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New photos show convicted guard John Demjanjuk at Nazi death camp

The revealing images came from the estate of Johann Niemann, a deputy commandant at the camp who was one of 10 SS-men killed by inmates during the October 1943 uprising.

John Demjanjuk's supposed Nazi ID card from Trawniki, which trial experts said appeared authentic. Later investigations called the authenticity into question, when it was said to be a KGB forgery, 1943. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
John Demjanjuk's supposed Nazi ID card from Trawniki, which trial experts said appeared authentic. Later investigations called the authenticity into question, when it was said to be a KGB forgery, 1943. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

New pictures show convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk at Sobibor, where he denied ever being a guard there—reportedly the first time that he has been identified in photos at the death camp.

The images came from the estate of Johann Niemann, a deputy commandant at the camp who was one of 10 SS-men killed by inmates during the October 1943 uprising.

Part of his collection will become public at the Topography of Terror archive in Berlin on Jan. 28, in addition to a new book scheduled to be released that day.

“The Niemann collection expands our knowledge of ‘Aktion Reinhard,’ the murder of 1.8 million Jews in the Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka camps,” said the archive in a statement.

Demjanjuk, who was born in 1920 in Ukraine, immigrated to the United States after World War II. He was extradited to stand trial in Israel in 1986. His death sentence was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993, and he returned to Ohio in September that year.

However, Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship was revoked in 2002 for not disclosing that he was a Nazi guard. He was deported to Germany in 2009, where he was sentenced to serve five years behind bars.

He died at a senior home in Germany on March 17, 2012, at the age of 91 while his case was on appeal.

A docuseries is currently running on Netflix about the retired Ukrainian-American autoworker in Cleveland who was accused of being “Ivan the Terrible,” one of the Holocaust’s most notorious SS guards.

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