 To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web   browser that   supports HTML5  video    Netflix’s newest addition to its true crime armada tells the story of John Demjanjuk, who was convicted of serving as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II
  The Devil Next Door attempts to tell Demjanjuk’s story – and seperate fact from fiction
 Questions still remain whether he was the Nazi guard known as ‘Ivan The Terrible’, if it was a case of mistaken identity…or whether he was actually somebody else altogether
    The show’s five episodes take viewers on a twisting story; with interviews with the former auto worker from Cleveland’s family members, prosecution and defence teams, as well as footage from his highly-publicised trial
 Who was John Demjanjuk?  John Demjanjuk was born in Ukraine in 1920. He most certainly had a rough childhood, surviving a famine in the 1930s that caused the death of millions across the country, before being drafted into the Soviet Union army in 1940
  Demjanjuk was then captured by the Nazis in 1942. But a massive question mark remains just what the soldier got up to for three years, between his capture and the end of the war in 1945
  As the documentary explores, there are various conflicting pieces of evidence that place the Ukranian native at several concentration camps during the last years of the war
 Until his death, he maintained that he had been a prisoner at a Nazi death camp, before being made to work as a guard
  Following the end of the war and the dissolution of Nazi Germany and his release, the former soldier and his wife emigrated to the US in 1952
 Settling in Cleveland, he worked as an auto-worker at a Ford Motor plant and became a naturalised American citizen in 1958
  He was well-known in the local Ukrainian-American community, but this would all come crashing down in the 70s when the US government claimed they had obtained evidence that Demjanjuk hadn’t just worked as a guard at a concentration camp, but he had been one of the most notorious and sadistic gas-chamber operators who had been given the chilling moniker ‘Ivan the Terrible
’ Who was Ivan the Terrible?    Ivan the Terrible was the nickname given to a guard at the Treblinka concentration camp in Warsaw that was operating during the Holocaust
  The moniker is a reference to Ivan IV, also called Ivan the Terrible, who was the first Tsar of Russia, believed to have killed his eldest son and heir
  The guard in question was often referred to as a Ukrainian and was responsible to operate the two tank engines that fed the deadly gas chambers
  There are some truly harrowing stories about his cruelty and malice whilst working at the camp; from torturing prisoners with pipes, swords and whips, to cutting off the ears of workers as they walked by, and making them continue to work as they bled out
 What happened in John Demjanjuk’s trial?  Well, Demjanjuk actually had two trials; one in Israel and one in Germany
  After being denaturalised as a US citizen, he was sent to Israel to stand trial for war crimes, as prosecutors alleged that as Ivan the Terrible, he had killed ‘thousands’ of prisoners and had been trained to operated the gas chamber of the camp
  The evidence linking him to the crimes included a Nazi identity card that prosecutors claimed was from an SS training camp, which bore the photo of a man with his resemblance
  Demjanjuk was actually convicted and sentenced to death during the trial, but the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that a lot of old Soviet Union war documents were released after being sealed away
 New evidence came to light that Ivan the Terrible was actually an altogether different man, Ivan Marchenko
 Demjanjuk was acquitted and regained US citizenship.    The peace wasn’t to last long, however
  evidence came to light that Demjanjuk – whilst probably not Ivan the Terrible – had worked in another concentration camp, Sobibor
  Demjanjuk was once again convicted of participating in the mass killings of Jews during the Holocaust at the Sobibar camp and was sentenced to five years imprisonment
  He died in 2012, at the age of 91. The final appeal against his conviction was still pending
  The Devil Next Door is available to stream on Netflix now.   
