Classic Essays

The Death of Dov Eitan

John Demjanjuk at one of his trials; he was hounded beyond all reason for many years by hate-filled, fanatical, homicidal, lying Jews — one of whom almost certainly murdered Demjanjuk’s Jewish defense attorney, Dov Eitan.

by Robert Morgan

IN FEBRUARY 2002, Eli M. Rosenbaum, boss of the witch-hunting Office of Special Investigations (OSI), a unit within the U.S. “Justice” Department’s Criminal Division, easily persuaded a pliant federal judge, Paul Ramon Matia (an appointee of the first President Bush), to once again cynically strip 81-year-old Ukrainian-American autoworker John Demjanjuk of his U.S. citizenship.

In one of the most bizarre vendettas on record, world Jewry has conducted a vicious, nonstop campaign of vilification and legal persecution against Demjanjuk for more than a quarter of a century—a third of the man’s life. (In contrast, Demjanjuk served as a camp guard for two years in World War II—the “crime” that is the basis for this shameful affair.) The Demjanjuk family, with the generous support of dwindling, aging Ukrainian communities in the United States and Canada, has expended millions of dollars just to keep Demjanjuk alive. On the prosecution side, White taxpayers in the United States, Russia, and Poland have forked over tens of millions more to subsidize their own group’s defamation and dispossession, enriching scores of Jewish attorneys and government officials in the process.

Over the course of time, unchecked Jewish fanaticism transmogrified a simple, ordinary human being into a comic book Symbol of Evil—“Ivan the Terrible,” “the butcher of Treblinka,” operator of gas chambers where 900,000 Jews were exterminated. In his spare time, this legendary Aryan bully beat Jews mercilessly, cracked skulls, cut off ears, gouged out eyes, stabbed pregnant women in the abdomen, committed indescribable atrocities on corpses, and drilled into the buttocks of helpless Jewish prisoners. Reporters, academics, judges, prosecutors, and cabinet officials have uncritically endorsed these and equally lurid atrocity stories without batting an eye or cracking a grin—at least in public.

The low point of the Demjanjuk affair occurred after Jews in the U.S. government extradited Demjanjuk to Israel in 1986 to be hung. The condemned man spent the next seven and a half years of his life in a cage where the lights were never turned off, and where his every move—including showering, sleeping, and using the toilet—was observed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, by shifts of Jewish guards. All of his telephone conversations were tapped.

The trial, broadcast live over Israeli TV and radio, was conducted in a large auditorium in Jerusalem filled with 500-650 Jews, many lining the sides of the hall. The lead judge, Dov Levin, a former member of the terrorist Irgun, permitted the Israeli prosecutor to spend the first week describing the events and horrors of the “Holocaust”—because young Jews needed to be educated. Reinforcement of the cultic persecution myth—the religiously-grounded “common bond of suffering” that Jews believe makes them unique—was, of course, the real motivation for the affair.

The circus-like atmosphere was chaotic. Throughout the trial, the Jewish audience was permitted to disrupt proceedings and voice hatred for the defendant. Its members regularly hissed, booed, wept, snarled, and grimaced in unison, at times making so much racket that defense attorneys seated next to one another found it difficult to converse.

The sole piece of physical evidence was a forged Soviet ID card. The remainder of the “evidence” consisted of “witness” testimony. After Treblinka “eyewitness” Eliahu Rosenberg, in a moment of high courtroom melodrama, accused Demjanjuk of being “Ivan the Terrible” “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” the Jewish mob went wild. “Murderer!” “He should be killed!” “Enough of the trial, take him to the gallows!” (In 1945 Rosenberg had testified that he personally witnessed the murder of “Ivan the Terrible” during an uprising.)

As expected, the Jerusalem district court identified Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible” in 1988 and sentenced him to die. He was convicted on all four counts: war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and crimes against persecuted people. In appropriately Kafkaesque fashion, the transcript of the proceedings exceeded 14,000 pages. The verdict alone was 400 pages long and took twelve hours to read.

