Devil Next Door

Netflix’s Documentary Series The Devil Next Door, Explained | Time 11/6/19, 9:36 AM
The History Behind Net0ix’s Nazi Trial

Documentary Series The Devil Next Door
BY MAHITA GAJANAN NOVEMBER 4, 2019
Q uestions about John Demjanjuk — an auto worker from

Cleveland who was convicted of serving as a Nazi guard at a
concentration camp during World War II — captured headlines and
worldwide attention for several years starting in the 1980s. Now,
Netflix is adding his story to a growing arsenal of true-crime
documentaries.
The Devil Next Door, which comes to Netflix on Nov. 4, attempts to

explain the allegations that surrounded Demjanjuk for the latter
part of his life. The five-episode docu-series features interviews
with his family members, prosecutors and defense lawyers, as well
as footage from a high-profile trial that examined whether
Demjanjuk was the sadistic Nazi prison guard known as “Ivan the
Terrible” — and what happened after, as new evidence emerged
that sowed doubt about his conviction.
Even after his death in 2012, several questions remain about who
Demjanjuk actually was — simply a Ukrainian immigrant caught up
in a case of mistaken identity, or one of the Holocaust’s cruelest
prison guards? Or was he someone else entirely? As The Devil Next
Door shows, the answer may lie, uncomfortably, somewhere in the
middle. Here’s what to know about Demjanjuk’s case.
https://time.com/5716489/devil-next-door-true-story/?utm_source=twit…ampaign=editorial&utm_term=entertainment_television&linkId=76530927 Page 1 of 7
Who was John Demjanjuk?
Born in Ukraine in 1920, Demjanjuk was raised in impoverished

conditions, and, along with his family, endured an engineered
famine in the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians. He was
drafted into the Soviet Army around 1940, the year before the
Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact disintegrated. He was captured by
the Nazis in 1942 after being wounded while fighting. The
question that became the focus of trials decades later was what he
did for the three years following 1942.
As depicted in The Devil Next Door, various pieces of conflicting

evidence placed Demjanjuk at different concentration camps
during the final years of the war. Demjanjuk maintained until his
death that he was a prisoner at a labor camp, and was forced to
work as a guard. In his 2012 obituary, the Washington Post
reported that Demjanjuk said he joined the army of General Andrei
Vlasov, which consisted of mostly Ukrainian soldiers who sided
with the Nazis in an effort to overthrow the Soviet Union.
Following the war, Demjanjuk went to a displaced-persons camp.

With his wife, he immigrated to the U.S. in 1952. Demjanjuk
settled in Cleveland, became a naturalized citizen in 1958 and
worked at the Ford Motor plant until his retirement about 30 years
later. In the city’s tight-knit Ukrainian-American community, as
footage in The Devil Next Door shows, he was by all accounts
known as a churchgoing family man. This façade crumbled starting
in the late 1970s, when the U.S. government announced it had
evidence that he’d served as a concentration-camp guard and
began the process of revoking his citizenship, alleging that he’d
lied on immigration forms to hide his actions during World War II.
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What happened at John Demjanjuk’s trial in

Israel?
Officials at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special

Investigations, which pursues such crimes, said they had obtained
evidence alleging that Demjanjuk was not just any Nazi prison
guard, but in fact one of the most notorious gas-chamber
operators at the Treblinka concentration camp, whose sadistic
cruelty earned him the nickname “Ivan the Terrible.” Demjanjuk
was denaturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1981 and extradited to Israel
for a high-profile, heartrending trial in which multiple survivors of
Treblinka identified Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible.”
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At Demjanjuk’s first trial in Israel, prosecutors alleged that he had

killed thousands of prisoners at Treblinka between 1942 and 1943,
and that he’d been trained to operate the camp’s gas chambers.
Survivors who testified as witnesses said the man they thought to
be “Ivan the Terrible” would cut off Jewish prisoners’ body parts
using a sword, stab women and children, and use a steel pipe to
beat people while shepherding them to the gas chambers, the New
York Times reported. The documentary series shows that the
evidence linking Demjanjuk to the savage prison guard included a
Nazi identity card that prosecutors claimed was from an SS
training camp, with a photo of a man who looked like a younger
Demjanjuk. His defense attorneys said the card was a flimsy piece
of evidence, and that the photo appeared to have been tampered
with.
In 1988, Demjanjuk was found guilty and sentenced to death. But

as The Devil Next Door shows, the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9,
1989, foreshadowed the release of a trove of once-secret Soviet
Union documents, including new evidence from eyewitness
testimony that suggested “Ivan the Terrible” was a different man,
named Ivan Marchenko. The Israeli Supreme Court acquitted
Demjanjuk in 1993, and in 1998, he regained his U.S. citizenship.
What happened at John Demjanjuk’s trial in

