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.
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