...From Esterwegen, Johann Niemann was sent as a guard to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp which was located north of Berlin. The camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti people and, later, Soviet civilians. One of the camp’s most prominent prisoners was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's son, who died at Sachsenhausen in 1943 after his father refused to make a deal to secure his release.
In 1939 Niemann started to work for the Nazi Euthanasia Program, code-named T4, which was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany.
The T4 program predated the genocide of European Jewry, the Holocaust, by approximately two years. In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany implemented a plan to systematically murder the 2 million Jews living in German-occupied Poland. This plan was codenamed “Operation Reinhard and as part of this action, three killing centers were established: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
First, Niemann helped establish the Belzec killing center. Johann 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 the regular gassing operations began, and the fall of 1943. Most of the Jews brought to Sobibor were immediately gassed by carbon monoxide which had been piped into the gas chambers from an engine. About 250,000 victims were murdered in this killing center.
In September 1943 twenty Jewish Red Army prisoners of war, the soldiers who had the necessary expertise 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 the 14th of October 1943.
On that day at 4 PM, Johann Niemann, after a ride on horseback, was lured to the scheduled appointment with a tailor in a tailors’ barracks with the promise to be fitted for a leather jacket taken from a murdered Jew.
When Niemann arrived at the tailors’ barracks armed with his pistol and whip as usual, Alexander Shubayev, a Jewish Red Army prisoner, was already waiting for him with an axe in his hand.
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!".
Approximately 300 prisoners were able to escape, but most of them 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, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered that the camp be closed.
In 1939 Niemann started to work for the Nazi Euthanasia Program, code-named T4, which was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany.
The T4 program predated the genocide of European Jewry, the Holocaust, by approximately two years. In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany implemented a plan to systematically murder the 2 million Jews living in German-occupied Poland. This plan was codenamed “Operation Reinhard and as part of this action, three killing centers were established: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
First, Niemann helped establish the Belzec killing center. Johann 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 the regular gassing operations began, and the fall of 1943. Most of the Jews brought to Sobibor were immediately gassed by carbon monoxide which had been piped into the gas chambers from an engine. About 250,000 victims were murdered in this killing center.
In September 1943 twenty Jewish Red Army prisoners of war, the soldiers who had the necessary expertise 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 the 14th of October 1943.
On that day at 4 PM, Johann Niemann, after a ride on horseback, was lured to the scheduled appointment with a tailor in a tailors’ barracks with the promise to be fitted for a leather jacket taken from a murdered Jew.
When Niemann arrived at the tailors’ barracks armed with his pistol and whip as usual, Alexander Shubayev, a Jewish Red Army prisoner, was already waiting for him with an axe in his hand.
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!".
Approximately 300 prisoners were able to escape, but most of them 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, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered that the camp be closed.
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LearningTranscript
00:00The 30th of January 1933, Germany.
00:10Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, is appointed Chancellor of Germany by the
00:15German President, Paul von Hindenburg.
00:18The Nazi regime quickly begins to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and
00:22opens the first concentration camp, Dachau, situated near Munich.
00:28In 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its European allies would establish more than 44,000 camps
00:35and other incarceration sites, including ghettos.
00:39The perpetrators would use these locations for forced labor, detention of people deemed
00:44to be enemies of the state, and mass murder of millions.
00:49One such perpetrator is a German SS guard and fanatical believer in Nazi ideology, Johann
00:54Niemann.
00:56Johann Niemann was born on the 4th of August 1913 in the village of Völlin, then part
01:02of the German Empire.
01:03While his father was a farmer, Johann, the middle of nine siblings, was a painter and
01:08decorator by profession.
01:10Before Niemann started his criminal career in various concentration camps, he joined
01:14the Nazi party in 1931 and in 1934 he joined the SS.
01:20A true believer in Nazi racist ideology, Niemann was deployed in various German Nazi concentration
01:26camps where he served as a guard and participated in the systematic murder of people with disabilities
01:32and the mass slaughter of Polish Jews.
01:36Among these camps was Esterweggen, located near the German-Dutch border, where Johann
01:40Niemann arrived in 1934.
01:43Most of the prisoners in Esterweggen were political prisoners, many of them communists.
01:47The most famous was Karl von Ossietzky, a German journalist and political activist who
01:53was sent to Esterweggen in 1933.
