Accused Nazi guard 'defended collaborators’

Press, 13 March 1987, Page 6

Accused Nazi guard 'defended collaborators’

NZPA-Reuter Jerusalem An Israeli policeman has told a war crimes trial that he posed as a friendly prison guard and that the accused, John Demjanjuk, defended Nazi

collaborators during their talks together. Superintendent Arye Kaplan, a Russian-speak-ing police interrogator, told the Jerusalem court yesterday that he joined the prison staff where Demjanjuk, aged 66, is

detained in an attempt to elicit information from him.

“I was to try and develop communication with the suspect and draw out information on what he had done in World War II,” Mr Kaplan told the three-judge court. Demjanjuk has been in solitary confinement in the maximum-security Ramie prison since his extradition from the United States 13 months

ago on charges of killing hundreds of thousands of Jews as a sadistic death camp guard, “Ivan the Terrible.”

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk denies that he was at the Treblinka death camp, where 850,000 Jews were killed, and says he was interned at four prisoner-of-war camps after the Nazis captured him in 1941 as a Red Army soldier. Mr Kaplan said Demjanjuk described nearstarvation conditions in Nazi P.O.W. camps, and explained how captured Red Army soldiers could become collaborators.

“Demjanjuk said, ‘I was prepared to die for a loaf of bread. If I had been told: Eat as much as you want and afterwards you will be murdered, I would have agreed’,” Mr Kaplan reported.

“Then Demjanjuk added: ‘Can you imagine Germans suddenly coming up to you and saying: Come with us. Who could refuse? Who could have imagined it? How can you put someone on trial for that?’ ”

Israel says Demjanjuk was trained by the Germans for police duties

after he became a prisoner of war, and was sent to Treblinka in Nazioccupied Poland to run the gas chambers. Earlier yesterday, a Treblinka survivor told the court the Nazis prepared a special crematorium for British Jews they hoped to kill if they defeated England in the war.

Yehiel Reichman, aged 72, from Uruguay, pointed to a court diagram of Treblinka and said: “This was the oven for the Brit-

ish Jews the Germans were planning to bring.” Pressed by a defence lawyer, John Gill, to explain how he learned this, Mr Reichman said the German guards in the camp talked about it. Mr Reichman, who as a Jewish slave labourer extracted gold teeth from corpses and cut the hair of women before they were gassed, was the fifth Treblinka survivor to identify Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible.”