The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial

by Lawrence Douglas

Overview

Now the subject of the Netflix documentary The Devil Next Door

The incredible story of the most convoluted legal odyssey involving Nazi war crimes

In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in Nazi genocide. In the years that followed, Demjanjuk was stripped of his American citizenship and sentenced to death by a Jerusalem court as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka—only to be cleared in one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in legal history. Finally, in 2011, after eighteen months of trial, a court in Munich convicted the native Ukrainian of assisting Hitler’s SS in the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern Poland.

An award-winning novelist as well as legal scholar, Douglas offers a compulsively readable history of Demjanjuk’s bizarre case. The Right Wrong Man is both a gripping eyewitness account of the last major Holocaust trial to galvanize world attention and a vital meditation on the law’s effort to bring legal closure to the most horrific chapter in modern history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691178257
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/08/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. His books include The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust and The Vices. His work has appeared in leading publications such as the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and Harper's. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Beginning of the End of Something 17

2 John in America 26

3 Ivan in Israel 68

4 Demjanjuk Redux 109

5 Demjanjuk in Munich 137

6 Was damals Recht war . . . 161

7 Memory into History 194

8 The Trial by History 216

9 The Right Wrong Man 247

Postscript 258

Acknowledgments 261

Notes 263

Sources 299

Index 321

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A remarkable and important work that lays bare the limits of the justice system for the greatest crimes. Lawrence Douglas has woven out of the trials of John Demjanjuk a book that is utterly gripping and finely crafted, one that offers insights that are profound, troublesome, and enlightening."—Philippe Sands, University College London

"In this insightful and gracefully written book, Douglas elevates the Demjanjuk case from a legal curiosity—one involving an initially mistaken prosecution followed by a later valid one—to a study in the uses and limits of the law when it confronts genocide."—Michael B. Mukasey, former US attorney general

"A marvelous book and a gripping read, The Right Wrong Man dissects one of the most bizarre episodes in the adjudication of the Holocaust. It is reminiscent of, but superior to, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. Like Arendt, Douglas studied his subject from up close, from inside the courtroom. Combining eloquent reporting with trenchant analysis, he has produced a rare thing indeed—a learned page-turner."—Jens Meierhenrich, London School of Economics

"In this pathbreaking book, Lawrence Douglas reflects on how jurists in the Demjanjuk trial grappled with challenges of the passage of time, the infirmity of the accused, the hierarchy of perpetrators, inherited legal institutions, and different legal traditions. This is an essential work for understanding judicial reckoning with mass atrocity in our time."—Michael R. Marrus, professor emeritus, University of Toronto

"The Right Wrong Man is powerful, richly observed, and darkly entertaining. Anyone interested in postwar history will want to read it."—Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer with the New Yorker

"Lawrence Douglas has once again provided us with a history-laden and provocative analysis of Holocaust trials. His riveting study of the Demjanjuk saga is of importance, not just to historians and jurists, but to all those who wonder how can justice ever prevail when the crime being adjudicated is genocide."—Deborah E. Lipstadt, Emory University

"A wonderfully lucid book about the bizarre and fascinating case of John Demjanjuk, the only American to lose his citizenship twice, and about the much larger issues of law and morality that arise when individuals are held to account for crimes committed by the state."—Scott Turow, author of Identical

"In this excellent book, Lawrence Douglas, a thoughtful student of legal attempts to punish atrocities committed in wartime, uncovers the strange case of the non-German who, impressed into serving as a Nazi concentration camp guard, was, many years later, repeatedly tried as a war criminal and ultimately convicted."—Richard A. Posner, US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

"Impeccably researched, imaginatively crafted, and beautifully written, The Right Wrong Man is a brilliant analysis of the longest, most complex and confusing, and most controversial series of legal measures ever initiated against any Holocaust perpetrator—John Demjanjuk. The story of the three decades of litigation required to convict him is told here as only Lawrence Douglas can tell it."—Charles W. Sydnor Jr., Virginia Holocaust Museum