“We ruled in our judgment, without any hesitation and without a shadow of a doubt, that the defendant before us is Ivan the Terrible from Treblinka,” the court stated, “a man who murdered individuals, torturing and abusing them in their final moments before being sent to their deaths. Hands of flesh and blood cannot reach far enough to give him his deserts.”

Demjanjuk’s Israeli attorney, Yoram Sheftel, wrote in The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show-Trial (trans. from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman, London: Victor Gollancz, 1994, first published in Hebrew in Tel Aviv in 1993 [The title of the 1995 Gollancz paperback edition is Show Trial: The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk as ‘Ivan the Terrible.’ U.S. edition: Defending “Ivan the Terrible”: The Conspiracy to Convict John Demjanjuk (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1996)]):

The minute the word ‘death’ escaped Judge Tal’s lips, a terrible commotion began in the courtroom. . . . The unruly crowd began cursing, shouting and screaming insults. ‘Death, death,’ ‘Death to Ivan,’ ‘Death to the defence attorney,’ ‘Death to all Ukrainians,’ ‘Death, death, death!’ The people were dancing, stamping their feet, waving fists in the air. . . . The mob was ready to lynch anyone who got in its way.

Ukrainian activist Lubomyr Prytulak adds, “After John Demjanjuk was pushed out of the court room in his wheel chair, a mob from the audience tried to intercept his prison van, jeering, shouting that his punishment was too mild, and waving a placard which read ‘Let the Ukrainian beast starve to death.’”

The verdict of the trial court was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993, after it was shown that Demjanjuk could not possibly have been “Ivan the Terrible”—something the Jewish OSI had known from the beginning, but illegally concealed in hopes that the Ukrainian would be hung following his deportation. (Justice Meir Shamgar, head of the five-member Supreme Court panel, was—like chief trial judge Dov Levin—a former member of the Irgun.)

None of this diminished the power of the OSI in any way. It now says the 82-year-old Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor, Majdanek, and Flossenburg. When asked by reporters whether the OSI still claimed Demjanjuk was “Ivan the Terrible,” Michael Chertoff, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division (and Eli Rosenbaum’s boss), stated that the United States is “not taking a position on that matter.” In truth, Richard Glazer, yet another Treblinka “survivor,” summed up the Jewish-U.S. government position best: “Listen, maybe, maybe, but maybe, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe you know, he didn’t murder in Treblinka he murdered in Sobibor maybe, maybe.”

Among those revolted by the Israeli proceedings was a Jerusalem attorney and former judge named Dov Eitan. Eitan felt contempt for the way the Demjanjuk trial was conducted. The entertainment aspects—its conduct in a theater and live broadcast on Israeli television—repelled him, and he was particularly disgusted with the behavior of the lead trial judge, Dov Levin, who Eitan believed was disgracing Israeli justice. The proceedings made him so angry that he couldn’t bear to watch them for more than five minutes at a time.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1935, Eitan was a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces who received his law degree from Jerusalem University in 1962. After five years in private practice, he became a magistrate and then a Jerusalem district court judge. Eitan was forced to resign from the bench in 1983, after signing a public petition condemning the invasion of Lebanon and calling for Israeli withdrawal.

Eitan joined the Demjanjuk defense after the trial was over. This news was made public in early September 1988. Like Sheftel, Eitan thereafter received continuous death threats. Then, at around 7:30 a.m. on November 29, 1988—just days before his first scheduled appearance before the Supreme Court in the Demjanjuk case—Eitan allegedly leaped to his death from a window on the 15th floor of Jerusalem’s Ayalon Hotel, located in Jerusalem’s tallest office block, landing on the sidewalk below.

Eitan’s death provoked immediate suspicion. Given the atmosphere of fanaticism and hatred surrounding the trial, few believed Eitan committed suicide as Israeli officials claimed. The Ukrainians were unanimous in their conviction that Eitan had been murdered. Eitan’s own wife, Miriam, said, “They say he committed suicide. That can’t be. I don’t believe it.” The two had eaten breakfast together that morning, and had made an appointment for 11:00 a.m. to buy a new suit for the appeal. Similarly, neither Eitan’s law partner, Ronny Bar-On, nor Sheftel, who had last spoken to him around midnight the evening before his death, noticed anything unusual about Eitan’s attitudes, demeanor, or actions. In fact, the previous week, Eitan had insisted that the defense attorneys be allotted secured parking in the car park reserved for judges and prosecutors right next to the courthouse entrance.

