Transcript
KURT THOMAS: [. . .] the following happened: at 4 o’clock, Untersturmführer Niemann had an appointment to fit a suit. Exactly 4 o’clock. And as I explained before, he came on a horse. The horse’s name was Tsili. A brown mare. Her name was Tsili. There were four horses; but I remember Tsili, and I think there was another one, Ima. And he gets off the horse.
And right to the gate, there was also a bakery and the baker’s name was Israel. We called him ‘Srulek the baker.’ And he [NB: Niemann] says to the baker, who looked out, ‘Baker, hold the . . . keep the horse.’ And Srulek took the horse, and he’s holding the horse. And he [NB: Niemann] walks just as slow as ever, with his hand on the back, and his whip; and enters the . . . the tailor shop.
And as soon as he entered, they must have hit [him] over the head and that was the end of Niemann. And Srulek knew that he wouldn’t come out anymore; and as soon as he opened that door, he hit the horse on the rump and the horse turned around and run out of the yard and back to its stable, wherever it was.
That was the only SS man I have seen walking to his death.
Niemann (left) sits with fellow SS officer Gustav Wagner on the terrace of the mess hall. Niemann wears a summer uniform that he had prisoners tailor for him. One of the SS men most feared by the prisoners in Sobibor due to his unpredictability and sadism, Wagner was on leave on the day of the uprising. After the war, Wagner fled to Brazil, where he died in 1980. —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum collection, gift of Bildungswerk Stanislaw-Hantz
The photographs taken in the summer of 1943 of SS men socializing inside Sobibor coincided with a lull in arriving transports. The small number of prisoners kept alive as forced laborers suspected that the killing operations were winding down and that they would be killed next. In June, this “sorting commando” found slips of paper in the bloody clothing of forced laborers, who had been sent to Sobibor from the Belzec killing center and murdered at Sobibor. These secret notes urged the Sobibor prisoners to take action. Partly inspired by these pleas, a small band of Sobibor prisoners planned an uprising to enable mass escape.
Sobibor survivor Chaim Engel later recounted: “That is a time when we started to think, one day it’s our turn because, if they don’t have any people more around, and so they don’t need us, and then we, then it will be our turn to go. So, we already started at that time to think how to make the escape.”
On October 14, 1943, a group of prisoners, led by a newly arrived contingent of battle-tested Soviet Jewish prisoners of war (POWs), decided to revolt. They exploited Niemann’s and the other SS men’s vanity and greed, luring them to different tailor workshops supposedly for the fitting of garments. The prisoners then killed them one by one. Sobibor survivor Kurt Thomas recounted the final moments before the death of Niemann, who was the first of 11 SS men killed by the prisoners on that day.
Of the approximately 300 Jewish prisoners who were able to escape during the Sobibor uprising, only about 50 individuals are known to have survived until the end of the war.
Any prisoners remaining at Sobibor were murdered. Except for a few pre-existing buildings, the rest of the site, including Camps I and II and the German living quarters, was demolished. The killing area of Camp III was plowed over and planted with a pine forest in order to conceal the massive crimes committed there.
The Nazis and their collaborators murdered 167,000 people at Sobibor killing center. These victims were among the at least 1.52 million Jewish men, women, and children killed in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka combined.