Photos showing convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanuk at Sobibor concentration camp surface.
John Demjanjuk seen on trial in Jerusalem, Aug. 14, 1991
The recently discovered images come from the estate of a deputy commandant at the camp, Johann Niemann, one of ten SS-men killed by prisoners in the famous October 1943 uprising. Parts of his collection will be made public on Jan. 28, at the Topography of Terror archive in Berlin, and in a new book to be released that day.
It reportedly is the first time that Demjanuk has been identified in photos of Sobibor.
Demjanuk, whose U.S. citizenship was revoked in 2002 for lying on his citizenship application about his Nazi service, and who was deported to Germany in 2009, was convicted in Munich in 2011 as an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews at the death camp. Sentenced to five years in prison, he died in a nursing home at the age of 91 in March 2012, while awaiting a decision on his appeal.
The Topography of Terror archive said that the photos – part of a series of more than 350 images – provide unprecedented insight into the “Action Reinhardt” phase of the mass extermination of European Jewry in the death camps Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka.
Sobibor was constructed in German-occupied Poland in 1942. By the time it was shut down in November 1943, at least 167,000 Jews had been gassed there with carbon monoxide, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Topography of Terror archive is working on the project together with the Stanislaw Hantz Educational Center and the Ludwigsburg Research Center on National Socialism at the University of Stuttgart.
Demjanjuk’s conviction set a legal precedent under which those who served where crimes against humanity were committed can be prosecuted as accessories.
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@ Walter Alter: Untrue. Solid evidence that “Ivan the terrible” died in the uprising doen’t exist. But in any case, even if the Sobibor “Ivan” was killed in Sobibor, the name “Ivan the Terrible” may well have been applied to several brutal guards named “Ivan” at different camps, or even the same camp, by different inmate survivors. It may well have been a sort of “generic” name.
On his application for a residence visa to the United States, gave as hi mother’s maiden name the samename that witnesses to the Russian’s trial of Treblinka guards said was the surname of “Ivan the Terrible.” Demjanjuk’s attorney testified that Demjanjuk’s mother’s maiden name was actually something different. This to my mind makes it all the more likely that his use of the last name on his application for an American residence visa is no coincidence.
His defence attorney even admitted that a survivor sent him a document that stated that there were two operators of the gas chamber at Treblinka–one with the name given by witnesses at the Russian trial, and one with a name “something like Demjanjuk.” The defense attorney admitted that he destroyed the document.
The Trebling camp continued to operate for about a year after the Nazis closed Sobibor. Demjanjuk never accounted satisfactorily for his time betwwen the time between his Sobibor’s closing and the end of the war. It is hard to believe that the Nazi regime would leave an experienced death camp guard unemployed while it still had several death camps and many forced-labor camps still operating. That would have been inefficient management, and the Holocaust organizers were notoriously efficient and capable managers. They had real German efficiency and professionalism.
Demjanjuk was not the infamous “Ivan the Terrible”. Even though his first name was Ivan, Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor whereas Ivan the Terrible was a guard at Triblinka. His US trial prosecutors tried to make him out as Ivan the Terrible, simply for the PR value, a sell out of justice. Lots of Ukrainians served the Nazis, considered them liberators from Stalin and propelled by the memory of the Ukrainian famine. Demjanjuk was just another schmuck who got caught up by forces beyond his control. Ivan the Terrible was known as a particularly sadistic guard and was killed during the Treblinka uprising as documented in a number of first person accounts. The prosecutors of Demjanjuks trial used forged Russian documents to frame Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, they had to know that Ivan the Terrible was killed in the uprising, it is common knowledge among Holocaust researchers.