01:56For his work in exposing the clandestine German rearmament, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in
02:011935.
02:02However, Ossietzky was forbidden from traveling to Norway and accepting the prize, and after
02:08years of starvation, mistreatment and torture in various Nazi concentration camps, Ossietzky
02:14died three years later in 1938 in Berlin.
02:18From Esterweggen, Johann Niemann was sent as a guard to the Sachsenhausen concentration
02:22camp, which was located north of Berlin.
02:26The camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti people, and later
02:31Soviet civilians.
02:34One of the camp's most prominent prisoners was Yekhov Dzugashvili, Josef Stalin's son,
02:39who died at Sachsenhausen in 1943 after his father refused to make a deal to secure his
02:44release.
02:46In 1939, Niemann started to work for the Nazi euthanasia program, codenamed T4, which was
02:52the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany.
02:58The patients were transported by bus or by rail into six killing centers where they were
03:03murdered.
03:04In these centers, the Nazis gassed, shot or killed by lethal injection those who were
03:08deemed unworthy of life, such as residents of welfare institutions, some concentration
03:14camp inmates, the chronically sick, the mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, and
03:19even sick German soldiers.
03:23Niemann's duties included moving the murdered victims from the gas chambers to the crematoria.
03:27The T4 program predated the genocide of European Jewry, the Holocaust, by approximately two
03:33years.
03:35Historians estimate that the program claimed the lives of 250,000 men, women and children.
03:42In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany implemented a plan to systematically murder the two million
03:48Jews living in German-occupied Poland.
03:51This plan was codenamed Operation Reinhardt, and as part of this action, three killing
03:57centers were established, Belzec, Sorbibor and Treblinka.
04:01First, Niemann helped establish the Belzec killing center, where he essentially commanded
04:06Camp 2, which was the extermination side of the camp.
04:09Starting in March 1942, Jews from various parts of German-occupied Poland were deported
04:14to this camp, and by December of the same year, when the last transport of people arrived,
04:19600,000 victims, mostly Jews and a few hundred gypsies, were murdered at the Belzec killing
04:25center.
04:26When the camp was liquidated in June 1943, the Jewish forced laborers were either shot
04:31or deported to the Sorbibor killing center to be gassed.
04:35Johann Niemann helped establish the Sorbibor killing center in spring 1942, when he became
04:41the camp's deputy commander.
04:44German SS and police officials conducted deportations to Sorbibor between May 1942, when the regular
04:50gassing operations began, and the fall of 1943.
04:54Most of the Jews brought to Sorbibor were immediately gassed by carbon monoxide, which
04:59had been piped into the gas chambers from an engine.
05:02About 250,000 victims were murdered in this killing center.
05:07Approximately 50 German and Austrian personnel served at this site, and they were generally
05:11of lower middle-class backgrounds.
05:14According to the survivors, female local civilians from the village of Sorbibor were often employed
05:19in the camp as housekeeping staff and cooks.
05:22These civilians not only had economic incentives for the camp's existence, but it is believed
05:27that they also knew what was going on inside the camp.
05:30The Germans constructed Sorbibor as a rectangle, 1,312 by 1,969 feet.
05:38A double barbed wire fence woven with tree branches surrounded the perimeter of the camp.
05:43This design was intended to hide the view of what was inside.
05:47It had two side-by-side gates, one for trains and another for foot traffic and vehicles.
05:53The Nazis paid special attention to the front compound, which consisted of living quarters
05:58and recreational buildings for the camp personnel.
06:01The SS officers lived in cottages with colorful names, which helped to conceal the purpose
06:05of the camp from the new arrivals, who would arrive on the adjacent ramp.
06:10Upon arrival by train, the victims were brought into the so-called arrival area, where an
06:15SS man would give a speech welcoming them, saying that they had reached a transit camp
06:20on their way to the labor camps.
06:22They were also told that before embarking on the next part of their journey, they were
06:25to take showers, have their clothes disinfected and get a meal.
06:30The men and women were separated, children were sent with the women.
06:34The Nazis ordered the victims to remove their clothing and hand over their valuables.
06:39The Jews were then marched on the run to the gas chambers.
06:42The honking of geese would obscure the cries of victims as they were being beaten, screamed
06:46at and having warning shots fired at them.
