Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
Parallel form(s) of name
- Demjanjuk, John
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
- Дем'янюк, Іван
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
History
John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demianiuk), April 3, 1920 (Dubovi Makharenci, Vinnytska oblast, Ukraine) – March 17, 2012 (Bad Feilnbach, Bavaria, Germany) was a Ukrainian-American auto worker, a former soldier in the Soviet Red Army, and a prisoner of war during the Second World War.
During World War II he was conscripted into the Soviet Red Army, where he was captured as a German prisoner of war.
In 1952 he emigrated from West Germany to the United States and was granted citizenship in 1958. In 1977 an American newspaper “News from Ukraine” published an article and a picture of a forged ID card with Demianiuk photo on it. The article stated that Demianiuk was a trainee in the Trawniki training camp for guards.
In 1986 he was deported to Israel to stand trial for war crimes, after being identified by eleven Holocaust survivors as "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious guard at the Treblinka extermination camp in Nazi occupied Poland. Demianiuk was accused of committing murder and acts of extraordinarily savage violence against camp prisoners during 1942–43. He was convicted of having committed crimes against humanity and sentenced to death there in 1988. The verdict was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993, based on new evidence that "Ivan the Terrible" was probably another man.
In 2001 Demianiuk was charged again, this time on the grounds that he had, instead, served as a guard named Ivan Demianiuk at the Sobibór and Majdanek camps in Nazi occupied Poland and at the Flossenbürg camp in Germany.
He was convicted in 2011 in Germany for alleged war crimes as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews. Since his conviction was pending appeal at the time of his death, Demianiuk remains innocent under German law, and his earlier conviction is invalidated. According to the Munich state court, Demianiuk does not have a criminal record.