BERLIN — An FBI report kept secret for 25 years said the Soviet Union “quite likely fabricated” evidence central to the prosecution of John Demjanjuk — a revelation that could help the defense as closing arguments resume today in the retired Ohio autoworker’s Nazi war-crimes trial in Germany.
The newly declassified FBI field-office report casts doubt on the authenticity of a Nazi ID card that is a key piece of evidence that Demjanjuk served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland.
During decades of U.S. hearings, an extradition, a death sentence followed by acquittal in Israel, a deportation and now a trial in Munich, the arguments have relied heavily on the photo ID from an SS training camp that indicates Demjanjuk was sent to Sobibor.
Claims that the card and other evidence against Demjanjuk are Soviet forgeries have repeatedly been made by Demjanjuk’s defense attorneys. But the FBI report provides the first known confirmation that U.S. investigators had similar doubts.
“Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB,” the FBI’s Cleveland field office said in the 1985 report — four years after the Soviets had shown U.S. investigators the card, which they would not allow to be examined by document experts.
The FBI argued that the Soviets had an interest in faking the documents as part of a campaign to smear anti-communist emigres.
A quarter-century later, Demjanjuk, now 90, is standing trial in Munich on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder at Sobibor, which he denies.
The Associated Press discovered the FBI report at the National Archives in Maryland, among case files that were declassified after the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was deported from the U.S. in May 2009 to face trial in Germany. It had not previously been seen by defense attorneys in Demjanjuk’s trials in Germany, Israel or the United States.
Russell Ezolt, the top lawyer for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Cleveland at the time, said by phone that the report could have influenced the outcome of Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial. “This was the key bit to the trial. . . . If you take away his ID card as a guard, what’s left?”
Because no known witnesses can place Demjanjuk at Sobibor, the case largely revolves around Nazi-era documents recovered by the Soviet Union.
Demjanjuk’s defense attorney in Germany plans to petition the court to introduce the FBI report as evidence.
The report contradicts the findings of the U.S. Office of Special Investigations, which was in charge of the overall Demjanjuk probe. Neal Sher, the OSI director from 1983 to 1994, said in an e-mail that “great care was taken to authenticate any documents” and that not one was found to be forged.
