Johann 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, the middle of nine siblings, trained as a painter and decorator. Before his career in the concentration camp system, he joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and the SS in 1934.
Niemann was a fanatical believer in Nazi ideology. He went on to serve as an SS guard in several camps and took part in the systematic murder of people with disabilities and the mass slaughter of Polish Jews.
His path into the camp system began at Esterwegen, near the German-Dutch border, where he arrived in 1934. Most prisoners there were political detainees, many of them Communists. The most famous was Carl von Ossietzky, a German journalist and political activist sent to Esterwegen in 1933.
Ossietzky won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935 for exposing clandestine German re-armament. He was forbidden from traveling to Norway to accept it, and after years of starvation, mistreatment, and torture in various camps, he died in Berlin in 1938.
From Esterwegen, Niemann was sent as a guard to Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin. That camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti people, and later Soviet civilians. One of its most prominent prisoners was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's son, who died there in 1943 after his father refused a deal to secure his release.
In 1939 Niemann began working for the Nazi Euthanasia Program, code-named T4. The program was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany. Victims were transported by bus or rail to six killing centers, where they were gassed, shot, or killed by lethal injection.
Those deemed "unworthy of life" included 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 about two years, and historians estimate it claimed 250,000 lives.
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 helped establish the Belzec killing center, where he essentially commanded Camp II, the extermination side of the camp. Deportations of Jews from various parts of occupied Poland began in March 1942. By December of that year, when the last transport arrived, 600,000 victims, mostly Jews and a few hundred Roma, had been murdered at Belzec.
When Belzec was liquidated in June 1943, its Jewish forced laborers were either shot or deported to Sobibor to be gassed. Niemann had helped establish Sobibor in spring 1942 and became the camp's deputy commander.
Deportations to Sobibor ran from May 1942, when regular gassing operations began, until the fall of 1943. Most Jews brought there were immediately killed by carbon monoxide piped into the gas chambers from an engine. About 250,000 victims were murdered at the site.
Approximately 50 German and Austrian personnel served at Sobibor, generally from lower-middle-class backgrounds. According to survivors, female local civilians from the village were often employed 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 happening inside.
The Germans built Sobibor as a rectangle measuring 1,312 by 1,969 feet. A double barbed-wire fence woven with tree branches surrounded the perimeter, designed 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 held 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 stepping onto the adjacent ramp.
Victims arriving by train were brought into a so-called arrival area, where an SS man gave a welcoming speech. They were told they had reached a transit camp on the way to labor camps and that they would shower, have their clothes disinfected, and receive a meal before continuing their journey.
Men and women were separated, and children were sent with the women. Victims were ordered to remove their clothing and hand over their valuables, then marched at a run to the gas chambers. The honking of geese helped obscure the cries of victims as they were beaten, screamed at, and shot at with warning fire.
About 450 to 550 Jews were forced into the chambers at a time. Once the maximum number was inside, the chambers were sealed and poisonous gas was piped in. Within 20 to 30 minutes, all inside were dead. Those too ill, weak, or elderly to walk to the chambers were shot in an open pit.
SS personnel at Sobibor enjoyed privileges including higher pay and regular visits home, with two weeks of leave every three months. They also stole victims' possessions such as gold, food, hair, and other valuables. Guards even took toys from murdered children home to their own families.
Niemann took part in this plunder and made sizable deposits of money each time he returned home to his wife and children. 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 received an official trip to Berlin and Potsdam.
Niemann showed no mercy. During the year and a half Sobibor was operational, prisoners made several escape attempts. 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 spread that Sobibor would soon cease operations, and prisoners understood this meant certain death for all of them. They already knew this from Belzec prisoners who 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!"
In September 1943, twenty Jewish Red Army prisoners of war arrived at Sobibor on a transport from the Minsk Ghetto and were selected for labor. They had the military expertise needed to pull off an escape. One of them, Alexander Pechersky, would become a leader of the revolt.
The uprising began late in the afternoon on October 14, 1943. Targets were carefully selected, and because Niemann was the highest-ranking SS officer on duty that day, he was the first person marked for assassination.
At 4 PM that day, Niemann was lured to an appointment with a tailor in the tailors' barracks, after a ride on horseback. The promise was a fitting for a leather jacket taken from a murdered Jew. Niemann arrived 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 crept up behind him and buried the axe in 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 managed to escape, but most were chased down and killed. Prisoners who had not joined the escape were killed as well. Some 50 of the escapees survived the war.
After the prisoner revolt, SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp closed. 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.