CLEVELAND, Ohio – A German museum Tuesday released two photos that researchers say may identify the late John Demjanjuk, formerly of Seven Hills, as a guard in a death camp nearly 80 years ago.

The Topography of Terror, a Berlin memorial museum, produced the photos as part of a 361-picture collection of the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, its officers and guards.

The photos are among the first wartime pictures of the camp, and they will be included in the book, “Photos from Sobibor,” which was released in Germany on Tuesday.

The second photograph identifies a man standing in the third row of more than 20 officers as possibly being Demjanuk. The man is too far from the camera to get a clear image of his face.

“All we can say is that it is very likely that it is John Demjanjuk,’’ said Andreas Kahrs, a German historian who worked on the project, in a phone interview with The Plain Dealer. “We would never say that it is 100 percent; it is just too difficult."

Kahrs and a team of historians spent four years researching the collection. They gave four wartime photos of Demjanjuk to police authorities to study for facial recognition. Based on the examination, investigators suggested that Demjanjuk may be in two of the photos.

U.S. judges ruled that Demjanjuk worked six months at the camp, from March through September 1943. In the 16 months that the camp was open, from May 1942 to October 1943, more than 167,000 Jews were killed there.

Demjanjuk’s son, John Jr., dismissed the photos, saying in a statement that they “are certainly not proof of my father being in Sobibor and may even exculpate him once forensically examined.”

“It’s a baseless theory to claim they prove anything at all regarding my father,’’ the son said.

“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,” he said.

Edna Friedberg, a historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, said the collection is much more important than just Demjanjuk.

“The significance of this collection is that Sobibor was the site of murder on an industrial scale,’’ Friedberg said. “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.’’

The collection of photos will be stored at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

The photos of a deputy commander

Demjanjuk died at the age of 91 in 2012. His death came after nearly 35 years of fighting allegations in three countries that he worked as a concentration camp sentry.

He had been convicted in Germany in 2011 of being an accessory in the deaths of 28,000 people for his role as a guard at Sobibor and sentenced to five years in prison. His case was on appeal when he died.

His death came nearly three years after being taken from his suburban home and flown overseas, a deportation ordered after U.S. judges ruled that he lied about his Nazi past when he entered the United States in 1952.

The photos had been in the collection of Johann Niemann’s family for years. Niemann was the deputy commander of the Sobibor camp. He is either in the photos, or they are about something he had done.

The released photos include Niemann appearing proudly on a horse dressed in his uniform; the deputy commander and two other officers sitting on a paddleboat relaxing in civilian clothes; and Niemann and other officers of the camp drinking among kitchen staff.

“This is very disturbing,’’ said Martin Cueppers, who led the German research on the collection. “They’re drinking just 200 meters from the gas chambers. Niemann was a true believer in National Socialism and its crimes.’’

Peter Black, who worked as a historian for the U.S. Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit and later as the senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, called Niemann a brutal man who took satisfaction in his job. That Niemann sought to memorialize his work in photos shows his pride in dealing with prisoners, said Black.

Niemann died in a prisoner uprising in October 1943. Prisoners lured him to a leather shop on the guise of making him a coat. They then attacked him with an ax, Black said.

The case against Demjanjuk

U.S. prosecutors first went after Demjanjuk in 1977, when they accused him of lying about his wartime past to get into the United States, and they sought his deportation. In 1986, he was charged in Israel as being “Ivan the Terrible,” a Ukrainian guard who tortured Jews at the Treblinka death camp.

He was convicted and sentenced to death, but years later, in 1993, Israel’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction, based on new information obtained after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The court, however, said the Nazis had trained him as a guard and that he served at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk returned to the United States, and a judge reinstated his citizenship. In 1999, federal prosecutors in Cleveland again sought his deportation.

They said Demjanjuk worked at Sobibor and two other camps. They based their case on seven wartime documents that they said tied Demjanjuk to work as a guard. The documents included the Trawniki card, an identity card that included his photo, date of birth and birthplace. Courts have long ruled that the card linked Demjanjuk to his Nazi service. Trawniki was a training camp for guards in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Then-U.S. District Judge Paul Matia in Cleveland ruled in 2002 that Demjanjuk and other Nazi guards led Jews off trains at Sobibor, stripped them and led them to the gas chambers. An immigration judge later ordered Demjanjuk deported, but no country initially would take him.

That changed in 2009, when German prosecutors sought to charge him as an accessory. He eventually was taken to Germany, despite his family’s protests, citing his poor health. He was convicted in 2011. But his family refused to give up.

His attorneys said federal prosecutors withheld an FBI document that questioned the legitimacy of the Trawniki card. But U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster ruled the FBI document was based on speculation and mistaken beliefs.

Gianna Niewel, Page Three Editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich, contributed to this story.

Sobibor

The extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland opened in May 1942 and closed in October 1943 outside a tiny village in eastern Poland. The camp was a main cog in Operation Reinhard, or the Third Reich’s attempt to eliminate Polish Jews. It closed soon after an uprising in which prisoners attacked key leaders of the camp, including the camp’s deputy commander, Johann Niemann.

1.7 million: Jews killed in Operation Reinhard.

167,000: Jews killed in Sobibor in the 16 months the camp was open.

40,000: Jews killed from March to October, the period when U.S. judges ruled that John Demjanjuk of Seven Hills served at the camp.

400: Trawniki men who served at Sobibor during the camp’s duration. At any one time, about 100 worked at the camp.Trawniki was a training camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in which men who had been captured became German guards.

Sources: Interviews, federal court documents, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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