Right Wrong Man, How to Clone a Mammoth
The Right Wrong Man Guest: Lawrence Douglas, Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College, Author of “The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial” A case of mistaken identity and delayed justice is the story of Ivan Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant working at Ford motors in Cleveland in the 1970s, who was wrongly accused of being a sadistic Nazi known as Ivan the Terrible. He was deported to Israel where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. But then it became clear that he really wasn’t Ivan the Terrible, so he came back to the US. But the story continues, because while Ivan Demjanjuk wasn’t Ivan the Terrible, he had been a guard in a Nazi death camp. When that secret came to light, his US citizenship was revoked a second time and, in 2011, a German court convicted him of being an accessory to murder. That trial came 70 years after the alleged crimes and represented a major turning point for Germany’s handling of former Nazis. Legal scholar Lawrence Douglas writes in his new book that before Demjanjuk, judges in Germany treated the Holocaust as if it had been “perpetrated by no more than a handful of men” like Hitler and Goring. Demjanjuk was the first “replaceable cog” in the Third Reich’s killing machine to be tried and convicted. How to Clone a Mammoth (originally aired August 14, 2015) Guest: Beth Shapiro, PhD, Professor of Paleogenomics at the University of California Santa Cruz Molecular biologist Beth Shapiro’s lab at the University of California in Santa Cruz focuses on “ancient DNA.” She’s just published a truly fascinating book about the possibility of bringing ancient species back to life. It’s called “How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction.”