Good morning. And thank you for
joining us for another episode in our Museum's Facebook Live series. I'm your host, historian Edna Friedberg.
Due to some technical difficulties, we are prerecording today's program which means that unfortunately
we will not be able to field your questions in real time. However, please go ahead and
post them in the comment section and we will answer as many of them later as we can.
Today we mark the 77th anniversary of a revolt at the Sobibor killing center, where
Jewish men and women were held prisoner there in 1943 had the courage and audacity
to rise up against their Nazi captors. As a lens into this time and place, we will
share the personal photos of a man named Johann Niemann. Visual evidence that documents
his journey from an ordinary young man in Germany to a professional mass murderer
in service of the Nazi state. I'm very pleased to be joined by my colleague,
Anatol Steck. Anatol is Senior Project Director in the Museum's International Archival Programs
and he worked very hard for many months to help acquire the contents of Niemann's personal
holdings, his photographs and papers from colleagues in Germany. Hi, there, Anatol.
Hello, Edna. Its good to be with you today and our viewers.
It's hard to think that around ten months ago, we were still
able to travel. You and I went together to Berlin to meet with historians from the
Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz. A German nonprofit that focuses on education and research around
the killing process in German occupied Poland and they worked tirelessly to explain what these
photographs meant so we are in their debt. I hope you and I will have a chance to travel
again soon together or just anywhere. So do I, Edna.
So let's help the viewers to understand a bit about the man who collected these
photographs for whom these were mementos of his glory days if you will. Who was Johann Niemann
and what was the atmosphere in which he grew up? Well, Johann Niemann was born
in 1913 into a peasant family in northern Germany. He was one of nine siblings
and his father made a meager living delivering milk. At 14 he leaves school
and enters an apprenticeship to become a housepainter. His foreman is already a
very fervent Nazi and indoctrinates his apprentices with Nazi ideology. By this
time, it’s important to note, in the 1920s, Germany is an impoverished country, with runaway inflation
and high unemployment. Political violence spills out into the streets and antisemitism is rampant.
The stage is set for someone like Adolf Hitler a self-proclaimed law and order strong
man who promises to bring Germany back to its former greatness.
In the photos we just saw we're seeing Niemann as a young man and
dressed in his painter's clothes in that job that he had.
He becomes from these humble beginnings a fervent believer in Nazi ideology and a loyal party
supporter. What are some of the things that he did to show his commit to the cause.
Well, as soon as he is eligible in 1931 when he's only 18 years old, he becomes
a member in the SA, the Sturmabteilung and becomes a Nazi party member. Now, the SA was Hitler's
paramilitary force of thugs who were instrumental in bringing the Nazis to power
through violence and political intimidation and soon after the Nazis take over in 1933
the first concentration camps are built. In May 1934, Niemann volunteers as a
guard at a local concentration camp only 20 miles from his hometown and in this
photograph you can see Niemann, the second from the right, as a guard in the
Esterwegen concentration camp where he volunteered. Now, let's think a little bit about
motivation. Actually we have an audience comment a woman name Sarah watching
from Decatur, Indiana, writes to say I'll never understand this mindset. How can
you go from a normal civilian to a mass murderer, especially at such a young age?
Could you describe a little bit more about Niemann rise through the Nazi ranks and
what it explains about his motivations? Yes this is a very important
and fundamental question. It's important to note that as far as the Nazis were
concerned, Niemann checked all the boxes. He was a young, fanatical believer in Nazi
ideology from a very early age, and was willing to do anything at all that was asked of him.
He had joined the Nazi Party before the Nazis rose to power in 1933 and he also left the church on his own account to pledge allegiance only to the Nazi state
and to no other institution and he came from a poor, blue collar background and
was eager for social and financial and career advancement. So soon after becoming a camp guard,
Niemann makes the decision to join the SS. The so called protective squad charged
with removing and murdering those whom the Nazis deemed their political and racial
enemies. During his almost five years in the concentration camp system, he becomes
gradually desensitized. He earns several promotions until in 1938 he's promoted to
the staff of the commandant’s office at the Sachsenhausen camp, and in this picture you can see
him in the rank of an Unterscharfuehrer, which is basically the equivalent of a sergeant at the Sachsenhausen camp
which at the time was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany, which held mostly political prisoners. So we see that for Niemann, he
certainly was a racist. He was a full believer, a true believer in Nazi ideology
but there also were very personal more relatable motivation including as you described,
career advancement and Sarah keep watching also other factors that are much more base about material
gain as well. We have another audience comment, a
woman named Kathleen writes that it's very frightening to me how easily human
being like this man can cross the line so easily into destruction and killing, probably
telling himself the whole time he was doing his patriotic duty. And indeed Kathleen, that's the thing that is
actually more disturbing, is to realize that these are just men and women perhaps not unlike you or not unlike me.
