The Topography of Terror archive located in Berlin on Tuesday released a picture taken at the Sobibor Nazi death camp during World War II, in which John Ivan Demjanjuk can be seen.
According to the picture, Demjanjuk, in Nazi uniform, served as a guard at the camp, contrary to his claims over the years.
The photo is part of a collection of recently-discovered images 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.
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.
In 1988, Demjanjuk was put on trial in the Jerusalem District Court and convicted of being “Ivan the Terrible,” a Nazi guard whom survivors identified from their time as prisoners at the Treblinka death camp.
He was sentenced to death but, after appealing to the Supreme Court, was acquitted over doubt about his identity.
The new release of photos belonging to the Nazi commander at the Sobibor death camp sheds new light on the Holocaust site, of which very few images were known to exist. Sobibor was destroyed by the Nazis after the prisoner uprising.
The cache of photographs featuring the Sobibor camp, which operated in Nazi-occupied Poland between May 1942 and October 1943, was made public by the Topography of Terror museum in Berlin on Tuesday. The collection of 361 photos and dozens of other documents is also set to be put on display by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
The collection was donated by the descendants of Johann Niemann, deputy commandant of the death camp. Niemann was killed by an ax-wielding Jewish prisoner on October 14, 1943 during the famous Sobibor uprising – one of the few successful death camp riots against the Nazis. After the uprising, the camp was razed to the ground by the Nazis, who tried to erase the memory of Sobibor altogether, and few artifacts survived to tell the story of this terrible place.
Source: RT