army prisoners of war.
[4] An example would be Ivan Klatt, Ukrainian guard leader or a Volksdeutscher who served in the Sobibor extermination camp.
[12][13] Holocaust survivor Chil Rajchman testified that Ivan was about 25 years old at the time he worked in the camp.
[11] Ivan the Terrible used to cut off the ears of workers as they walked by, and these people were forced to continue working as they bled.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, John Demjanjuk, a retired suburban Cleveland autoworker of Ukrainian descent, was accused of being Ivan.
[16][17] One remarkable event during the trial in Israel involved a star witness for the prosecution, Eliyahu Rosenberg.
"[18] It was later revealed that Rosenberg had previously testified in a 1947 deposition that Ivan the Terrible had been killed during a prisoner uprising.
In 1944 as Allied forces approached, Marchenko and a driver named Gregory "fled in an armored car to the partisans in Yugoslavia.
[25] The Soviet documents created enough reasonable doubt to disqualify Demjanjuk, and his previous conviction was overturned.
[26] Some of the exculpatory evidence that led to Demjanjuk's release in 1993 had come to light years before and was deliberately withheld from the Israelis by the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the US Department of Justice, which had urged Israel to charge him with being Ivan the Terrible.
The prosecution, counseled by the OSI, presented documents and witnesses whose testimony was based on emotions and hysteria, but not hard evidence.
[29] On 12 May 2011, Demjanjuk was convicted pending appeal by a German criminal court of having been a guard at Sobibor extermination camp.