Helen Chapman

New London— A memorial service for Helen W. Chapman, who passed away on Nov. 17, 2011, wife of CDR Donald M. Chapman, USCG (Ret.), will be held at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 25, 2012, at the Coast Guard Academy Chapel. There will be a reception following the service at the Officers’ Club at the Academy.

The stranger settled in Cleveland after World War II with his wife and little girl. He became an autoworker and changed his first name from Ivan to John. He had two more children, became a naturalized American, lived quietly and retired. Decades later, the past came back to haunt John Demjanjuk. And for the rest of his life it hovered over a tortuous odyssey of denunciations by Nazi hunters and Holocaust survivors, of questions over his identity, citizenship revocations, deportation orders and eventually trials in Israel and Germany for war crimes involving the collaboration with Nazis at death camps. He was convicted, reprieved and convicted again, but steadfastly denied the accusations.

As survivors and defendants have aged and died, the prosecution of Nazi-era war criminals has become increasingly rare and difficult. Even at the end of Demjanjuk’s life — he died on Saturday at a nursing home in southern Germany, his son, John Demjanjuk Jr., told The Associated Press — questions remained in a case that had always been riddled with mysteries. Demjanjuk was 91.

Had he been, as he and his family claimed, a Ukrainian prisoner of war in Germany and Poland who made his way to America and became a victim of mistaken identity? Or had he been, as prosecutors charged, a collaborating guard who willingly participated in the killing of Jews at the Treblinka, Majdanek and Sobibor death camps?

Ivan Demjanjuk was born on April 3, 1920, in Dubovye Makharintsy, a village in Ukraine. He had only four years of schooling, and was drafted into the Soviet Army in 1941. In 1942, he was wounded and captured by the Germans in the Crimea. What he did for the rest of the war was the crux of the issues surrounding his later life.

After the war, Demjanjuk met Vera Kowlowa in a German camp for displaced people. They married and in 1950, still living in DP camps, had a daughter, Lydia. In 1952, they emigrated to the United States and settled in Cleveland. The couple had two more children.

Butdemjanjukwasstripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 and deported to Israel, where witnesses and an identity card of “Ivan the Terrible,” a sadist who had murdered thousands of Jews at Treblinka, had turned up. The photograph on the identity card bore a striking resemblance to Demjanjuk.

He was placed on trial, convicted in 1988 of crimes against humanity and sentenced to be hanged. But five years later, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction when new evidence showed that another Ukrainian was probably the notorious Ivan. Back in America, Demjanjuk regained his citizenship, only to have it revoked again as new allegations arose.

Extradited to Germany in 2009, Demjanjuk, frail and suffering from bone-marrow and kidney diseases, was tried in a Munich court on charges of participating in the extermination of 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor camp in Germanoccupied Poland in 1943.

In May 2011, the court found Demjanjuk guilty and sentenced him to five years in prison.