They're not monsters. They are people who become caught up in a swirl of different factors.
Let's turn to some of those factors. Anatol, describe the trajectory of Johann Niemann
through the concentration camp system but that was not the end or even peak of his career. What
kinds of things was he willing to do on behalf of the Nazi state?
By November 1939, Niemann and a small group of fellow SS guards are
called to Berlin and they're recruited in the secret Operation T4. This was the
code name given by the Nazis to the systematic killing of people with mental
and physical disabilities and this was a turning point. Niemann becomes a so-called burner, it is now
his job to drag the corpses of the victims out of the gas chambers at the so-called euthanasia facilities, remove the gold
teeth and then burn their bodies. Here in this photograph which was taken in 1940, he can be seen
with two other so-called burners in the Bradenburg killing facility. All three
men, by this time, were considered by the Nazis killing experts which means they were well
versed in killing a great number of people in a short time and then disposing
of their bodies and all of these three men would later advance to the death camps
in occupied Poland as, in fact, many of the T4 personnel of the time did.
And we are again grateful to colleagues in Germany who have painstakingly
identified different friends, different coworkers of Niemann in these photographs. They
enable us to tell a much fuller story, the way, for example, that the systematic
murder of people with mental and physical disabilities, these so called euthanasia
programs functioned as sort of a proving ground for later mass killing, the genocide of Europe's Jews. These were men who were willing. They
showed that they were able to normalize these behaviors and they also developed the
knowhow to operationalize it. So the death camps later don't come out of
the thin air, they are kind of test driven here at these euthanasia sites in greater Germany.
Anatol, how did Niemann then end up at the Sobibor killing center which is the
heart of our story today? Well, your earlier comment
here is very important. Niemann actually showed a lot of initiative. We often hear the
defense that orders were given and orders were followed. In Niemann's case, here
we see somebody who is an active participant and active perpetrator who actually uses
incentives and initiatives to implement the systematic killing of the victims. And you
can see that in the fall of 1941 when Niemann and several fellow burners were
sent to the village of Belzec in German occupied Poland and there they held the first of
three killing centers, for the systematic murder of the Jews and they use a lot of
incentive and a lot of initiative to design industrialized killing machine which then
would be used in all three death camps. During Niemann's as time at Belzec, over
430,000 Jews were murdered in the ten months of the camp's existence.
Niemann oversees the extermination area. And after less than a year, in late summer 1942,
Niemann is then promoted to become deputy commandant of the Sobibor death camp. At that point
he's only 29 years old. In this photograph you can see him posing at the arrival ramp
at the death camp where the trains with the deportees, with the victims would arrive and it is a visual testament to how he
as a perpetrator and mass-murderer viewed himself and how he set himself the stage for himself.
Anatol we have a number of viewer comments showing that this
theme of how someone is transformed is really resonating with people. David from
New York writes that this can happen in any country, that humans are humans
and Janet from Jacksonville, Florida, writes in to say when you view your
fellow humans as less than, then atrocities are easy to come by, especially
if you lack being taught empathy and compassion. We don't know, Janet whether someone
like Johann Niemann was taught empathy and compassion and his later affiliations
overrode those. We just know what he did and the system of which he was a
part, but it is definitely very, very disturbing. Now, you just showed us actually the
first photograph that we've seen today that is from the Sobibor killing center,
Anatol, of Niemann posing very proudly on a horse, as you said only 29 years
old and having experienced really a meteoric rise through the Nazi ranks to be deputy commandant of this death camp. Before the Museum acquired Niemann's personal photos we only knew
of in the world I think three or four images of Sobibor while the facility was in operation.
Give us an idea, not only of what these photos tell us about Niemann
the man but also how they corroborate the testimony of Holocaust survivors
who managed to escape. Well, many of the
survivors have told us in their testimonies of the first impressions upon arrival at
the Sobibor camp and that the death camp was really set up as a place of deception.
