One of Berlin’s leading museums is due to publish never-before-seen photographs next week that purport to show John Demjanjuk at work in the extermination camp Sobibor.
According to officials at the Topography of Terror, Berlin’s museum of the history of the Nazi regime’s security services, a newly-unearthed photographic archive places the convicted SS guard at the extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
In 2011, a court in Germany sentenced Demjanjuk to five years imprisonment on over 27,900 counts of accessory to murder for his role at Sobibor.
But until his death in March 2012, in spite to documentary evidence proving the contrary, Demjanjuk denied he had ever been a concentration camp guard there.
Demjanjuk became known to the world when, in 1988, an Israeli court convicted him of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Ukrainian had been a Trawniki man — a Nazi collaborator who partook in the Final Solution — during the Second World War.
At the time, he was believed to be notorious Sobibor guard “Ivan the Terrible”.
When doubt was cast upon that presumption, Israel’s Supreme Court overturned his death sentence and released him in 1993.
The Topography of Terror’s tranche of photographs was taken by Sobibor’s former deputy commandant, Johann Niemann.
Niemann died in October 1943 during an uprising by the extermination camp’s prisoners.
Regarding Demjanjuk, German historians have tried to lower expectations ahead of Tuesday’s publication.
Stuttgart University’s Martin Cüppers has said that one cannot say with “absolute certainty” that Demjanjuk will be identifiable from the photographs.
But Niemann’s archive of more than 350 photos should prove to be revelatory nonetheless, documenting the working life of a camp of which few traces remain.
Following the October 1943 uprising, Sobibor was closed, its buildings including the gas chambers raised and foundations paved over, and its grounds planted with trees.
Prior to its demolition, around 250,000 Jews were murdered there.
