Brutal Death of Johann Niemann
- Nazi Officer at Belzec & Sobibor Extermin. Camp - Sobibor Uprising

8 July 2022

Category: High Ranking Nazi Representatives

Johann Niemann was born on the 4th of August 1913. Niemann joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and in 1934 he joined the SS. A true believer in Nazi racist ideology, Niemann was deployed in various German Nazi concentration camps. Among these camps was Esterwegen. The most famous was Carl von Ossietzky, a German journalist and political activist who was sent to Esterwegen in 1933.

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.

Helped establish the Belzec killing center

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.

Killed with Axe by his victim

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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