And the images in the collection bear this out. Before these images, Sobibor had
been a visual void. It is now through the testimony of the survivors in
connection with the images that we can see the visual evidence. And
here you see for instance the German living quarters which were built to
resemble an orderly quaint village. Survivors often recall the little houses with tended gardens
and flower boxes and in fact their initial relief at having arrived at such a bucolic place. Behind the German village
were the prisoner barracks and the workshops, and there was in fact a small prisoner population of a few hundred men and women
at any one time inside the camp and they were there for the sole purpose to keep the camp
and the extermination machine running and for the sorting of the victims’
belongings. And although Niemann's photographs do not depict the actual
atrocities of mass murder that were committed inside the camp, the images contain
important Holocaust evidence. So for instance in this photograph,
barely visible in the background and here inside the circle, is the crane
for the exhumation of the bodies from the mass graves. By the time
this photograph was taken, the mass graves had already overfilled with
the bodies so they were exhumed to be then burned. And then finally
on the far right of this image, you can see the train tracks and the ramp which led
into the so-called arrival area of the camp. I think it's very important that
we emphasize to people how successful and strategic this kind of Nazi deception
was. That Sobibor as you said, looks like a sort of benign, almost bucolic pleasant country
village and that this was a way to placate to calm arriving transports of prisoners,
people who were coming - old people, babies, children, and hopefully would
breate some kind of sigh of relief if they came out and saw this. But behind this
you see glimmers of the brutal violence that in fact is happening at what is a death factory.
Tell us a little bit more about this arrival area, please.
In order to talk about the arrival area, let me also give our viewers a
background in terms of how extermination of, the mass extermination system worked.
So trains of 40 to 60 freight cars, each loaded with 80 to 100 people at a time, arrived at the local station
and only 20 freight cars at a time were unloaded. The rest of the victims remained
behind in the locked train cars. The victims were then brought into the
so-called arrival area, which you can see here, where an SS man would give a
speech and actually welcome the deportees to a transit or forced labor camp promising
them a shower and a meal. The victims had to undress and hand over
their belongings to the slave laborers who were present as well.
The victims were then herded by the German SS and their auxiliary guards through a
winding, camouflaged barbed wire fence into the gas chambers. At least 180,000
Jews and an undetermined number of local Roma and Sinti were murdered at Sobibor
during the camp's existence between May 1942 and October 1943. Just to
give you an idea, the SS men would actually draw up quote-on-quote "wish lists"
for items which they had the prison laborers then retrieve and search for them
amongst the victim's possessions. And among the most popular items
besides jewelry and gold coins, et cetera, from the victim's possessions
were toys, which the German SS would then bring home to their children
during their frequent home furloughs. Just for clarification,
when you're talking about slave laborers or prison laborers, those are among
the several hundred camp inmates who you mentioned earlier would be kept
alive merely to do the dirty work to keep the camp functioning.
And also to add to that, the slave laborers themselves
were part of the deception. They were ordered to be present when
the deportees arrived but they were not allowed to talk with them and
importantly the slave laborers were not issued concentration camp uniforms
but were wearing civilian clothes thereby making it again look average and nonthreatening.
We're looking at another photograph that appears among Johann Niemann's
souvenir photos of his time at Sobibor. Explain what this basically agricultural
picture really means. What's the story behind it?
So the arrival area was actually a working farm, and
here you can see a flock of geese, but besides being used as food and
provisions, this flock of geese also had a much more sinister role. And they're often mentioned by the survivors in their testimony.
The honking of the geese would obscure the cries of victims as they were being herded through the so-called tube, the barbed
wire fence alley into the gas chambers because remember only 20 cars at a time were unloaded while the rest of the victims
was still sitting at the ramp in the locked railcars. So in order to camouflage what was going on inside the camp,
the geese were used for that particular purpose. Although we're talking
about this in very muted and matter of fact terms, this is, of course,
extraordinarily brutal and horrific crimes and experiences. One of
the things that is so powerful and valuable about this material is that
so much of it corroborates, it validates and agrees with testimony that we
have had for decades from survivors about the layout of the camp, about the
functioning of the camp, about the role of the SS personnel and of auxiliary
guards who were from other ethnicities non-Germans. Here we have from
a perpetrator himself photos that demonstrate that in fact, this is exactly how it
happened and now we can see it with our own two eyes.
What was daily life like for those like Niemann and his colleagues,
other members of the SS who were working in Sobibor because that's
what he was really carefully curating documenting, not the
killing process. What do we see? Well, we see the
degree to which the SS and the death camps not only in Sobibor
but the other death camps as well had an air of invincibility about
themselves and enjoyed also a slew of privileges. There were financial
and personal incentives, such as higher pay, regular home visits,
every three months the SS was allowed to go and visit their families
at home for two weeks. The plunder that I mentioned earlier of the
property and the assets of the victims and the collection. We have
the account ledgers which clearly show Niemann was making
sizable deposits of money each time he came home, no doubt
from the belongings and assets of the victims that he plundered
and stole, and, of course, the fact that the SS staff was spared
frontline duty during the war.
