John Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian-American who served as a Trawniki man and Nazi camp guard at Sobibor extermination camp, Majdanek, and Flossenbürg. Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, when he was tried and convicted in Israel after being misidentified as "Ivan the Terrible", a notoriously cruel watchman at Treblinka extermination camp. In 1993 the verdict was overturned. Shortly before his death, he was tried and convicted in the Federal Republic of Germany as an accessory to the 28,060 murders that occurred during his service at Sobibor.
Demjanjuk in his Trawniki card, 1940s
Sobibor "Road to Death" in 2007
Photograph of Trawniki guards at Sobibor, taken in 1943. This was not seen publicly until January 2020, when it was one of numerous photos from Sobibor newly exhibited in Berlin. The originals have been donated to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Demjanjuk was "inconclusively identified" as the guard in the middle of the front row.
During World War II, Trawniki men were Central and Eastern European Nazi collaborators, consisting of either volunteers or recruits from prisoner-of-war camps set up by Nazi Germany for Soviet Red Army soldiers captured in the border regions during Operation Barbarossa launched in June 1941. Thousands of these volunteers served in the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland until the end of World War II. Trawnikis belonged to a category of Hiwis, Nazi auxiliary forces recruited from native subjects serving in various jobs such as concentration camp guards.
Inspection of Trawnikimänner (some of them still wearing Soviet Budenovkas) by SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Streibel (center) at the SS Trawniki training division. As Hiwis, they were tasked with liquidating Nazi-era Jewish ghettos in occupied Poland
Stroop Report Trawniki shooters during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, with Jürgen Stroop (on the right), 1943 at the Umschlagplatz, with Stawki 5/7 in the back. Their military overcoats came from the Allgemeine-SS surplus no longer used by the German SS.
"Trawniki" men during the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto at Zamenhofa 42 / Kupiecka 18.<. Photo from Jürgen Stroop Report, May 1943
Picture of Trawniki guards at Sobibor, taken in 1943. Demjanjuk has been "inconclusively identified" as the guard in the middle front left.