Buchanan on trial - Patrick Buchanan's support for John Demjanjuk and other Nazis from World War II - response to National Review August 23, 1993 editorial supporting the vindication of both Demjanjuk and Buchanan - Letter to the Editor

National Review, Nov 29, 1993 by Joshua Muravchik

Your editorial on the Israeli Supreme Court's decision overturning the conviction of John Demjanjuk ["Trial and Error," Aug. 23] argues that Patrick Buchanan stands vindicated. Let us see.

The editorial says Buchanan "was excoriated as 'a defender of Nazi war criminals,' when he was in fact a defender of someone charged--falsely--with particular war crimes." This misrepresents the argument in three major respects. First, Buchanan's controversial pronouncements about former Nazis were not limited to "someone," i.e., Demjanjuk, but covered several different cases. Second, it is far from clear that Demjanjuk was "charged--falsely." Third, Buchanan was taken to task not for airing doubts about Demjanjuk's guilt but for various indefensible things he said in the process.

In addition to the many columns he spent championing Demjanjuk, Buchanan took up the defense of Arthur Rudolph, whose American citizenship was revoked when he confessed to his role in the use of slave-labor in the production of Hitler's V-2 rockets. Buchanan's method in the Rudolph case was the same as in the Demjanjuk case: he took what he was told by the accused or their advocates and repeated it in his own voice as if he knew it to be true. Thus he wrote that Rudolph's confession was a "lie" forced out of him by the U.S. Justice Department under the threat of prosecuting his wife and daughter, and he further claimed that West German authorities had found the case against Rudolph "to be a cruel joke." But a member of my staff interviewed the German prosecutor, who flatly denied Buchanan's version (although the statute of limitations shielded Rudolph from prosecution there), and not a scintilla of evidence has ever been produced to buttress Buchanan's grave and far-fetched accusation against the Justice Department. Rudolph's case was revisited last year by Canada's courts when he appealed his exclusion from that country--thus providing avenue untainted by the U.S. Justice Department. Canada's Federal Court of Appeal upheld Rudolph's exclusion, finding "the applicant's admitted activities give reasonable grounds to believe that he was an active participant and accomplice in both war crimes . . . and crimes against humanity."

Buchanan also appealed to Attorney General Meese to block the deportation of Karl Linnas to the Soviet Union, where he faced execution. Although the Soviet penal system was not to be trusted, it was the one with jurisdiction over Linnas's crimes, and before ordering his deportation, the American courts had satisfied themselves of his guilt. In the words of the U.S. Court of Appeals, "the evidence... was overwhelming and largely uncontroverted .... [Linnas] ordered the extermination of innocent men, women, and children."

Then there was Kurt Waldheim; he had been a target of Buchanan's as UN Secretary-General, yet when it was revealed that Waldheim had been complicit in Nazi war crimes, Buchanan's outrage turned against Waldheim's accusers. "The ostracism of President Waldheim [has] an aspect of moral bullying and the singular stench of selective indignation," he wrote. And Buchanan also waxed indignant when the U.S. Government apologized to France for having sheltered Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyons." "To what end, all this wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime when there is scarcely a peep of protest over... the concentration camps operating now in China and Siberia, in Cuba, and in South Vietnam," wrote Buchanan. In sum, Buchanan's record of defending accused Nazis includes both those who claim innocence and those who confess guilt.

Was Demjanjuk accused falsely? NR's editorial says so, presumably on the strength of the reversal of his conviction, but this misrepresents the Supreme Court's findings. It weighed evidence newly discovered in Soviet files consisting of the signed statements, under interrogation, of former Soviet POWs who were executed after the war for having served the Germans as death-camp guards. Some of these identified the operator of the gas chamber at Treblinka (Ivan. the Terrible's job) as a guard named Ivan Marchenko. This evidence was inconclusive in two key respects. First, neither these guards nor their interrogators remain alive, and so it is impossible to determine the conditions under which the statements were written and signed, or even their authenticity. Second, while documentary records show that another guard named Ivan Marchenko existed, they also show that Demjanjuk swore that his mother's maiden name was Marchenko (which he now says was a lie), raising the possibility that he used Marchenko as an alias. The court affirmed that the evidence identifying Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible was strong, but it concluded that the new evidence, however inconclusive, sufficed to generate "reasonable doubt."

The court also found that "clear and unequivocal evidence . . . singles out [Demjanjuk] from hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners of war held by the Germans and places him among the thousands who volunteered to serve in the SS within the... unit that served the Germans in . . . the extermination camps in Sobibor, Lodz [Belzec], and Treblinka."