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00:21:30,000 --> 0021:35,000
And in between arriving transports
the SS would idle away the time by drinking, playing cards and
board games, and entertaining official guests and playing music.
You can see that in the images as well. So here you have a photograph
that you could refer to as happy hour inside a death camp. This
photo was taken a mere 300 yards or so from the extermination area
with its mass graves, the burning pile of corpses and the gas chambers.
You will notice there are fine crystals sitting on the table which again, was almost certainly was
plundered from the victims' belongings. I think what we're seeing
here in really horrific focus is an ability to compartmentalize to an extreme not only are they
compartmentalizing their socialization, here they're socializing and drinking and relaxing time, we
have pictures of them playing accordions and joking around but even when you mention the home visits and the
fact they would take toys from murdered children home to their own families,
I think it's very tempting to believe or most people may believe that it's almost
as though these events happened not on this earth. In fact, these are
men who went home every three months as you said, slept in their
own beds, with their wives, played with their children, were able to do
that and then willingly returned to this place where their job was the
industrial scale slaughter of human beings. It is a horrific juxtaposition.
If we can bring that photograph back up for a second, the drinking photo you just saw,
people may also be surprised to see there are women, women
not in a uniform. Who are these women to the best of our knowledge
and what would their function have been? This is again where
the testimony of the survivors is crucial. According to the survivors, female local civilians from the
town, or from the village of Sobibor, were actually employed as housekeeping staff and cooks inside the death camp
This is a very important indication that the general surrounding population
had economic incentives that were based on the camp's existence and also knew
what was going on inside the camp. In fact, there was no hiding.
Thousands of people arriving and disappearing inside the camp, the screams
and the shots that could be heard, the fires that burned the bodies
day and night, the odor and then the ashes that settled for miles around
the camp. So we see what are
increasingly inclusive circles of complicity whether from people
who benefited or people who were afraid but there was knowledge
of what was happening here. This was not some kind of black
hole and I think that's very disturbing but also very historically important.
Now, we saw, for example, Niemann posing on a horse in an almost kind of pin up
shot earlier. He relished his role as deputy commandant of this place, of Sobibor.
What do his photos reveal about his time there that then will lead
us to the prisoner revolt? We see through the
photographs the perpetrator's perspective, and in this cases
how Niemann viewed himself in the role that he played and Niemann
consciously acted out his superiority for himself but also for the other SS men.
Here he can be seen wearing a totally inappropriate, gala uniform,
something you would wear to a fine ball that he had the prisoners tailor for him. And we have testimony from
survivors who go as far as telling us that the SS men actually had their underwear tailored by the prisoners out of fine
silk also taken and stolen from the victim's belongings. In fact, it was
this greed and vanity on which the prisoners counted for the uprising
and for their plans to work and then their subsequent escape from Sobibor.
So tell us this vanity, this greed as you've said, this feeling of
invincibility, offered an opening that the prisoners could exploit. How did
they do that and what happened 77 years ago today?
Well, first off a small group of prisoners who were in
the know chose October 14, 1943 for the uprising because on that
date the camp commandant and several other SS men were on
furlough leaving Niemann in charge and they knew Niemann's
weakness. Starting at 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon, a select group of
prisoners summoned one SS man after another to different workshops
for the fitting of fancy garments, such as a leather coat, or in Niemann's
case a fine suit. All of them again stolen and taken from the victims' belongings.
As each SS man entered the workshop, the prisoners then killed each one of
them by using their tools, whatever they had at their disposal, such as
axes, hammers, and knives and, in fact, Niemann was the first of 11 SS
men killed by the prisoners the day of the uprising.
And as the approximately 600 prisoners most of whom would not know what
was going on until this point assembled for evening roll call at 5:00 p.m. that
day. The word would spread and the prisoners would then storm the main gate.