Germany?
Any resolution Demjanjuk and his family felt when his conviction
in Israel was overturned soon disappeared. A year after he became
a U.S. citizen again, the government restarted the process of
denaturalizing him, over charges that he’d served as a guard at
other concentration camps. In 2002, his citizenship was revoked
again and, following years of Demjanjuk fighting against the
charges, he was deported to Germany in 2009.
In Germany, Demjanjuk stood trial on charges that he’d aided the

Nazis in killing Jews at the Sobibor death camp in 1943. By this
point, Demjanjuk’s family claimed he was too old and sick to
continue with the process, but doctors cleared him for trial. At the
trial, prosecutors said Demjanjuk’s job at Sobibor was to lead Jews
to the gas chambers to be killed. Included in their evidence was an
ID card showing that Demjanjuk was transferred from the Nazi
training camp Trawniki to Sobibor in March 1943, according to
TIME’s coverage of the trial.
At that point, Germany had decided to try a new strategy in its
pursuit of justice against Nazi war criminals, looking not only for
evidence of specific killings but also for evidence that the person
had been part of the process of mass killings. As TIME noted in
2009, central to the prosecutors’ case against Demjanjuk was
guards’ actions in the train transport of Jews to Sobibor:
“When the transport train carrying Jews arrived, the normal work was stopped
and each member of the camp personnel became involved in the routine
extermination process,” the document reads. After the Jews were ordered out
of the cars, they were told to leave their luggage on the ramps and take oO
their clothes, the charge sheet says. They were then allegedly led to the gas
chambers under the pretext they were taking a shower. Holocaust experts have
also linked the Sobibor guards to mass executions.
Several former inmates of Sobibor gave evidence in the trial, but,

as TIME reported, it was by then difficult to find living witnesses
who could link him to specific deaths. Demjanjuk was eventually
convicted of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at
Sobibor. He was sentenced to five years in prison with credit for
the time he’d already served.
Demjanjuk died in 2012 at the age of 91, while his final appeal
against his conviction was still pending. As there had been no
ultimate conviction, Demjanjuk was presumed to be innocent
when he died. So, though his original conviction solidified a legal
strategy that would be used in Nazi trials going forward, his own
story will remain unresolved.
WRITE TO MAHITA GAJANAN AT MAHITA.GAJANAN@TIME.COM.

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Netflix’s Documentary Series The Devil Next Door, Explained | Time 11/6/19, 9:36 AM

The History Behind Net0ix’s Nazi Trial

BY MAHITA GAJANAN NOVEMBER 4, 2019

Q uestions about John Demjanjuk — an auto worker from

The Devil Next Door, which comes to Netflix on Nov. 4, attempts to

Who was John Demjanjuk?

Born in Ukraine in 1920, Demjanjuk was raised in impoverished

As depicted in The Devil Next Door, various pieces of conflicting

Following the war, Demjanjuk went to a displaced-persons camp.

History Newsletter SIGN UP NOW

What happened at John Demjanjuk’s trial in

Officials at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special

Get The Brief. Sign up to receive

Enter your email address

Choose your country

I can confirm I have read and accept the Terms Of Use.

At Demjanjuk’s first trial in Israel, prosecutors alleged that he had

In 1988, Demjanjuk was found guilty and sentenced to death. But

What happened at John Demjanjuk’s trial in

In Germany, Demjanjuk stood trial on charges that he’d aided the

At that point, Germany had decided to try a new strategy in its

Several former inmates of Sobibor gave evidence in the trial, but,

WRITE TO MAHITA GAJANAN AT MAHITA.GAJANAN@TIME.COM.

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