Netflix's The Devil Next Door explained
Note: contains descriptions of Nazi war crimes which some may find upsetting.
The five-episode Netflix docu-series The Devil Next Door explores the real-life story of John Demjanjuk, who was initially sentenced to death in 1988 for having been a guard at a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War. The guard in question was nicknamed 'Ivan the Terrible' by his victims.
Yet Demjanjuk adamantly insisted it was a case of mistaken identity and that he wasn't the man people said he was. So was he wrongfully convicted or was he trying to deny his disturbing past? Via interviews and trial footage, the team behind The Devil Next Door pieced the disturbing story together.
Who was John Demjanjuk?
He was born in 1920 in Ukraine, surviving the horrendous man-made famine that ravaged the country in the '30s, before being drafted into the Soviet army during World War Two. He was captured by the Nazis in 1942 and there are a variety of claims about what happened to him during this period, including that he was a guard at a series of concentration camps.
However, he insisted he had actually been a prisoner of war at one such camp himself before being forced to work as a guard.
After the war, he and his wife emigrated to America, settling in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1952. They went on to have three children and John found work with Ford, becoming a naturalised US citizen in 1958. Life seemed relatively settled for the Demjanjuk family until 1975, when Demjanjuk's name was put forward on a list of Ukrainians living in America who were suspected of having worked for the Nazi cause.
Journalist Michael Hanusiak, who compiled the list, raised the question of Demjanjuk's identity with the US Immigration and Nationalisation Service, along with what appeared to be photographic evidence. The department made a request that Demjanjuk's American citizenship be revoked and the ensuing investigation saw him identified by Holocaust survivors in 1977 as the guard nicknamed 'Ivan the Terrible'.
Who was 'Ivan the Terrible'?
Named after the Tsar notable for his horrendous cruelty to his subjects, 'Ivan the Terrible' was one of the most feared guards at the Sobibor and Treblinka concentration camps. In charge of a gas chamber, Ivan was known to beat prisoners with pipes and cut off their ears with a sword as they walked past, among other atrocities.
When the claims first arose, Demjanjuk was adamant it was a case of mistaken identity and that the man shown on an SS prison camp ID card – which survivors had claimed was Demjanjuk – was in fact not him. He was denaturalised as a US citizen and was extradited to Israel in 1986 to stand trial for his role in operating the gas chambers. Demjanjuk was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1988, before a lengthy appeal process began.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991, previously concealed war records were released which proved that 'Ivan the Terrible' was actually another man entirely – namely, Ivan Marchenko. Demjanjuk's conviction was overturned in 1993, his US citizenship was restored and he returned home.
Why did John Demjanjuk stand trial in Germany?
Here's where it gets even more complicated. Despite Demjanjuk's not being 'Ivan the Terrible', it was later discovered that he had worked at another Nazi gas chamber during the Holocaust.
His US citizenship was stripped again in 2002 after a judge declared he had provided insufficient evidence of what he had done during the war period; despite losing his citizenship, he remained in the States until 2009, when he was taken to stand trial in Germany.
In 2011, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment for his role as an accessory to murder for the deaths of over 28,000 Jews. He died at the age of 91 in 2012 before his appeal could be heard by the courts.
Who made the documentary The Devil Next Door?
The series is directed by Daniel Sivan and Yossi Bloch, who produced it along with Dan and Josh Braun. Bloch's family was devastated by the Holocaust ("They all went to Treblinka… There should have been thousands of us," he revealed in a recent interview with Jewish Journal). Sivan's grandparents were lucky to get away ("They had a lot of relatives that didn't," he said in the same interview).
The team behind the series are keen for it to educate a new generation about the appalling treatment of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, whilst also exploring Demjanjuk's incredible story at the same time.
What did Demjanjuk's family have to say?
The Demjanjuk family are shown in the documentary as being insistent of his innocence, firmly believing his claim that he was not the man known as 'Ivan the Terrible' and nothing more than a Ukrainian prisoner of war caught up in a case of mistaken identity.
In fact, in Demjanjuk's 2012 obituary in the New York Times, his son is quoted as saying that "history will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian POW's for the deeds of Nazi Germans".
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