GLARING INEQUITIES IN JUSTICE

The April 15 Plain Dealer carried graphic photos of John Demjanjuk, now 89 years old, being carried out of his Cleveland suburban home by Federal Agents who were to take him to a plane at Burke Lakefront Airport. He was scheduled to fly to Germany to stand trial for being an accessory to herding 29,000 Jews to gas chambers at Sobibor in Poland. He was 23 years old at the time.

In 1977 Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel where he was convicted of being the notorious Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp. He was sentenced to death, but the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction and allowed him to return to Cleveland. A federal judge, however, ruled that Demjanjuk worked at three other death camps, including the one at Sobibor.

Attorneys for Demjanjuk claim that he is too ill to travel and that he will certainly die in a German prison. His accusers say that he needs to face the consequences of his crimes. I agree with that, but I also believe that our country has not tried to convict brilliant German scientists who were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people during WW II. We forgot about their crimes against humanity because they were useful to our country when World War II ended.

Take, for example, Wernher von Braun, a highly educated German SS officer who helped develop the Nazi V -2 program. His defenders excuse him, claiming that he was not an ardent Nazi. But according to Dr. Andrew Dunar and Dr. Stephen Waring, historians at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, “He must have known of the atrocities perpetrated at V-2 production facilities at Nordhausen and the nearby concentration camp at Dora -- where some 20,000 died as a result of execution, starvation, and disease-stimulated controversy that plagued the rocket pioneers who left Germany after the war.”

Yet von Braun was granted U.S. citizenship in 1955 and is even admired by some Americans because he was useful to our country in developing rockets and in space exploration. He died in 1977. On the other hand, John Demjanjuk, who was a 23-year-old uneducated Ukrainian when he was appointed as guard at concentration camps, is being deported.

Apparently neither man had the courage to refuse orders that caused thousands of innocent people to die. But why the difference in their treatment? Is this an inequity in justice? Or moral judgment.

I believe that those who participated in the Holocaust should be brought to justice. But will deporting John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old man in ill health, bring closure to his case that has been pursued for over 30 years -- or will it spark more anti-Semitism in our country?

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