The Devil Next Door review – murderous Nazi or victim of mistaken identity?
If only there were indeed some art to find the mind’s construction in the face. What a different world that would be. Instead, we live in this one and its horrors may live anywhere.
In Cleveland, Ohio in 1985, John Demjanjuk, a nationalised Ukrainian immigrant and Ford auto worker of 30-plus years’ good standing, was arrested as a war criminal. The US Office of Special Investigations (OSI) – Nazi hunters – had amassed evidence that he was the notoriously sadistic death camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible, an operator of the gas ovens at Treblinka who would beat, torture and cut off the breasts of Jewish captives as he herded thousands of the estimated 850,000 men, women and children killed there to their deaths.
Netflix’s new true-crime series The Devil Next Door tells, over five instalments, the story of what became the highest-profile and most bitterly emotive trial since Adolf Eichmann’s 25 years before. Both the survivors and the perpetrators of the Holocaust were ageing and dying; it would be one of the last chances to deliver justice for what had gone before.
Demjanjuk never moved from his position that he was a victim of mistaken identity. The US stripped him of citizenship and Israel extradited him for trial in Jerusalem. A year of trying to prove the verity or otherwise of documents and photographs ensued. Should they be considered suspect because they came from the KGB at a time when the Soviets were trying to drive a wedge between Ukrainian and Jewish American communities allied by their anti-communist sympathies? Or was that a spur to releasing the truth? Facial-recognition experts testified for and against the 66-year-old Demjanjuk being the man in Nazi ID card photos taken more than 40 years before. Lawyers battled for supremacy, sometimes even when they were on the same side. One of Demjanjuk’s lawyers, Yoram Sheftel, remains vocal about it being “a show trial” designed to bring succour to survivors, with unreliable evidence at every stage.
Above all, it was a year of survivor testimony. Of them insisting they recognised the man before them as the man who sliced at bodies as he forced them into the gas chambers, and of trying to resolve unspeakable atrocities into words. One, Pinhas Epstein, recalled a 12-year-old girl emerging alive from the chamber crying “I want my mummy”, before she was shot and thrown into a pit. What do you do with that sight, that knowledge? Forty years on her voice still rang in his head as if it were yesterday.
The Devil Next Door rarely touched on wider questions, although, during their contributions, both Israeli state prosecutor Eli Gabay and Eli Rosenbaum of the OSI considered the moral and practical implications of letting war criminals go unpunished, and Demjanjuk’s supervisor at the Ford plant noted the US’s willingness to let bygones be bygones when they found former Nazis who could, for example, help with their space programme. It largely stuck to the relatively straightforward task of delineating events as they unfolded, although even here there were leaps and gaps in the telling I needed to fill in for myself via the internet after it was all over.
Perhaps the makers, understandably, felt that a sober, traditional approach was the most respectful. Although they used substantial amounts of footage of the witnesses’ testimonies and the appalling newsreel footage that came from inside the death and concentration camps, they did so in a way that avoided sensationalism or any sense of viewer manipulation. But the best of Netflix’s true-crime series (and, indeed, any other broadcaster’s, even if they haven’t made them such a central feature of their offerings) manage to ask bigger questions, often about entire systems of justice or government, the corruption therein or just the innate human fallibility that attends even our best endeavours.
There was scope in The Devil Next Door for much more context and philosophising about truth and memory, the difficulty of weighing evidence impartially in the face of overwhelming emotion, or how you ever find justice – collective, individual, true or symbolic – or any kind of peace when you have witnessed more acts of purest evil than a human soul can surely bear.
The Jerusalem court’s verdict was that Demjanjuk was indeed Ivan the Terrible. It was overturned on appeal, but when the Berlin Wall came down it led to new documents being accessed and, eventually, another trial, where the 91-year-old Demjanjuk was found guilty as an accessory to 28,500 murders as a guard at Sobibór, but not found to be Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka.
Questions, from the smallest to the very largest we ever ask of ourselves, remain.