An Unprecedented View of “Killing Experts”
By: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Tags: Nazis, Holocaust, Evidence, World War II

In an image from 1943, uniformed men relax around a table, with drinking glasses in hand, while in the presence of civilian housekeeping staff.

This scene of SS personnel at leisure is remarkable for what is just out of frame: the extermination area at the Sobibor killing center. It is only about 400 yards away from where this picture was taken and was in operation.

Johann Niemann, the deputy commandant of Sobibor, kept this photograph and 360 others with his personal possessions. Earlier this year, the Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz, a German educational nonprofit, donated them to the Museum so they could be preserved and made accessible to scholars around the world. The collection includes 62 images taken at Sobibor, located in German-occupied Poland. Before these photographs surfaced, there were only two known pictures of Sobibor and none that captured any of the at least 167,000 people who were murdered there.

View of the Sobibor killing center, 1943. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The photographs — along with some personal items and letters (including one where Niemann writes his wife from Sobibor in August 1943 to say he’s doing “really well personally”) — document Niemann’s rise through the Nazi ranks, starting as a guard in the early concentration camp system, followed by his involvement in the murder of patients with mental and physical disabilities in the T-4 “euthanasia” program and his later role in the mass killings at the Belzec and Sobibor killing centers. The photos shed light on the complicity and motivations of individuals involved in the implementation of the Holocaust and how average German citizens became mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi state. For Niemann specifically, we learn he was not only a believer in Nazi racist ideology, but he came from a blue-collar background and was eager for the opportunity to increase his wealth and status.

“These photographs give a human face to the killers,” said Museum Director Sara J. Bloomfield. “Our understanding of Holocaust history depends on seeing ordinary people participating in crimes like this. It takes human beings to do inhumane things. The Holocaust didn’t happen passively.”

The Museum is one of the few institutions that collect artifacts from perpetrators in the Holocaust. Rescuing this evidence opens new avenues for scholarly research, said Anatol Steck, senior project director in International Archival Programs of the Museum’s National Institute for Holocaust Documentation.

“The images confirm what the survivors of Sobibor have been recounting in their testimonies, but until now we did not have visual evidence of, such as the topography and set up of the Sobibor killing center,” Steck said. “The photographs and personal documents also provide insights into the actions and complicity of civilians, the perpetrators’ wives, and other actors.”

Johann Niemann (center) sits with fellow workers responsible for burning bodies of victims as part of the Nazi “euthanasia” program, Brandenburg, Germany, 1940. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Niemann’s career in the SS came to a violent end on October 14, 1943, when Jewish prisoners bludgeoned him to death with an ax during the Sobibor uprising. In the revolt, 11 SS men and several Ukrainian auxiliary guards were killed and 300 prisoners were able to escape the killing center, although fewer than 50 are known to have survived until the end of the war.

After the uprising, the SS sent Niemann’s personal effects, which included the photographs, to his widow in Germany. The family stored the belongings for decades in the family home until the Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz recently acquired them from Niemann’s grandson.

A small group of historians from the Bildungswerk and the Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg of the University of Stuttgart, including a former fellow of the Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, spent four years meticulously researching the photographs and released a book on the collection before donating it to the Museum. Currently, Mandel Center scholars are working on an English edition of the book, tentatively scheduled for release in 2022.

View the Sobibor Perpetrator Collection