Johann Niemann (standing in the middle) oversees so-called Trawniki guards conducting target practice in the Belzec killing center, spring 1942. —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum collection, gift of Bildungswerk Stanislaw-Hantz
In fall 1941, Nazi officials sent Niemann and a small group of fellow “burners” to German-occupied Poland as a part of Operation Reinhard. Operation Reinhard was the code name for the German plan to murder European Jews in the part of German-occupied Poland known as the General Government (Generalgouvernement). The group’s mission was to construct killing centers specifically designed for mass murder. The first of three such killing centers was named Belzec, after a nearby village. Sobibor and Treblinka would soon follow.
The collection includes three photographs taken at the Belzec killing center in early spring 1942. Niemann is pictured in uniform training the “Trawniki men,” civilian guards recruited by the Nazis largely from Soviet prisoners of war. The roughly 5,000-man force provided the bulk of the manpower to conduct the mass killings in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Only a small staff of German officers would be required to supervise the killing operations.
After months of planning and construction, Niemann, together with his fellow SS men and the Trawniki guards, embarked on murder on a massive scale on March 17, 1942. Around 70,000 Jews imprisoned in ghettos in German-occupied Poland were rounded up and deported to the Belzec killing center in its first four weeks of operation. Transports that contained about 5,000 people at a time arrived at the center. People were packed into a single deportation train without food, water, heat, or sanitation. Most victims were killed upon arrival by exhaust fumes from diesel engines pumped into gas chambers.
Niemann was stationed at Belzec from fall 1941 until late summer 1942. For a few weeks during spring 1942, he also helped oversee the construction of the gas chambers at the Sobibor killing center. During Niemann’s time at Belzec, he oversaw the murder of tens of thousands of Jewish victims. In September 1942, he was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer (the equivalent of master sergeant) and transferred to the Sobibor killing center as its deputy commandant. Niemann was 29 years old and rising quickly in the ranks of Nazi mass murderers.
At least 434,500 Jews and an unknown number of Christian Poles and Roma and Sinti were murdered at Belzec until the camp was disbanded in December 1942.