Response to Olga Bertelsen's Article

摘要

After carefully reading Olga Bertelsen's article, we feel strongly compelled to express our concerns regarding the numerous factual errors and significant misrepresentations on which the author bases her primary assertions. Bertelsen claims that the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB) purposely framed an innocent Ivan Demjanjuk of Nazi war crimes in order to sow discord between emigre Jews and Ukrainians in the West, for fear that they would join forces to fight against Soviet human rights violations. To support this thesis, she portrays the U.S. Justice Department's "Office of Special Investigations" as a group of politically motivated amateurs, who were easily hoodwinked by the cunning operatives of the KGB, ignoring the fact that for many years they have been the most successful Nazi-hunting unit in the world.1 This theory is based, moreover, on her assertion that the primary document proving Demjanjuk's service as an auxiliary with the Schutzstaffel (SS) (his ID from the Trawniki SS training camp) was a forgery, when in fact there has never been a single case in which a Nazi document provided to a German court trying a Nazi war crimes case has been discovered to be forged.2 Its veracity was confirmed, moreover, by multiple courts in three Western democracies-Germany, Israel, and the United States.3