The Ukrainian Jewish Committee has condemned the Lviv regional legislature's attempts to defend Ivan Demyaniuk, a former guard of Nazi concentration camps.
Lviv lawmakers claim that the Demyaniuk case is an international
conspiracy, which allegedly aims to discredit Ukrainians and Ukraine in
the eyes of the world public. “Undoubtedly, this case has been
falsified and fabricated by the KGB a long time ago, and is now “being
fuelled by the Russian FSB and other states, which have hastened to
take in this provocative bait,” the Lviv legislature said in an appeal
to the Ukrainian president, prime minister and parliament.
The Jewish Committee said, meanwhile that, “Lviv lawmakers are
making a big mistake, putting the words “Ukrainian” and “Nazi criminal”
on the same footing.
“Ukrainians are perceived globally as a winning nation in World War
II, a nation that suffered the largest losses in the fight against
fascism. Lviv deputies’ provocative appeals are asserting undesirable
and unobjective associations in the minds of many,” the Jewish
Committee said in a statement on Thursday.
“The Nazi criminals and their accomplices have no nationality,” the statement says.
Although Demyaniuk is of Ukrainian ethnicity and is an old person,
his possible extradition to Ukraine “is not desirable from the point of
view of its negative impact on the country’s image and his likely being
used by Ukrainian nationalists for political purposes,” the Jewish
Committee said.
Demyaniuk, now 89 years old, was a Red Army soldier when the Great
Patriotic War began. He was taken prisoner and he emigrated to the
United States in 1952, where he was granted American citizen ship. In
the late 1970s he was accused of being a guard in the Treblinka
concentration camp, where he operated gas chambers, took part in he
execution of over 100,000 people and tortured prisoners.
His trial was restarted in the United States in 2001. Proof was
found in the archives that Demyaniuk was a guard in the Treblinka,
Sobibor and Majdanek concentration camps. On May 12 he was deported to
Germany in compliance with a court order. The Munich Prosecutor’s
Office accused Demyaniuk of participating in the killing of about
29,000 Jews in Sobibor.
