John Demjanjuk Jr: New pictures are not proof my father was a Nazi guard
Recently released photographs of the Sobibor death camp appear to show John Demjanjuk as a guard, but his son denies the claim.
By DONNA RACHEL EDMUNDSThe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that it is possible that Ivan Demjanjuk aka John Demjanjuk, believed to be "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblenka, may be the man in the middle of the first row(photo credit: US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM)
The son of famed John Demjanjuk has dismissed the claim that newly emerged photos of the Sobibor death camp show his father performing duties as a guard.On Tuesday, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released a cache of photos entitled "The Sobibor Perpetrator Collection," created initially by the camp's deputy commandant Johann Niemann. The 361 pictures and dozens of paper documents constitute a record of events at Sobibor, which operated from April 1942 until November 1943 in Nazi-occupied Poland.But in its press release, the Museum wrote that one of the photos "possibly" showed Demjanjuk among a group of guards.An Ukranian national who is believed to have joined the SS, Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in Israel for being the so-called “Ivan the Terrible” camp guard at Treblinka in Poland in 1988. The guilty verdict was overturned on appeal by the Supreme Court in 1993 after new evidence emerged pointing to a case of mistaken identity, and although the court said there was sufficient evidence that he did serve as a guard at Sobibor, it declined to prosecute.In a statement, John Demjanjuk Jr said the photos “are certainly not proof of my father being in Sobibor and may even exculpate him once forensically examined," adding “It’s a baseless theory to claim they prove anything at all regarding my father."In 2009, Germany sought his extradition from the USA, and in 2011 Demjanjuk was convicted in Munich as an accessory to murder on allegations that he served as a guard at Sobibor but died in 2012 before his appeal could be heard, making the verdict not legally binding.“It’s ridiculous to now conclude anything about blurry photos showing many similar faces, and it further detracts from the totality of all the photos that are obviously of significant historical value regarding the Holocaust and the Nazi crimes committed at Sobibor,” John Jr said.Andreas Kahrs, a German historian who worked on the project, told The Plain Dealer "All we can say is that it is very likely that it is John Demjanjuk. We would never say that it is 100%; it is just too difficult."But Edna Friedberg, a historian at the Museum said that the collection was about much more than the possible guilt of Demjanjuk. “The significance of this collection is that Sobibor was the site of murder on an industrial scale," Friedberg said, according to Cleveland.com. "The identification of Demjanjuk is a distraction of the larger issues of guilt and complicity.“Whether or not it is Demjanjuk in those photos, we see some of the up to 400 auxiliary guards who also served in the extermination process. Most of their names have been lost to history."
