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Do new photos prove former Seven Hills resident John Demjanjuk was a Nazi death camp guard?

A German archive will release pictures next week.

SEVEN HILLS, Ohio — The keepers of an archive in Berlin claim they have proof that John Demjanjuk was in fact a Nazi death camp guard and they plan to release it on Tuesday.

The Berlin-based “The Topography of Terror” told German press that the pictures will be part of a new book. The hundreds of photos came from the estate of an SS officer who died during a 1943 inmate uprising at Sobibor, the death camp where Ivan the Terrible also worked.

Unclear is how many pictures may show Demjanjuk or why they were out of public view for so long. The archive promised other insights will come from the book.

Late last year, the Netflix documentary series The Devil Next Door brought the story of John Demjanjuk out of dormancy. The film reignited beliefs among some that the local factory worker could be “Ivan the Terrible,” a brutal Nazi guard who worked at Treblinka extermination camp during the Holocaust.

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Demjanjuk was convicted in 1988 of being Ivan by an Israeli court, but that conviction was later overturned by the country's Supreme Court and he returned to Ohio. However, Germany later convicted Demjanjuk of thousands of killings at the Sobibor death camp in 2009.

Demjanjuk died in Germany in 2012 while appealing that last conviction.  His family points out that he died under German law as an innocent man, since his appeal was never heard.

Demjanjuk’s son said Tuesday that the family has not seen the photos, but that a German research center saw two and could not conclude 100% they showed his father. Attorneys are involved, with the family accusing the archive of stirring up buzz to try and sell books.

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