The Ukrainian refugee arrived in Cleveland after World War II with his wife and daughter. He changed his name from Ivan to John, became a U.S. citizen, and lived a quiet, law-abiding life. But decades later, the past would come back to haunt John Demjanjuk. Prosecutors in Israel and Germany accused him of volunteering as a guard at Nazi death camps and willingly participating in the killing of Jews. Demjanjuk insisted that he was the victim of mistaken identity, and that he had spent most of the war as a prisoner in Germany and Poland. At the time of his death, Demjanjuk was still protesting his innocence.
Demjanjuk was born to a destitute peasant family in central Ukraine, said the London Telegraph. He was called up by the Soviet army in late 1940 and captured two years later by the Germans. “The question of what happened next would come to dominate the rest of his life.” Demjanjuk said he was eventually forced to join Germany’s Vlasov army, an anti-communist force made up of Soviet prisoners. At war’s end, he spent six years in a camp for displaced persons before immigrating to the U.S. in 1952.
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