The Toronto Globe and Mail reported: “Mystery still surrounds Mr. Eitan’s apparent suicide. There was no note, and friends and relatives said he had not shown any particular signs of depression or stress. But [Israeli] police believe there is no possibility it was murder. . . . Israeli newspapers gave the death considerable coverage yesterday morning, although none came up with a convincing explanation of why a successful and seemingly happily married lawyer should have wanted to kill himself.”

Two days later, at Eitan’s funeral, a 70-year-old “Holocaust survivor” (as the international press labeled him) improbably named Yisrael Yehezkeli (or Yehezkieli), hurled acid into Yoram Sheftel’s face, badly damaging his eyes. According to Sheftel, “Yehezkeli was not a Holocaust survivor at all. He had fled Warsaw as soon as the Germans entered the city, spent time in various parts of the Soviet Union and enlisted in the Polish Anders Army, with which he arrived in the then Palestine in 1942.” Patrick Buchanan wrote, “It seems [Demjanjuk’s] attorney, Dov Eitan, full of high spirits a day before he was to argue the appeal, secretly made his way to the 15th floor of a Jerusalem hotel and jumped to his death, without leaving a suicide note. After his funeral, co-counsel Yoram Sheftel had acid thrown into his eyes.”

Yehezkeli, who was apprehended on the spot at Jerusalem’s Sanhedria cemetery, readily confessed. Press reports identified him as a regular member of the audience during the Demjanjuk proceedings. “I am sure that all Jews are pleased with what I did,” he told the Israeli press, which treated him as something of a hero. Zvi Tal, one of the three judges who sentenced John Demjanjuk to death, freed Yehezkeli on bail, although the defendant refused to apologize, and refused to promise not to harm Sheftel again. Subsequently convicted on the basis of his confession, Yehezkeli was ordered to pay $11,000 in damages and served two years in prison. Sheftel pronounced himself “satisfied.”

Later, on July 29, 1993—the same day the Israeli Supreme Court handed down its acquittal of Demjanjuk and ordered him free—a petition was filed requesting that Demjanjuk be detained in Israel and tried all over again on charges that he had been a guard not at Treblinka, but at Sobibor and other camps. The petition succeeded in extending Demjanjuk’s imprisonment for two more months. Significantly, the same arguments were employed a decade later by Eli Rosenbaum’s OSI and Michael Chertoff’s Justice Department to strip John Demjanjuk of his U.S. citizenship all over again, at the age of 81.

The petitioner was Noam Federman, the official spokesman for Kach (“Thus”), the political party founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane. Federman has been implicated in numerous acts of violence. Within days, acid thrower Yisrael Yehezkeli joined. Soon, a long list of Establishment petitioners also came aboard—among them, eight of the eleven Sobibor survivors living in Israel, Ephraim Zoroff of the Israeli Wiesenthal Center (whose attorney on the petition was the son of a former Knesset speaker), and the World Jewish Congress (whose attorney on the petition was the son-in-law of Eichmann prosecutor Gideon Hausner).

And in September 1993, when Demjanjuk finally did leave Israel aboard El Al, representatives of Kach and Kahane Chai (“Kahane Lives”) were at the airport protesting. Members of the latter group, according to the ADL, chanted, “[Yitzhak] Rabin is a traitor, frees a Nazi Jew-hater.”

Two years later, a 27-year-old Jewish law and computer science student who was the son of a religious scribe assassinated Rabin. Eyal, an offshoot of the Kahanist Kach movement, appears to have been involved, although its head was a secret police agent. Kahanist activist Avigdor Eskin was convicted of performing a Pulsa D’Nura Kabbalistic ceremony and placing a curse on the prime minister four weeks before his death.

