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Robert "Sput" Searight & Ghost-Note in BEAST MODE: Drumeo Festival 2020

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steve_davis2/28/2021 11:29:02 am PST

re: #178 Nyet

Plus dozens of guards at different times and in different places testified that Marchenko ran the engine. In fact, Nikolay Shalayev, who usually appears in the survivors’ testimonies together with Ivan (usually as “Ivan and Nikolay” or “Ivan and Mykola”) also testified about Marchenko.

As far as the false identification testimonies… I’ll quote from what I wrote elsewhere. Here it should be noted that we have an intersection of two problems at once here: the false memory problem, which was largely unrecognized at the time (cf. Satanic panic) and the very problematic area of visual identification, especially identification after decades after the fact.

One or the leading experts in false memory research, Elizabeth Loftus, chose not to testify for the defence (she explained that due to her Jewish background the personal cost would be too high for her), but she recommended her acquaintance, the memory expert Willem Wagenaar to testify in Jerusalem. He did, and then wrote a meticulously detailed study of witness identifications in the case, Identifying Ivan. A case study in legal psychology (1988, Harvard University Press), a detailed summary of which with numerous quotes you can read in the appendix at the last link.

Basically, there were only 9 survivors who claimed to recognize Demjanjuk during the official interrogations. Whereas there were at least 15 (including one survivor who lived in the camp the longest, knew Ivan well and was forced to help building the gas chambers) who either did not recognize Demjanjuk or said he was not Ivan.

The first two witnesses who testified in May of 1976, Turowski and Goldfarb, did not recognize Demjanjuk at first. The third witness to testify in May, Rosenberg, said the face was familiar but literally “declined” to “identify with certainty”.

All other witnesses were interrogated from September 1976 on, which is significant, since on each August 2, the day of the uprising, the Treblinka surviors in Israel used to meet in Tel Aviv and there’s no chance the shocking “discovery” that Ivan was alive was not discussed there. All the subsequent positive identifications came from the Israeli survivors.

The fourth positive witness, Czarny, failed to identify Demjanjuk on the first try. Boraks and Lindwasser identified him with certainty. Epstein used phrases like “this is how I remember him”, “reminds me very strongly of” - so no certainty, and he also falsely identified Nikolay (Shaleyev) on an unrelated photo. Levkowitch made a positive identification, Rajchman took half an hour to reach the conclusion of “fairly certain”.

So only three witnesses - Boraks, Levkowitch and Lindwasser - identified Demjanjuk immediately and with certainty. Unfortunately, their testimonies cannot be shown to be independent since they were late and it had to be investigated what they knew before their identifications from the other survivors. However Levkowitch did not testify during the trial (her testimony was withdrawn), Lindwasser died before it and Boraks’ memory more or less completely failed him during the trial, so the issue remained uninvestigated - but most probably their testimonies were not indepedent from those of Turowski, Goldfarb and Rosenberg. Due to deaths and for other reasons only 5 witnesses testified in the Jerusalem court (Rosenberg, Czarny, Boraks, Epstein, and Rajchman).

During the trial itself the witnesses who were either not completely sure during the first identifications sessions or did not recognize him at all at first, suddenly claimed they recognize him with complete and utter certainty. Which only shows that such confidence is not worth much. They simply convinced themselves with time that they got the right man (and Wagenaar explains the psychological mechanisms of it happening).

Aside from the problems with the witnesses themselves there were huge problems with identification procedures which were irredeemably flawed (due to the investigators either completely untrained or inadequately trained in such procedures). The photo spreads were completely wrong and biased (e.g. there was no one remotely resembling Demjanjuk among the foils, which made him stand out), the investigators were leading the witnesses, different albums with the same person were shown to the same witnesses (a no-no), the issue of the indepedence of the identifications was not even touched upon, the crucial negative results were not systematically gathered, and so on.

Demjanjuk’s official name in the concentration camp system was “Iwan Demjanjuk”, with slight phonetically almost identical variations thereof appearing in various documents.

There’s not the slightest documentary hint of Demjanjuk ever having been to Treblinka even once, not to mention for a prolonged time. As opposed to his stay in Sobibor, about which there’s a wealth of documentation.

His identification as Ivan the Terrible stems purely from identifications from very few witnesses discussed above.

Ivan the Terrible’s actual name is established through an impressive number of testimonies - at least 38 of his Trawniki colleagues (perhaps most importantly, by Nikolai Shaleyev, another gas chamber operator, who is usually mentioned in the survivor testimonies together with Ivan) as well as other people who knew him. His name was Ivan Marchenko and unlike Demjanjuk he was born in 1911 in Dnepropetrovsk. His last traces disappear in 1945 in Yugoslavia.

Marchenko was neither a phantom, nor an alias. He was an actual person whose daughter was in fact still alive in the 1990s.

So we know that:

- Ivan the Terrible was Ivan Marchenko, a real and entirely different person from Demjanjuk.

- Demjanjuk used his real name in the camps and thus couldn’t have used an additional alias since he was “Demjanjuk” in the official paperwork.

(This has to be mentioned, since there’s an argument going around that Demjanjuk specifying his mother’s maiden name as “Marchenko” in the US paperwork is somehow significant. It’s anything but. Whatever the maiden name of his mother, it was JD and not she that was accused, and his name was not Marchenko, so it’s hard to see the relevance. And the maiden name of his mother is actually Tabachuk - he forgot it and wrote in one of the most popular Ukrainian surnames (think “Smith” or “Jones”). The “argument” thus quickly turns out to be a total dud.)

This settles the issue and completely trumps the weak witness identification evidence.

I should note here that the German court that convicted Demjanuk positively excluded the possibility of him having been Ivan the Terrible - it specifically addressed this issue in the verdict.

Just out of curiousity, is Marchenko basically “son of Mark” in Ukrainian, and is Mark a patron saint there? I always wonder why particular surnames become extremely popular. For instance, as I recall, my surname stems from the Welsh all being kind of mass baptized somewhere along the line and taking names reflecting David, king of the Jews, to demonstrate that.