A Nazi death camp commander's newly released photos appear to include images of John Demjanjuk, the retired US car worker who was tried in Germany for his alleged time as a Sobibor guard.
The collection was unveiled on Tuesday at Berlin's Topography Of Terror museum and comprises 361 photos as well as written documents illustrating Johann Niemann's career.
Niemann was the deputy commander of Sobibor from September 1942 until he was killed on Oct. 14, 1943 in an uprising by Jewish inmates.
Historican Martin Cueppers points at a man thought to be John Demjanjuk
John Demjanjuk leaves the court after his verdict in Munich, southern Germany, on May 12, 2011. He was convicted of helping to kill almost 30,000 people while a guard at the Sobibor death camp in World War II
A journalist looks at a catalogue prior to a press conference to unveil newly discovered photos from Sobibor Nazi death camp today
A staff member of the Topography of Terror archive points at a historical photograph allegedly showing John Demjanjuk during a press conference on newly discovered photos from Sobibor Nazi death camp today
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The collection is being handed over to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Experts say the collection enhances historians' knowledge of what Sobibor looked like.
So far, they knew of only two photos taken of the camp while it existed.
The Niemann collection adds another 49.
Anne Lepper, whose grandparents were murdered on arrival at Sobibor from the Netherlands in 1943, said it was 'very courageous' of Niemann's descendants to release the photos.
She said it was 'a breathtaking experience' to see the images after frequently having seen the site.
The collection may also shed more light on Demjanjuk, who was convicted in 2011 as an accessory to murder on allegations he served as a Sobibor guard.
Demjanjuk always denied the accusations and died in 2012 before his appeal against the ruling by a Munich court could be heard, making the verdict not legally binding.
Two photos in the collection may depict a young Iwan Demjanjuk, as he was known before anglicising his name to John, among other former prisoners of war who were trained at an SS camp and were deployed at Sobibor, according to historians.
If they do, they would be the first to prove that he was at the camp.
Martin Cueppers, a Holocaust historian at the University of Stuttgart, said researchers concluded that Demjanjuk is 'probably' depicted at least in one case in conjunction with the criminal police office in Germany's Baden-Wuerttemberg state, whose biometric department agreed to examine the historical photos.
But Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr, said of the newly unveiled photos that 'it's a baseless theory to claim they prove anything at all regarding my father'.
The collection as a whole is 'of significant historical value' regarding the Holocaust and Sobibor, he said in a statement.
But 'the photos are not proof of my father being in Sobibor and may even exculpate him once forensically examined'.
How Demjanjuk outran his Holocaust atrocities until his final years
by Allan Hall
John Demjanjuk was born Ivan on April 3,1920 in the small Ukrainian village of Dubovi Makharintsi and raised under Soviet rule.
As a young man he was employed as a farm worker due to his stocky frame.
With the dawn of the Second World War he joined the Red Army along with millions of his countrymen but was captured by Nazis in 1942.
Facing almost certain death in a PoW camp, he took a Nazi offer of staying alive by agreeing to work on a 'special project'.
A file photograph showing a picture of the service certificate of Ivan John Demjanjuk, who received the identitiy card as 'Watchman' at his labour camp in Trawniki, Poland
He became a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland where a quarter of a million Jews were murdered.
The case against him involved 15 trains that arrived at Sobibor from Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, carrying 28,060 people.
Demjanjuk was captured by the Americans in 1944 and became a prisoner of war - but revealed nothing of his role during the war years.
After marrying a fellow Ukrainian Vera Kowlowa in 1947, he worked for the Americans after the war driving a truck through Germany.
He registered to be recognised as a refugee and sailed to New York with his family in the 1950s and became an American citizen.
The couple had three children, Lydia, Irene and John Junior. He spent his life working as a mechanic at the Ford car plant in Cleveland, Ohio.
In the mid-70s, the family settled in the Seven Hills suburb, in a ranch-style house on a half-acre lot.
On the morning of August 25, 1977, John Demjanjuk was working at the factory as usual, when the storm broke that the U.S. attorneys wanted to strip him of his American citizenship for having been a suspected Nazi War criminal.
He was accused of being ‘Ivan the Terrible’ - a particularly sadistic guard at another Nazi death camp called Treblinka in Poland.
Israel extradited him to stand trial for his crimes there, found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
But during a five-year appeal process, it scoured the world for evidence and found that he was not in Treblinka but in Sobibor.
He was released and it was left to Germany to extradite him from America to stand trial in Munich.
Part of his trial, most of which he slept through while wearing a hat and dark glasses, involved the families of his victims talking about their loss.
He never displayed an ounce of emotion as they wept on the witness stand.
Ulrich Busch, his right-wing lawyer, enraged Jewish groups when he tried to equate his client’s suffering with the Jews in wartime.
'Ukrainians like him were considered subhuman; Jews, Ukrainians or Gypsies did not count' for the Nazis, he told the court.
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