The objective of Kahanism is to establish a Torah-based political regime that will impose halakha (Jewish law). According to this view, the purpose of the Israeli government is to maintain the internal order of the state and protect the people from external enemies. But if the actions or edicts of the state (or, in the Diaspora, of organized Jewry) contradict the Torah, then halakha must take precedence—for, as Kahane wrote, “the Torah is the authority, and its laws obligate the Jew and govern him.” The obligation of the Jew to respect the Israeli government or the established leaders of the Jewish community in the Diaspora is valid only on the condition that the leadership obeys Jewish law.

Consonant with this view, Kahane, in a Jewish Press article in 1984, called for the liquidation of Jews whose views he found pernicious: “In order to save Israel the Torah says to burn out the evil from our midst. Indeed, the rabbis of the Talmud bring down the verse, ‘and thou shalt love thy fellow Jew as thyself’ in order to explain why we must kill the Jew who is deserving of death in a humane way. . . . [W]hen a Jew rises to challenge fundamentals of God, Jewry and Israel, that Jew must be stopped. And indeed, the punishment that we bring on the wicked Jew goes a long and necessary way to atonement for him in the world to come. . . . It takes great strength to love Jews so much that one fights for them. It takes, perhaps, even more strength to love Jews so much that one fights Jews who would destroy them.”

Kahane’s views reflect a long tradition within Jewry, and are still alive today. For example, political scientist John H. Sigler has noted, “Two leading settler rabbis were accused of giving religious sanction for killing Rabin because of his willingness to give up holy land in the West Bank. . . . The Council of Rabbis in the territories had sought to establish if Rabin should be declared a moser, or collaborator with oppressors of Jews and deserving of death under halakah, Jewish religious law.” Similarly, Rabbi Avraham Hecht, a prominent member of New York’s Syrian Jewish community, chief rabbi of the wealthy Congregation Sha’are Zion in Flatbush, New York, and president of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, a national organization of 540 Orthodox rabbis, has enthusiastically endorsed Kahane’s views. The late maverick journalist Robert I. Friedman wrote an article about Hecht for New York magazine (Oct. 9, 1995) entitled “The Rabbi Who Sentenced Yitzhak Rabin to Death.” (Hecht retracted his statement and apologized to Rabin.)

An amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999 in a Florida capital punishment case offers insight into some of the principles of capital punishment in traditional Jewish law. Of course, what the New York Times wrote about the kosher food laws (that for decades have compelled European Americans to pay an involuntary tax to organized Jewry on virtually all of the foodstuffs and cleaning products they buy) also applies to other areas of Jewish law: “Kosher basics are clear. . . . But there are as many interpretations and loopholes as in the tax code.”

The brief in question was written by Jewish attorneys in New York and Washington, D.C. on behalf of the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs (COLPA) (an Orthodox group), and the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IAJLJ) (an organization formed in Jerusalem in 1969 with former U. S. Supreme Court Justice and UN Ambassador Arthur J. Goldberg as its first head), which represents Jewish lawyers in thirty countries. The authors note that Justice Menachem Elon, former Deputy President of the Israeli Supreme Court, had reviewed the text of their brief, and authorized them to state that he concurred with its conclusions. “Justice Elon is the world’s foremost modern legal authority on ‘Mishpat Ivri’ – legal principles derived from traditional Jewish Law.”

Capital punishment is a penalty prescribed by Jewish law for the commission of specified offenses. “The Biblical text explicitly specifies two forms of execution: stoning (Exodus 17:4, 8:22; Numbers 14:10) and burning (Leviticus 20:14, 21:9). The oral tradition includes two additional means—strangulation and decapitation.” (Stoning is considered the most severe of the four modes of capital punishment.)

“A casual reader of the Biblical text might assume that the execution described as ‘stoning’ is carried out by hurling stones at the condemned individual until he dies from the force of the objects thrown.” “The Mishna in tractate Sanhedrin (45a) describes execution by ‘stoning.’ The condemned defendant was pushed from a platform set high enough above a stone floor that his fall would probably result in instantaneous death.” “The continuation of the discourse in Sanhedrin reveals that the rabbis’ ultimate concern was that the mode of execution be as quick and as painless as possible, and that it cause as little disfigurement as possible.”