"The Right Wrong Man is a fascinating exploration of what kind of justice the bit players in history's greatest crimes deserve. With the authority of an academic and the eye of a novelist, Lawrence Douglas sheds bright new light on the perplexing case of John Demjanjuk, a small cog in the Nazis' genocidal machine. Although Demjanjuk was not ‘Ivan the Terrible,' as originally accused, Douglas argues that in the end he was Ivan-the-terrible-enough to have been properly convicted."—Jane Mayer, staff writer with the New Yorker

"This book cements Douglas's reputation as our leading guide to thinking about the difficult moral, political, and legal issues surrounding the postwar Nazi trials. The Right Wrong Man is brilliant, ambitious, and wide ranging."—Devin O. Pendas, author of The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965

"Douglas has produced an excellent account of the Demjanjuk case—or rather cases. His beautifully written book is the definitive work on the subject."—William Schabas, author of Unimaginable Atrocities: Justice, Politics, and Rights at the War Crimes Tribunals

Editorial Reviews

"[A] tour de force."

Foreign Affairs

"Formidable . . . a thoughtful treatise."

Cleveland Jewish Star

Douglas relates with authority and clarity the story of these complex legal processes, which stretched across several decades. They constituted, he writes, "the most convoluted, lengthy and bizarre criminal case to arise from the Holocaust." Douglas does justice to both the story's factual complexities and its moral and political conundrums. He puts the trials in the dual context of the greater postwar judicial reckoning with Nazism and the Cold War, and shows how the long-drawn-out case exposed tensions both within and among the relevant three legal systems. The Right Wrong Man, from its summary title to its thoughtful postscript, is an impressive work, as well as a timely one in its demonstration of the power of legal systems to learn from past missteps.

The New York Times Book Review - Anthony Julius

"Douglas relates with authority and clarity the story of these complex legal processes. . . . [He] does justice to both the story's factual complexities and its moral and political conundrums. . . . The Right Wrong Man, from its summary title to its thoughtful postscript, is an impressive work, as well as a timely one in its demonstration of the power of legal systems to learn from past missteps."—-Anthony Julius, New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

"[M]asterful. . . . [D]eftly delivers disquisitions on nuanced legal questions as if they were plot points in a thriller, making his demanding book a pleasure even for readers unschooled in the particulars of international law."

The Wall Street Journal

"The case of [Demjanjuk] the death camp guard turned autoworker, related with authority and clarity."

New York Times Book Review

"The Right Wrong Man is an important read about the accountability those who do wrong ultimately face."

San Francisco Book Review

2015-10-08
Nailing a Nazi-era "faceless facilitator of murder." Legal scholar and author Douglas (Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought/Amherst Coll., The Vices, 2011, etc.) conveys the important precedent in the conviction of John (Ivan) Demjanjuk by the Munich court in May 2011, after being acquitted 16 years before by a Jerusalem court for mistaken identity as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka. By that time, the courts had come a long way in recognizing the special nature of the crime of genocide as separate from conventional murder. In this finely wrought work, Douglas traces this crucial legal "self-correction." After bouncing around several displaced persons camps in Germany following the war, Demjanjuk came to America in 1952, became a union "lifer" mechanic and machinist near Cleveland, Ohio, and an American citizen in 1958. Placed on a U.S. war criminals list in the mid-1970s, he was eventually denaturalized and deported to Israel as Ivan the Terrible for the first sensational trial dominated by many anguished survivors' accounts. However, mistaking Demjanjuk for another guard underscored the unreliability of memory, and as the pool of survivors diminished over time, the rise of historians' meticulous research took prominence at the next trial. The German prosecution was able to make several crucial breakthroughs about the defendant, who was taken as a POW in 1942 and pressed into the SS service as a guard at Sobibor and elsewhere. The prosecution argued that there were no grounds to the "question of duress" of SS guards suffering punishment if they refused their killing duties and that since Sobibor, in particular, was a "pure extermination facility," the job of the guards was by definition as accessory to murder. While some of the legal subtleties might elude lay readers, Douglas ably delineates the legal evolution in atrocity cases. An excellent legal-minded elucidation of the long trail toward the conviction of a notorious concentration camp guard. Pair with Richard Rashke's Useful Enemies (2013).

Kirkus Reviews