Check me out on Filmsuck talking about a new Netflix doc: "The Devil Next Door"
This week I went on Filmsuck with Eileen Jones and Evgenia Kovda. We talked about The Devil Next Door, a new Netflix doc series that tells the convoluted story of Nazi collaborator and death camp guard John (aka Ivan) Demjanjuk.
He was living a quiet family life in Cleveland and working at Ford when his wartime past finally caught up with him. After that, he was stripped of his American citizenship, deported to Israel, tried and convicted of being Treblinka’s feared Ivan the Terrible, acquitted, sent back to America, deported once again to Germany, convicted there of being an accessory to 28,000 murders at Sobibor, and then died while awaiting for appeal. All the while, America’s nationalist Ukrainian immigrant community rallied to his defense, collecting more than $2 million for his legal fees.
We discussed America’s ugly history of weaponizing fascist and anticommunist emigre movements and the privileged position that our culture reserves for nationalist and fascist-adjacent immigrant communities. This is obviously a very worthy subject for a doc. But the Devil Next Door didn’t do it justice. The truth is that it was a bit of hack job of a doc. As Evgenia said, it could almost have been pumped out by an AI algorithm.
What’s interesting is that the makers of the The Devil Next Door are Israeli. And a big part of the doc is clearly an attempt to criticize Israel’s cynical use of Holocaust memory. But their hit on Israel is too squishy and doesn’t really land.
The frustrating thing about the Demjanjuk case is that he really was a nobody — a low-level sociopathic thug who didn’t mind working at SS extermination camps. He was stripped of his citizenship and deported. A huge amount of energy was expended on trying him in America, Israel, and Germany. But hundreds — and perhaps thousands — of other, much more important and more horrible Nazis and fascists skated by with no problem at all. They got to live out their lives peacefully in America (and especially in Germany). The question is: Why? But the doc wasn’t very interested in that question.
We talk about all that and more. Give it a listen…and subscribe to Filmsuck!
—Yasha Levine
PS: We also briefly talk about how both Bernie and Warren’s foreign policy advisors come out of emigre families that came through post-WWII displaced persons camps. These camps, filled as they were with lots of Nazi collabos, were a big source of immigration into America in the late 40s and early 50s.
Immigrants as a Weapon is a new investigative newsletter that looks at the weaponization of nationalism and immigrant communities. Check out this introductory post.