Retired Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner referred to the trial of John Ivan Demjanjuk, who shocked the country 25 years ago.
Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian accused of committing war crimes against Jews during the Holocaust. He was suspected of being "Ivan the Terrible" from the Treblinka death camp. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a District Court in Israel in 1988, but in the appeal to the Supreme Court he was acquitted over doubts about his identity as Ivan the Terrible.
In an interview with Kan Reshet Bet, Dorner, who as a district court judge had been part of the panel that had initially convicted Demjanjuk, said that "Eichmann was a murderer behind the writing desk, Ivan the Terrible murdered with his own hands, he would operate the gas chambers, the cruelest of the cruel. The trial took a difficult year of my life. It was terrible to see those things. What to give him? Life in prison - it wouldn’t express the extent of the horror.”
Dorner described the harsh sentence: "We sat every day, five days a week, in a panel headed by the late Dov Levin Authority, Zvi Tal, and we heard from survivors what they experienced and it was very difficult, people recognized him and would not forget all their lives."
As stated, Demjanjuk denied being "Ivan the Terrible." Dorner said, "What convinced us that he was the man, because we heard 11 survivors who identified him and would not forget him. They brought experts with a picture of him and he said it was fake, and I saw him in his eyes that it was him. Among the identifiers was an SS man who identified him and was afraid to come to Israel lest we put him on trial, and then the entire court went to Berlin to interrogate him. "
