Photos may show Ohioan at Nazi camp

BERLIN — Some historians said the 361-photo collection unveiled Tuesday at Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum appears to include images of John Demjanjuk, the retired Ohio autoworker who was tried in Germany for his alleged time as a guard at the Sobibor camp.

Demjanjuk was denaturalized in the United States and sent to Germany in 2009 to stand trial for his actions at Sobibor. He was convicted in 2011 as an accessory to murder on allegations he served as a Sobibor guard. He 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 anglicizing 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 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 emailed to The Associated Press. But “the photos are not proof of my father being in Sobibor and may even exculpate him once forensically examined.”