In his book, Yoram Sheftel takes pains to imply that Dov Eitan committed suicide, and was not murdered. Thus he writes, “His body and face were smashed beyond recognition; he had been identified by the I.D. card in his wallet.” However, this is not persuasive. For one thing, every such suicide would be identified first by I.D., not by facial recognition. Eitan was successful, but not famous. Moreover, fifteen floors is about the height necessary to insure death. Even so, Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who is believed by many to have been the victim of an early MK-Ultra experiment with LSD, plunged thirteen stories to his death, although he remained semi-conscious for a time after the fall. And in Miami in 2002 a woman survived a leap from the 14th floor of her apartment building, landing on a car in the lot below. She scrambled off and stood up, suffering only a broken arm.

Such examples strongly militate against any unusual degree of disfigurement in Eitan’s case, unless he was deliberately disfigured. Rabbinic authorities accept a certain degree of bodily mutilation in cases of stoning.

The Jewish Encyclopedia indicates that Jewish capital punishment persists in the Diaspora, albeit in disguised form (called “Substitutes for ‘The Four Deaths’”): “A suggestion occurs more than once in the Talmud (Sanh. 37b; Ket. 30a et seq.) that, though Israel has lost its freedom, and its judges can no longer wield the sword of justice, ‘the four capital punishments have not ceased. He who deserves stoning will fall from the roof, or a wild beast will trample him down.”

“Punishment is inflicted upon the offender not so much for his own sake as for the deterrence of others,” the Encyclopedia Judaica states, “that all people should hear and be afraid. . . . The deterrent aspect of punishment in Jewish law is already the most important of all: people who hear and see a man heavily punished for his offense are supposed to be deterred from committing the offense and incurring the risk of such punishment.” Prior to Eitan’s death, one Israeli newspaper bore the headline, “Yoram Sheftel, How Can You Explain the Contradiction,” and asked, “How will Yoram Sheftel explain serving as defense attorney in the Demjanjuk trial, of all trials, if he really is a loyal and devoted Jew?”

The plethora of “witnesses” in the trial is also consistent with the rule that “’The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death’ (Deut. 17:7) . . . A mode of ‘stoning’ had therefore to be devised in which the witness would not only be assured of the first chance to lay hands on the convicted person, but also of the certainty of putting him to death. (Sanh. 6:4)” (Encyclopedia Judaica)

Finally, capital punishment may not be inflicted “except on the most trustworthy and convincing testimony of at least two qualified eye-witnesses to the crime who must also depose that the culprit had been forewarned as to the criminality and the consequences of his project.” (The Jewish Encyclopedia)

Four days before Dov Eitan’s death, and six days prior to the acid attack upon Sheftel, Yisrael Yehezkeli paid a visit to the apartment of Sheftel’s elderly mother. Introducing himself as Avraham Berman, he said that his address was 14 King George Street, Jerusalem (which in reality was Dov Eitan’s office address, a building in which there were no residential apartments). “Berman” said he represented an organization that “fought against [Jewish – R.M.] Nazi collaborators” of the Eitan and Sheftel type. Yehezkeli told Mrs. Sheftel that if Eitan and her son did not stop representing Demjanjuk immediately, they would be killed. Yehezkeli admitted all of this to the authorities in his confession.

In the beginning, stoning to death was an expression of popular fury analogous to lynching, and only later did it become a formal, legally recognized method of execution. While there is no way to be certain that Dov Eitan was stoned to death, the signs point to it, and only our abysmal ignorance of the true nature of the strangers who move among us and rule over us blinds us to this simple fact. If he was stoned, it would seem that this form of punishment has come full circle, and is once again an expression of mob fury.

Neither Dov Eitan nor Yoram Sheftel was motivated by humanitarian love for Whites or even a desire that non-Jews be treated fairly, in their defense of John Demjanjuk. While both men charged enormous fees for their services, Sheftel appears to have been the more purely mercenary of the two, motivated primarily by fame, money, and celebrity. Eitan, a former judge, was perhaps more concerned about the possible unintended ramifications of out-of-control behavior on the Jewish people.

