Museum releases possible photo of ‘Ivan the Terrible’ Demjanjuk at Sobibor

Once top of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi criminals, Demjanjuk said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941 and then taken prisoner by the Germans.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF, REUTERS
The 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 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 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released a series of photos entitled “The Sobibor Perpetrator Collection” on Tuesday, one of which may show John Demjanjuk (1920-2012).
Demjanjuk was initially sentenced to death in Israel for being the so-called “Ivan the Terrible” camp guard at Treblinka in Poland. The guilty verdict was overturned on appeal by the Supreme Court in 1993 after new evidence emerged pointing to a case of mistaken identity.
This may be the first time that Demjanjuk has been identified in photos of the Sobibor death camp, where he served as a guard at the time the photo was taken. The Holocaust Memorial Museum wrote it is “possibly” him among the guards and officials.
Demjanjuk was extradited from Israel to Germany from his home in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2009 to stand trial. He attended the 18-month court proceedings in Munich – the birthplace of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement – in a wheelchair and sometimes lying down. He denied the charges against him but otherwise did not speak at his trial.
Once at the top of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most wanted Nazi war criminals, the Berdychiv, Ukraine-born Demjanjuk said he was drafted into the Red Army in 1941 and then taken prisoner by the Germans the following year.
“At least 167,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor. However, until now, we had almost no photographic evidence of this Nazi killing center,” Holocaust Memorial Museum director Sara J. Bloomfield said. “This groundbreaking collection will increase understanding about the killing center’s operations and the complicity of many people, performing a wide variety of tasks, in order to make it function.”
The camp’s deputy commandant, Johann Niemann, created the collection. It shows previously unseen aspects of the inner workings of Sobibor, which operated from April 1942 until November 1943 in Nazi-occupied Poland. Niemann was the first officer killed in a prisoner uprising on October 14, 1943, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s press release.
“Like others, Niemann began working in the so-called euthanasia program and went on to play a role in the operation of a killing center,” Bloomfield said. “Many of the same personnel worked in multiple sites or programs, and these connections served the genocidal aims of Nazi Germany.”
The collection contains 361 photos as well as “dozens” of paper documents. The photos show details of Sobibor, including its topography, the SS staff, auxiliary guards and “the role of women including perpetrators’ wives and local female civilians.”
Henriette Niemann originally owned the collection. But in 2015, her grandson donated it to the Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz, a German nonprofit educational organization, according to the museum’s press release.

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“We chose to donate this collection to the museum because we felt it would be best suited to care for it in perpetuity, while also making the material accessible to researchers from a wide range of disciplines,” Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz’s Andreas Kahrs said.


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Treblinka
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