We actually have an extraordinary piece of testimony from
a survivor of Sobibor, a member of the uprising a man named Kurt Thomas who
describes Johann Niemann's last moments as he witnessed them
with his own eyes. Let's have a look. It is important to note that this
testimony from Kurt Thomas was actually filmed in 1990, some 30 years, almost, before the
Sobibor photo albums and photographs were discovered and it demonstrates the knowledge that
Kurt and others imprisoned there had to exploit Niemann's vanity. Now, we actually have photos
that Niemann posed for, and cherished himself, showing as you said Anatol him in a special gala kind of uniform or in
other photos that just showed his own feeling of almost godlike status and how the prisoners who were there knew
that. So what was the end result of this incredibly bold uprising? Half of the approximately
600 prisoners were able to escape that day. It could have been more,
however one remaining SS man who had not shown up for his
prearranged appointment and the Ukrainian guards opened
fire on the prisoners and this prevented most of the prisoners
from escaping through the main gate and instead they had to
escape through the mine field around the camp and to first
climb over the fence and then make their way across the mine
field where many of them were killed. Here you can see the
area with the fence and with the mine field outside of the
perimeter of the fence on the right side of the photograph.
Of the 300 prisoners who escaped that day, less than
60 in the end were known to have survived until the end of the war.
Once again, this truly heretofore unprecedented
photograph that we had taken from a guard tower showing an
aerial view of the double fences, surrounding the perimeter of the
camp, confirms hand drawn maps that we had from survivors of what
the layout of the camp was. You had also mentioned Ukrainian
guards. These were the so-called auxiliary guards that we mentioned before, ethnic Ukrainians
who were drafted in to amp up the staffing at Sobibor and other camps and
the Niemann collection we could do an= whole episode just on that documents
in much more vivid detail than we had here what their relationship was and how critical
they were to the functioning of the camp. In tribute to those brave men and
women, we'd like to show a photograph taken less than a
year after the uprising of some of the Jewish men and women
who organized the revolt at Sobibor. Who do you recognize here,
Anatol, among others? Well as you just said,
that is a group portrait of survivors of the Sobibor uprising, taken less than a
year after their escape and in the back row in The far right is Leib Feldhendler, one of the leaders
of the uprising and the young woman in the front row, second from the right is Esther Raab
who later settled in Silver Spring, Maryland, not far from the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, DC and whom the Museum has interviewed, together with other survivors from Sobibor
and these interviews were recorded in the 1990s. And for viewers who
would like to learn more, hear more of this first hand testimony
from Esther Raab and others we'll be posting links in the comment
section where you can dive deeper into this history and
the multiplicity of perspectives that we now have.
Before we close, we have only been able to scratch the
surface of what is really an extremely rich collection of
photographs, of documents and the impact they have
on our understanding of the Holocaust on the staffing and
mechanisms of the killing centers, so many subjects.
From your mind, having studied these for a while, what do
these photos teach us more broadly? Well as you already
stated earlier, Sobibor until now was a visual void.
Before the Museum thanks to the Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz was able
to acquire Niemann's photographs and personal documents earlier this year.
In fact, there are over 360 photographs which document
his entire Nazi career and 62 photographs are specific to Sobibor.
So what the photos tell us and what they visually confirm
are the details which only the survivors and eyewitnesses
could have known and which their testimony confirms. And
this is retroactive validation of what has happened. And the photos
contain crucial evidence against those who might seek
to deny or belittle the Holocaust. And the images also confirm
once more that the Holocaust would not have been possible
were it not for the willing participation of ordinary individuals like
Niemann whose collection we now have.
Well, Anatol, I want to thank you so much
for joining us today. And giving people some insight
into what is an incredibly complex but vitally important
history. Thank you. Thank you, Edna.
I also want to just mention as a note
these are not the only materials that we have at the Museum
that show Nazi officials documenting their so-called glory days and when
we look at them as part of a totality of our holdings we also understand
them in a different light. So we are incredibly grateful and feel a grave
responsibility to be the stewards of this collection which will continue to
speak for this history when there are no more eyewitnesses among us.
We also pay tribute to the extraordinary bravery of the men and women who
launched the prisoner uprising at Sobibor 77 years ago today and
May their memories be for a blessing. We are continually learning new
information and always glad to share with you the ways that work like
Professionals like Anatol to gather and collect and enhances and expands
our understanding of the events of the Holocaust. It helps us to understand
how vulnerable human beings are to these kind of forces and that the choices
that we make can have long lasting implications on ourselves, on others, and
on our society. We hope that you will join us two
weeks from today for our next Facebook Live program. For disability awareness
month we will be having a program focusing on the Nazi's nameless victims,
those adults, those children, who as we discussed today were the targets
of the Nazis first systematic mass murder program.
This program for disability awareness month will be held on Wednesday,
October 28 at 9:30 a.m. eastern time here in the United States and we will
be helping to understand and restore humanity to people who through new
records we are now able to identify and describe with the respect that
they deserve. Until then, be well, be healthy, wherever you are, and
we hope to see you again soon. Bye bye.
