For 70 years after the Holocaust, scholars were aware of only a handful of photographs taken in the vicinity of the Sobibor killing center while it was in operation. That changed in 2015 when the grandson of a Nazi perpetrator shared his grandfather’s long-hidden personal mementos with the Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz, a small German non-profit organization of Holocaust historians. Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz, in turn, donated the collection to the Museum.
During the Holocaust, Nazi authorities built killing centers for the systematic mass murder of European Jews in gas chambers. Sobibor was one of five killing centers located in German-occupied Poland. From April 1942 to October 1943, the German SS (Schutzstaffel or “Protection Squads”) and its collaborators murdered at least 167,000 Jewish people at Sobibor.
The mementos, photographs, albums, and papers in this collection were originally owned by Johann Niemann, second in command at Sobibor. They include photographs of the killing center itself from the time when tens of thousands of innocent human beings were murdered there.
Although none of the pictures shows the atrocities committed, they reveal crucial details that corroborate earlier recorded survivor testimony of the layout and design of the killing center. Niemann’s personal papers and photos give unprecedented insight into the mindset of people, like him, who were active and even enthusiastic participants in perpetrating the brutal crimes of the Holocaust.
The original documents and photographs are permanently housed at the Museum’s David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center.
A Museum conservator looks at photographs from the Sobibor Perpetrator Collection, February 2020. —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum