Feb. 3



POLAND:

Poland Launches New 'Ivan the Terrible' Probe


Poland Monday launched a probe into World War II mass murders of Jews by
four alleged Nazi henchmen, marking a new attempt to build a case
against a feared SS concentration camp guard known as ``Ivan the Terrible.''

The four are suspected of committing genocide between 1942 and 1944 in
Nazi death camps sited in Poland and the liquidation of urban ghettoes
into which Jews were rounded up.

``One of the suspects is Ivan the Terrible,'' prosecutor Andrzej
Witkowski, of the National Remembrance Institute (IPN), told Reuters.
``We hope to reach significant conclusions in the first half of this year.''

The IPN, responsible for prosecuting crimes against the nation, said in a
statement that John Demjanjuk had been identified as Ivan the Terrible at
a 1986 trial in Israel.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who emigrated to the United States in 1952, was
sentenced to death at a sensational trial before the verdict was
overturned by Israel's Supreme Court.

The IPN said it was launching its investigation with the help of evidence
from the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem and German prosecutors.

Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, an estimated three
million died in Poland, many in the gas chambers of purpose-built Nazi
death camps.

SUSPECTS IN GERMANY, U.S.

The other three suspects were identified as Dymitro S., now residing in
Germany, and Bronislaw H. and Jacob R., who live in the United States.

The IPN alleged the four had undergone training at an SS camp in Trawniki
before joining the ``Aktion Reinhardt'' operation to wipe out Jews on the
territory of the General Government, or German-occupied central and
southern Poland.

They were also suspected of committing genocide at Poland's Belzec,
Sobibor and Treblinka death camps, the Poniatowa labor camp and the
liquidation of the Bialystok, Czestochowa, Lublin and Warsaw ghettoes.

An estimated 840,000 Jews died at the Treblinka camp, 50 miles northeast
of Warsaw.

(source: Reuters)