Ivan Marchenko

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Ivan Ivanovich Marchenko (also Marchenko , Ukrainian Іван Иванович Марченко ; * 1911 in Sergejewka, Dnjepropetrovsk Oblast , today Ukraine ; † presumably 1943 ) was an overseer in the Treblinka extermination camp .

Because of his particular cruelty and brutality, he was called Ivan the Terrible . He was probably killed in the Treblinka prisoner uprising in 1943 .

Life

Marchenko was born in Ukraine, which at that time still belonged to the Russian Empire . He arrived during the Second World War as a member of the Red Army in German captivity . Like many Ukrainians, he volunteered for auxiliary services for the SS and was trained in the German SS camp Trawniki in occupied eastern Poland.

Atrocities in the Treblinka extermination camp

Martschenko, Personnel Number 476, served as a guard in the Treblinka extermination camp , where he, as Ivan the Terrible, operated the gas chambers and is said to have tortured prisoners. Among other things, he cut off women’s breasts and used a whip to force a corpse carrier to rape a twelve-year-old.

According to a former inmate of Treblinka, Martschenko died in 1943. He is said to have been killed with a shovel during the Treblinka prisoner uprising .

According to other sources, however, he was last seen in Yugoslavia in 1944 .

Suspicion of Ivan the Terrible's identity with John Demjanjuk

In 1975, American authorities obtained a Soviet list of 70 names of alleged Nazi collaborators who had emigrated to America. Then the name Ivan Demjanjuk appeared. The Cleveland-based auto mechanic John Demjanjuk , a Ukrainian by birth, who first gave up his first name Iwan in connection with his emigration to the USA in 1952, was then suspected of having been a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp . Because of this suspicion, the investigators sent a photo of Demjanjuk to their colleagues in Israel. Survivors of the Treblinka extermination camp wrongly identified him in the photo as Ivan the Terrible . Demjanjuk was therefore extradited to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death in 1988. The verdict was overturned in 1993 because it could be proven that the surname of the concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible was not Demjanjuk , but Martschenko .

Notwithstanding the lifting of his conviction, Demjanjuk was repeatedly associated with the name Ivan the Terrible in press reports .

It has also been suggested that Ivan Demjanjuk and Ivan Martschenko were in fact one and the same person. In a 1951 application for a visa to the United States, Demjanjuk erroneously entered Marchenko as his mother's name. He claimed that he had lost his real name and that he had therefore entered the name Martschenko, which is common in Ukraine.

Demjanjuk and Martschenko, however, as photos show, were of different ages and sizes, they had different stature and different hair colors. In contrast, they shared similarities such as a rounded face, protruding ears, almond-shaped eyes and thin lips.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c revierflaneur.de , April 2, 2009, offline
  2. ↑ a b caretaker of the gas chambers . In: Spiegel Online .
  3. ↑ a b c Murderous Eyes . In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 , 1993, pp. 103-105 ( online ).
  4. ↑ a b c time.com
  5. ↑ The wrong Ivan? . In: FAZ , May 11, 2009
  6. ↑ dw-world.de
personal data
SURNAME Marchenko, Ivan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Marchenko, Ivan Ivanovich (full name); Marchenko, Ivan; Марченко, Іван Иванович (Ukrainian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ukrainian concentration camp guard
DATE OF BIRTH 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Sergeyevka, Dnepropetrovsk Oblast , Ukraine
DATE OF DEATH 1943