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Criminal narcissism. That could be the title of the series of unpublished photographs presented today in Berlin by the Topography of Terror Foundation on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, although the images were not taken in that death camp and do not document their atrocities. They refer to the fields of Sobibor and Belzec and the shock of these snapshots is the normality with which the Nazis and their helpers spent their leisure time. They are seen with their women having a few beers, posing in groups with their weapons in their hands or smiling while listening to the music of an accordion. Memories for the family album.
In Sobibor at least 167,000 Jews were killed in the gas chambers in just 17 months. Belzec, also in occupied Poland, was close to the Trawinki training camp, where the Nazis trained about 5,000 civilians and Soviet prisoners of war, who were later deployed to Jewish ghettos and death camps.
In one of those forums the Ukrainian John Demjanjuk is seen, sentenced in Germany in 2011 to five years in prison for complicity in the death of 27,900 Jews in Sobibor. During the process, Demjanjuk always denied being a guard of that field. He died a year later, when his case was on appeal.
The first photos of this nature were made available to German and American historians by the grandson of Johan Niemann, the SS commander in Sobibor. He found them in the loft of the family home and they come from several albums. " They are disgusting photos ," says historian Andreas Kahr of the Stanislav Hantz Center. "It hurts to see how the SS officers sat down to drink a wine or beers surrounded by corpses or wearing stolen sunglasses to the victims."
A photo captures an officer walking down the hall to the gas chambers in Sobibor, next to the barracks where women were forced to shave their heads. In others there is a group of guardians lying on the ground next to their weapons, Niemann riding a horse next to the ramp used to move the ground Jews from the trains to the gas chambers, shirtless officers sharing beers in a courtyard that was named "Casino."
"Happy hour after work, in the midst of mass murders," Edna Friedberg, historian of the Holocaust Museum, who checked the photos to certify their authenticity, said in her disgust.
Of the 361 photos presented in Berlin, 62 refer to Sobibor, which is a great find for historians, because of this death camp there were only two photographs to date. "Sobibor has so far been a black hole, but these photos change everything. Now we have a very concrete image of that field and very first hand," Friedberg said.
The photos document Niemann's participation in the so-called "Operation Reinhard", the secret plan of the SS to annihilate the Jews of occupied Poland. Niemann was selected to help euthanize people with disabilities and mental illnesses, including children.
Niemann was sent in 1942 as a sergeant to the Belzec extermination camp and, before his willingness to continue killing, he was promoted to one of the posts in the Sobibor command. He died in October 1943, in the revolt carried out by the nearly 600 prisoners remaining in Sobibor, an uprising that is still waiting for its place in history and in which more than a dozen Nazi officers and auxiliary guards died.
Commander Niemann was invited by the prisoners to the tailors' hut with the promise that they would make him a leather jacket. They cut off his head, but from that moment there is no photo. Niemann was not accompanied by a photographer to capture the moment in which the prisoners took the measures.
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