New photos of Nazi death camp may show guard Demjanjuk
30 January, 2020
Historians in Germany have released previously unseen photos of the Nazi Sobibor death camp, including what they believe are images of John Demjanjuk, who was sentenced in 2011 for his role in the killing of about 28,000 people there.
Ukraine-born Demjanjuk, who had been No. 1 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of “Most Wanted Nazi War Criminals,” was deported to Germany from the United States in 2009, where he had spent much of his life as a car worker, to face trial.
The photos, described by historian Martin Cueppers as representing a “quantum leap in the visual record on the Holocaust in occupied Poland,” had belonged to Johann Niemann, once deputy commandant of Sobibor.
Between March 1942 and November 1943, some 1.8 million Jews were murdered as part of a Nazi scheme called “Aktion Reinhard,” mostly at the extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Few photos of Sobibor, which was razed before the end of World War II, have survived so the pictures offer new insight into how the camp worked and into the individuals involved.
“It was a breathtaking experience for me to see these pictures of Sobibor,” said Jetje Manheim, 72, from the Netherlands whose grandparents were murdered at the camp where Jews were killed with exhaust fumes in gas chambers.
“For the first time I saw what my grandparents glimpsed at the end of their exhausting 72-hour train journey. On that day, their lives ended,” she said at the presentation, at a museum on the site of the former SS and Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.
Source: the-japan-news.com
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