06:49About 450 to 550 Jews were forced into the chambers at a time.
06:55The gas chambers were then sealed once the maximum number of victims were inside.
07:00Poisonous gas was then piped in.
07:02Within twenty to thirty minutes, all those inside were dead.
07:07Those who were too ill, weak or elderly to make the walk to the gas chambers were shot
07:12in an open pit.
07:13The SS personnel working at Sobibor enjoyed a number of privileges such as higher pay
07:18and regular visits home.
07:20Every three months they could visit their families for two weeks.
07:24The SS also stole possessions of the victims such as gold, food, hair and other valuables.
07:30The guards would even take toys from murdered children home to their families.
07:35Johann Niemann participated in this plunder and was making sizable deposits of money each
07:40time he came home, where he was awaited by his wife and children.
07:44Between the transports, the SS personnel were not only drinking, but also playing music
07:49as well as enjoying card and board games.
07:51All of this was going on in a camp where thousands of people were being murdered.
07:56As an award, they even had an official trip to Berlin and Potsdam.
08:01Johann Niemann had no mercy when during the year and a half that Sobibor was operational,
08:06several attempts were made by the prisoners to escape.
08:09On one such occasion, when seventy-two Dutch Jews were organizing an escape and were betrayed
08:14by the kapo, Niemann ordered all of them to be executed.
08:18Afterward, in the summer of 1943, rumors began to circulate that Sobibor would soon cease
08:24operations and the prisoners understood that this would mean certain death for all of them.
08:29The Sobibor prisoners knew this since the Belzec prisoners had sewn messages into their
08:33clothing before they were killed.
08:36We worked at Belzec for one year and did not know where we would be sent next.
08:41They said it would be Germany, now we are in Sobibor and know what to expect.
08:45Be aware that you will be killed also.
08:48Avenge us.
08:49And they did.
08:50In September 1943, twenty Jewish Red Army prisoners of war, the soldiers who had the
08:56necessary expertise to pull off an escape, arrived at Sobibor on a transport from the
09:00Minsk ghetto and were selected for labor.
09:04One of them, Alexander Pechersky, would become a leader of the revolt which began late in
09:08the afternoon, on the 14th of October 1943.
09:13The targets were carefully selected and because Niemann was the highest ranking SS officer
09:17who was on duty that day, he was the first person targeted to be assassinated by the
09:22prisoners.
09:24On that day at 4pm, Johann Niemann, then thirty years old after a ride on horseback, was lured
09:30to a scheduled appointment with a tailor in the tailor's barracks with a promise to be
09:34fitted for a leather jacket taken from a murdered Jew.
09:38When Niemann arrived at the tailor's barracks, armed with his pistol and whip as usual, Alexander
09:43Shubaev, a Jewish Red Army prisoner, was already waiting for him with an axe in his hand.
09:48When Niemann came inside and asked the tailor what Shubaev was doing there with an axe,
09:53the tailor replied that he was there to repair the table.
09:56The tailor then asked Niemann to remove his pistol holder, put on the jacket, and to turn
10:00around and check if any alterations were needed in the back.
10:04When Niemann complied, Alexander Shubaev snuck up behind him and buried the axe into the
10:09back of his head, splitting his skull open.
10:12Niemann was dead on the spot.
10:15And this was just the beginning of the revolt.
10:18In total, eleven SS officers were killed by the rebels.
10:22When one of them, Chaim Engel, was stabbing Rudolf Beckmann, the camp's head of the
10:25Sorting Commands, Engel could be heard shouting,
10:28For my father, for my brother, for all the Jews.
10:33The prisoners had to escape by climbing over barbed wire fences and running through a minefield
10:37under heavy machine gun fire.
10:39Approximately 300 prisoners were able to escape, but most of them were chased down and killed.
10:46Those prisoners who had not joined the escape were killed as well.
10:50Some fifty of the escapees did survive the war.
10:53After the prisoner revolt, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered that the camp be closed.
10:59After a funeral was held for Niemann and the other officers killed during the uprising,
11:04his widow was sent his belongings, including two photograph albums he had compiled containing
11:09images of his Holocaust-era service.
11:12The collection of photographs is known as the Sorbibor Perpetrator Album and was made
11:16public only in 2020.
11:20There were no tears shed for Johann Niemann.