Both men responded to the demonstrative warmth and gratitude of the Ukrainians with aloof reserve. Sheftel is an out-and-out anti-White racist who continually defames Whites and Christians by falsely attributing hideous crimes to them, and routinely invokes the slurs “goy” and “goyim”—even when referring to the clients who were paying his enormous fees, and who had been unforgivably wronged by American and Israeli Jews.

Likewise, “Eitan expressed surprise that the Demjanjuk family was so nice, and not full of resentment towards Israel and Jews, as he had feared, because of the disgraceful treatment of Demjanjuk. ‘I would expect such Ukrainian goyim to be much more anti-Semitic than they are.’” This is equivalent to a Frenchman saying, “I am surprised that the Dreyfus family is so nice, and not full of resentment towards Frenchmen and Europeans because of the disgraceful treatment of Dreyfus. I would expect such kikes to be much more anti-White than they are.”

Another attorney who aided the Demjanjuk defense provides an unequivocal example of ingroup motivation among Jewish Demjanjuk defenders. An article in the Hebrew-language newspaper Davar (July 15, 1988) reported, “Mr. William Wolf expresses his deep and abiding love for Israel. He says his actions for Demjanjuk are virtually for the benefit of Israel.” Wolf told the Greater Phoenix Jewish News, “I’m subjecting myself to all this aggravation and gaining nothing. I’ve become a pariah. Other than my family, my next concern is the Jewish community. I love Israel.” The paper said that Wolf’s views had put him at odds with the OSI, the ADL, the Jewish Federation of Greater Phoenix, and others.

Indeed, the Dov Eitans, Israel Shahaks, and Israel Shamirs are as responsible for our grim plight as are the far more typical fiends who built and ran the killing machine of Communism that robbed tens of millions of Aryans—and their now nonexistent descendants—of their lives under conditions too horrible to imagine, or the thugs and commissars of the OSI, ADL, and Wiesenthal Center, who ruthlessly advance the interests of Jewry at the expense of humanity as a whole. The “good Jew”—hated by his fellows though he may be—is every bit as vital to his group’s success as is the most vicious kike. For it is he who stills the strident fanaticism of his insane compatriots at the last possible moment, he who sows confusion and doubt in the simple minds and bleeding hearts of the goyim, he who ultimately stays the Aryan’s sword when the pitiless kill stroke is needed.

“Good Jews” are conscious and proud of the indispensable role they play in the strange saga of Jewish triumphalism. As Israel Shahak patiently explained to a headstrong Jewish critic shortly before his death: “[F]or us . . . to attack Jewish institutions and laws, even when hallowed by time, and use the sharpest language while doing so, as the Prophets and other Jewish poets preserved in the Old Testament did when criticizing Jews (usually they used much sharper language than I am using), is the most normal thing; it is something which preserves our freedom and our sense of continuity as Jews.”

He is right. Shahak and others like him know what they are doing. Do you?

Therefore, mourn not for Dov Eitan. Mourn for your own lost people—befuddled and confused, hated and reviled, teetering precariously on the brink of physical and cultural annihilation . . . yet utterly bereft of prophets or poets willing to speak truth to power.

* * *

Source: Author (2003)

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Solzhenitsyn's Ghost
Solzhenitsyn's Ghost
16 December, 2018 1:15 pm

“In his spare time, this legendary Aryan bully beat Jews mercilessly, cracked skulls, cut off ears, gouged out eyes, stabbed pregnant women in the abdomen, committed indescribable atrocities on corpses, and drilled into the buttocks of helpless Jewish prisoners….”

These people always project their sadistic fantasies, sometimes carried out in real life by them, unto others. This is probably one of the most insidious and horrifying aspects about them. They are able to hide behind a false underdog narrative created and propagated by them through their control of the media, Thus shielding them from criticism and prosecution for their crimes.
The burning at the stake of James Fields is a more recent example of this phenomenon.