Sometimes we think we know our neighbours... But think about it carefully. They are people who practically share our lives with us. They live in the same place as we do, they have (broadly) the same problems and advantages that we might experience, and they belong to the same community... The amazing thing about all this is that all that glitters is not always gold. This is the real, documented and stranger-than-fiction case of ‘Ivan the Terrible’.
A guy who, since the 1950s, has lived legally in the United States of America. He worked, until he reached retirement at General Motors, and lived a life as ordinary and normal as you and I would have done if we had been in his shoes... The detail? His past. This is what it reveals from the first episode of the docu-series, Netflix. It is a step-by-step, detail-by-detail investigation of what really happened in the case of ‘Ivan Deminiauk’. A former Ukrainian soldier who actively collaborated with the Nazis during most of the Second World War...
People say that the sins of the past are expired little by little. And in Ivan's case, at least, this saying seems to be accepted... The docu-series shows how a declassification of files by the USSR made it easier to hunt down and search for escaped war criminals all over the world. These files were made available to anyone who wanted them, and so, like a jigsaw puzzle, the lie of the exemplary family man, faithful Orthodox Christian believer, grandfather and father, began to crumble.
On the one hand we have a professional torturer, cruel and with extensive cases of abuse, violent deaths and inhumane treatment of Jews, Soviet and Polish prisoners during the German occupation of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland.... Ivan's sin was not in choosing the criminal and losing side in the war, Demianiuk's real mistake was in believing that his true face would go unnoticed over the decades. .... Netflix shows through the 3 episodes of the series how this man faces the consequences of his actions and how he pretends to be innocent, even though the overwhelming evidence contradicts what he and his family claim. It's not true crime, but this docu-series is a summary of what happened after the barbarism and how difficult it is to get justice...
The process it took to legally confront everything this man did in his youth was something worthy of a show, a spectacle.... Not even O.J. Simpson would have been so cynical and brazen, and while the documentary doesn't take sides, it's impossible, as an audience, not to ask a lot of questions... It was not for nothing that he was supported by ‘The Terrible’... As a Nazi collaborator, Demianiuk excelled in deadly concentration camps such as ‘Treblinka’ Chelmno’, “Majdanek”, and “Sobibor”. In all of them, he distinguished himself as a cruel, ruthless and efficient butcher of prisoners... Undoubtedly, a story that is consumed with a certain distaste and revulsion, but which reminds us that there is much that we do not know, but which nevertheless haunts us.
