American Notes Justice

His defenders claim that Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, 65, is nothing more than a quiet resident of the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, retired from his job in a Ford auto plant. But to his Israeli accusers, Demjanjuk is "Ivan the Terrible," who helped murder some 900,000 people at the Nazi death camp near Treblinka, Poland, in 1942 and 1943 and then slipped into the U.S. in 1952 as a "displaced person." Last week, after seven years of legal wrangling, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the extradition of Demjanjuk to Israel, where he will become the first Nazi since Adolf Eichmann in 1961 to stand trial. Compared with Eichmann, who was executed for shipping millions of Jews to death camps, Demjanjuk was small fry in Hitler's genocide machine. A prisoner of war who switched sides and volunteered for the SS, he performed his camp duties with sadistic relish, according to court papers and Treblinka ; survivors. Critics in Israel question the purpose of trying Demjanjuk more than 40 years after his alleged crimes, but prosecutors are determined. They plan to stage an Eichmann-like trial, even using the glass booth that shielded the notorious Nazi.