# The Devil Next Door (2019)

> A Cleveland retiree stands trial in Israel accused of being the notorious Treblinka guard Ivan the Terrible, and the case becomes a reckoning with identity, memory and justice.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/80093

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 5
- Episode runtime: 44 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: documentary, crime, history
- Network: Netflix
- Cast: John Demjanjuk, Eli Rosenbaum, Elizabeth Holtzman, Pat Buchanan, Richard Rashke, Ronald Reagan, Eyal Megged, William Flynn
- TMDB rating: 7.5/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11165002/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: moderate
- Tone: sober, tense, haunting, somber

## What critics say

Viewers broadly rate the docuseries positively for its gripping account of a Cleveland man's extradition trial in Israel over alleged Nazi war crimes.

## Synopsis

The Devil Next Door (2019) is an Israeli-American true crime documentary miniseries created for Netflix. Across five episodes of roughly forty-four minutes each, the series follows a Cleveland retiree, John Demjanjuk, who is brought to trial in Jerusalem accused of being the Nazi death camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible. Prosecutors and former Office of Special Investigations director Eli Rosenbaum (who pursued the case), along with historian Richard Rashke and former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, appear in interviews that reconstruct the proceedings. The engine of the story is a question of identity: whether a survivor's memory and fragmentary documents can prove who a man was decades after the crimes. Archive footage from the original trial and from the American political debate it provoked gives the story weight and texture. Set against the postwar hunt for Nazi war criminals in Israel and the United States, the series is sober, tense and often harrowing, balancing courtroom detail with the human cost of genocide. Fans of Making a Murderer and Shoah will find resonance in its patient, archival approach to a historical legal reckoning.

## Shows like The Devil Next Door

- [Einsatzgruppen: The Nazi Death Squads (2009)](https://ember.film/tv/63771)
- [Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom (2023)](https://ember.film/tv/154706)
- [Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes (2026)](https://ember.film/tv/1105220)
- [The Confession Tapes (2017)](https://ember.film/tv/64206)
- [Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution (2005)](https://ember.film/tv/6853)
- [Nuremberg (2000)](https://ember.film/tv/6877)
- [Inside the Mossad (2017)](https://ember.film/tv/73594)
- [Unabomber: In His Own Words (2020)](https://ember.film/tv/83999)
- [Shadow of Truth (2016)](https://ember.film/tv/58405)
- [World's Most Wanted (2020)](https://ember.film/tv/88993)

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