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THE DEVIL NEXT DOOR
A MUST-SEE DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE WAR CRIME TRIALS OF JOHN DEMJANJUK
“EYEWITNESSES STATED HE SOMETIMES MUTILATED PEOPLE WITH A SWORD”
Director: Yossi Bloch and Daniel Sivan Distributor: Netflix Released: Out now
The case tried in Israel against John Demjanjuk (1920-2012) turned out to be powered by the strangest irony. To his last breath the man protested his innocence as a victim of mistaken identity. Evidence unearthed after the fall of the Soviet Union points to Demjanjuk, a former Ukrainian national who later became an American citizen, as spending his war years as a Trawniki guard stationed not at Treblinka, as first accused, but another Nazi death camp: Sobibór.
Reinventing himself after the Second World War as a hard-working Ford factory worker living the American dream, he was originally charged with being the monster known at Treblinka by Sonderkommandos as ‘Ivan the Terrible’. To those who knew him back in Cleveland, Ohio, he was a churchgoer, caring father, good neighbour, a loving husband. Yet Treblinka survivors persistently told the world Demjanjuk was the vicious beast who manned the modified trucks which pumped carbon monoxide into the gas chamber; who took pleasure in humiliating Jews as they faced imminent death. Eyewitnesses stated he sometimes mutilated people with a sword.
In crucial ways Yossi Bloch and Daniel Sivan’s haunting five-part Netflix Original documentary, isn’t about John Demjanjuk at all. He’s what film director Alfred Hitchcock
