On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. The Nazi regime quickly began restricting the civil and human rights of Jews and opened its first concentration camp, Dachau, near Munich.
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its European allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites, including ghettos. These locations were used for forced labor, the detention of people deemed enemies of the state, and the mass murder of millions.
One perpetrator of that system was Johann Niemann, a German SS guard and a fanatical believer in Nazi ideology. Niemann was born on August 4, 1913, in the village of Völlen, then part of the German Empire.
His father was a farmer, and Johann was the middle of nine siblings. By profession, he was a painter and decorator.
Before beginning his criminal career in the camps, Niemann joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and the SS in 1934. A true believer in Nazi racist ideology, he was deployed across various German concentration camps, where he served as a guard and took part in the systematic murder of people with disabilities and the mass slaughter of Polish Jews.
Among those camps was Esterwegen, near the German-Dutch border, where Niemann arrived in 1934. Most prisoners there were political prisoners, many of them Communists.
The most famous was Carl von Ossietzky, a German journalist and political activist sent to Esterwegen in 1933. For exposing clandestine German rearmament, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935.
Ossietzky was forbidden from traveling to Norway to accept the prize. After years of starvation, mistreatment, and torture in various Nazi camps, he died three years later, in 1938, in Berlin.
From Esterwegen, Niemann was sent as a guard to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin. The camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti people, and later Soviet civilians.
One of Sachsenhausen's most prominent prisoners was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's son. He died at the camp in 1943 after his father refused to make a deal to secure his release.
In 1939, Niemann began working for the Nazi Euthanasia Program, code-named T4, the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany. Patients were transported by bus or rail to six killing centers.
There, the Nazis gassed, shot, or killed by lethal injection those deemed "unworthy of life," including residents of welfare institutions, some concentration camp inmates, the chronically sick, the mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, and even sick German soldiers. Niemann's duties included moving murdered victims from the gas chambers to the crematoria.
The T4 program predated the Holocaust by approximately two years. Historians estimate it claimed the lives of 250,000 men, women, and children.
In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany implemented a plan to systematically murder the 2 million Jews living in German-occupied Poland. The plan was code-named Operation Reinhard, and it established three killing centers: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Niemann first helped establish the Belzec killing center, where he essentially commanded Camp II, the extermination side of the camp. Beginning in March 1942, Jews from various parts of occupied Poland were deported there.
By December of that year, when the last transport arrived, 600,000 victims, mostly Jews and a few hundred Gypsies, had been murdered at Belzec. When the camp was liquidated in June 1943, its Jewish forced laborers were either shot or deported to Sobibor to be gassed.
Niemann helped establish the Sobibor killing center in spring 1942, when he became the camp's deputy commander. German SS and police officials conducted deportations to Sobibor between May 1942, when regular gassing operations began, and the fall of 1943.
Most Jews brought to Sobibor were immediately gassed by carbon monoxide piped into the gas chambers from an engine. About 250,000 victims were murdered at the killing center.
Approximately 50 German and Austrian personnel served at the site, generally from lower-middle-class backgrounds. According to survivors, female local civilians from the village of Sobibor were often employed in the camp as housekeeping staff and cooks.
These civilians had economic incentives tied to the camp's existence, and it is believed they also knew what was going on inside. The Germans constructed Sobibor as a rectangle measuring 1,312 by 1,969 feet.
A double barbed-wire fence woven with tree branches surrounded the perimeter, a design intended to hide the view of what was inside. The camp had two side-by-side gates, one for trains and another for foot traffic and vehicles.
The Nazis paid special attention to the front compound, which consisted of living quarters and recreational buildings for camp personnel. SS officers lived in cottages with colorful names, which helped conceal the camp's purpose from new arrivals who arrived on the adjacent ramp.
Upon arrival by train, victims were brought into the so-called arrival area, where an SS man gave a speech welcoming them and saying they had reached a transit camp on their way to labor camps. They were told that before continuing their journey, they would take showers, have their clothes disinfected, and get a meal.
Men and women were separated, and children were sent with the women. The Nazis ordered the victims to remove their clothing and hand over their valuables.
The Jews were then marched on the run to the gas chambers. The honking of geese would obscure the cries of victims as they were beaten, screamed at, and had warning shots fired at them.
About 450 to 550 Jews were forced into the chambers at a time. Once the maximum number of victims was inside, the gas chambers were sealed and poisonous gas was piped in. Within 20 to 30 minutes, all those inside were dead.
Those too ill, weak, or elderly to walk to the gas chambers were shot in an open pit. SS personnel working at Sobibor enjoyed privileges such as higher pay and regular visits home, allowing them to see their families for two weeks every three months.
The SS also stole victims' possessions, including gold, food, hair, and other valuables. Guards would even take toys from murdered children home to their families.
Johann Niemann participated in this plunder and made sizable deposits of money each time he came home, where his wife and children awaited him. Between transports, SS personnel drank, played music, and enjoyed card and board games, all while thousands of people were being murdered. As a reward, they even had an official trip to Berlin and Potsdam.
Niemann showed no mercy during the year and a half Sobibor was operational, when several escape attempts were made by prisoners. On one occasion, when 72 Dutch Jews organizing an escape were betrayed by a kapo, Niemann ordered all of them executed.
In the summer of 1943, rumors began to circulate that Sobibor would soon cease operations, and prisoners understood this would mean certain death for all of them. The Sobibor prisoners knew this because Belzec prisoners had sewn messages into their clothing before being killed.
One message read: "We worked at Belzec for one year and did not know where we would be sent next. They said it would be Germany… Now we are in Sobibor and know what to expect. Be aware that you will be killed also! Avenge us!"
And they did. In September 1943, twenty Jewish Red Army prisoners of war, soldiers with the expertise needed to pull off an escape, arrived at Sobibor on a transport from the Minsk Ghetto and were selected for labor.
One of them, Alexander Pechersky, would become a leader of the revolt, which began late in the afternoon on October 14, 1943. The targets were carefully selected, and because Niemann was the highest-ranking SS officer on duty that day, he was the first person targeted for assassination by the prisoners.
At 4 PM that day, Niemann, after a ride on horseback, was lured to a scheduled appointment with a tailor in a tailors' barracks, with the promise of being fitted for a leather jacket taken from a murdered Jew. When Niemann arrived at the barracks armed with his pistol and whip as usual, Alexander Shubayev, a Jewish Red Army prisoner, was already waiting with an axe in his hand.
When Niemann came inside and asked the tailor what Shubayev was doing there with an axe, the tailor replied that he was there to repair the table. The tailor then asked Niemann to remove his pistol holster, put on the jacket, and turn around to check whether any alterations were needed in the back.
When Niemann complied, Shubayev snuck up behind him and buried the axe into the back of his head, splitting his skull open. Niemann was dead on the spot.
This was just the beginning of the revolt. In total, 11 SS officers were killed by the rebels.
When one of them, Chaim Engel, was stabbing Rudolf Beckmann, the camp's head of the sorting commands, Engel could be heard shouting, "For my father! For my brother! For all the Jews!" The prisoners had to escape by climbing over barbed-wire fences and running through a minefield under heavy machine gun fire.
Approximately 300 prisoners were able to escape, but most were chased down and killed. Those prisoners who had not joined the escape were killed as well. Some 50 of the escapees did survive the war.
After the prisoner revolt, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp closed. After a funeral was held for Niemann and the other officers killed during the uprising, his widow was sent his belongings, including two photograph albums he had compiled containing images of his Holocaust-era service.
The collection of photographs is known as the "Sobibor perpetrator album" and was made public only in 2020. There were no tears shed for Johann Niemann.