Detail from a photograph taken from the German living quarters, spring 1943. The arm of the excavator that removed the bodies from the mass graves can be seen protruding in the distance. —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum collection, gift of Bildungswerk Stanislaw-Hantz
Camp III included the gas chambers, mass graves, and—starting soon after Niemann’s transfer to Sobibor in late summer 1942—a cremation site for the burning of corpses. A small group of Jewish prisoners was kept alive and enslaved in Camp III. Their task was to remove corpses from the gas chambers and search the bodies for any hidden valuables. They then cremated the corpses in open-air makeshift “ovens.” The SS would routinely kill and replace the forced laborers compelled to live and work in Camp III to ensure that they could never reveal what they had witnessed. There are no known survivors from Camp III.
None of Niemann’s photographs directly depict mass killings, but a few images contain visual evidence. One photograph shows the excavator that was used to dig up corpses from overfilled mass graves for cremation. Another shows the roof of the barracks in which female victims’ hair was shorn before they were forced into the nearby gas chambers. Another image shows the roof of the building that contained the gas chambers.
Two SS men with an attack dog and a flock of geese on the grounds of Camp II, summer 1943. —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum collection, gift of Bildungswerk Stanislaw-Hantz
The photograph above shows two SS men standing in front of a flock of geese in the barnyard of Camp II. Yehuda Lerner, a Sobibor survivor, in testimony recorded in 1979, described how the SS men used the sounds of agitated geese to drown out the cries of people being murdered. This photograph is visual evidence that corroborates the presence of geese inside the Sobibor killing center.
“It was really the flocks of geese raised just for this reason, in order to be able to cover the cries of people at the moment when the people were crying out. The reason was that, since many thousands of people were taken at a time, the Germans wanted to avoid . . . having the people located at the end of the convoy hear the screams of those who were at the beginning of the convoy.”