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In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk's legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in Nazi genocide. In the years that followed, Demjanjuk was twice stripped of his American citizenship and sentenced to death by a JerUSlem court as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka - only to be cleared in one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in legal history. Finally, in 2011, after eighteen months of trial, a court in Munich convicted the native Ukrainian of assisting Hitler's SS in the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern Poland.
About the author
Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. His books include
The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust and
The Vices. His work has appeared in leading publications such as the
New Yorker, the
Times Literary Supplement, and
Harper's. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts.
Summary
In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk's legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalize
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"Thoughtful."---Sheldon Kirshner, Times of Israel
Report
"Douglas relates with authority and clarity the story of these complex legal processes. . . . [He] does justice to both the story's factual complexities and its moral and political conundrums. . . .The Right Wrong Man, from its summary title to its thoughtful postscript is an impressive work, as well as a timely one in its demonstration of the power of legal systems to learn from past missteps."--Anthony Julius, New York Times Book Review
