The Trials

In 1987, Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker from Cleveland, Ohio, was accused of being Ivan the Terrible of the Nazi extermination camp, Treblinka. Identified by survivors, Demjanjuk was brought to trial in Jerusalem in 1988 and sentenced to hang. The international community’s investment in finding the truth escalated and so began a strange period of litigation which saw Demjanjuk acquitted in 1993, yet his American citizenship was revoked in 2002. Was he guilty? And if so, of what? The Trials probes the nature of guilt, the need for retribution, and the lessons still to be learned today from the Holocaust.