The 30th of January 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party,
is appointed chancellor of Germany by the German President Paul von Hindenburg. The
Nazi regime quickly begins to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and opens
first concentration camp – Dachau – situated near Munich. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and
its European allies would establish more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites,
including ghettos. The perpetrators would use these locations for forced labor,
detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the state," and mass murder of millions. One such
perpetrator is a German SS guard and fanatical believer in Nazi ideology Rudolf Beckmann.
Rudolf Beckmann was born on the 20th of February 1910 in Osnabrück,
then part of the German Empire. Before Beckmann
started his criminal career in concentration camps, he had joined the Nazi Party and the SS.
The SS – Schutzstaffel or Protection Squads - was originally established in April 1925 to protect
Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders and speakers and provide security for political meetings.
SS members were subject to strict military discipline and swore an oath of complete loyalty
to Hitler and those appointed by him. Afterward in January 1929 Heinrich Himmler became the head
of the SS the organization greatly expanded in size and strength. By the time Hitler came
into power in 1933, Himmler had made the SS the dominant organization within the Reich.
From the beginning of the Nazi regime, Hitler entrusted the SS first and foremost with the
removal and eventual murder of political and so-called racial enemies of the regime. The
SS became a virtual state within a state in Nazi Germany, staffed by men who perceived themselves
as the “racial elite” of the Nazi future. In order to become an SS officer,
a person would have to prove his and his wife "racial purity" back to the eighteenth century,
be of Aryan appearance; and pledge unconditional allegiance to Hitler.
In 1939 Himmler created special SS courts, which legally allowed the SS to ignore
established German law. From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for “solving” the so-called Jewish
Question which then culminated in 1941, when the leadership planned, coordinated and directed the
so-called Final Solution. This “solution” was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.;
also known as the Holocaust. SS officers were directly responsible for the management of
concentration camps, where millions of Jews were murdered by poison gas.
In 1940, Rudolf Beckman, who was a true believer in Nazi racist ideology, was first sent to the
Grafeneck T4 facility which was the first centralized killing center to be established
by German authorities within the context of the Nazi “euthanasia,” or T4 program which was the
systematic extermination of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany.
It began its secret killing operations in January 1940 when the recruited T4 personnel
arrived in Grafeneck Castle. Approximately 100 Grafeneck personnel, which included physicians,
nurses and police, were led by German physician Horst Schumann. Their objective was to kill
patients who had mental and physical disabilities and were in care facilities in Germany. The
patients were gassed in gas chambers with pure, chemically produced carbon monoxide.
During the year that it was in operation, over 10,600 people with disabilities were killed by
the Nazis at Grafeneck through lethal injections and gas. Beckmann’s duties
included moving the murdered victims from the gas chambers to the crematoria.
The killings at Grafeneck came to an abrupt end in December 1940 when the clandestine
activities at the castle began to attract public attention. In response to this public pressure,
euthanasia officials hastily deactivated the center.
Shortly before it closed, most of the facility’s staff,
including Rudolf Beckmann, transferred to the newly established Hadamar T4 facility.
In the first phase of the killing operations between January and August 1941, around 10,000
men, women and children were asphyxiated with carbon monoxide in a gas chamber made to look
like a shower room. The victims murdered at Hadamar psychiatric hospital were brought in
by train and grey buses. The victims were sent before the physicians such as Adolf Wahlmann who
identified each person with a different-coloured sticking plasters for one of three categories:
murder; murder & removal of brain for research; murder & extraction of gold teeth.
When in the summer of 1941 the staff celebrated the cremation of their 10,000th patient,
they celebrated with beer and wine. Since the crematorium ovens were often filled with two
corpses at a time, the cremation process was less than perfect which often resulted in the thick,
acrid smog that hung over the town. Between 1941 and March 1945, almost 15,000 men,
women, and children were killed in the Hadamar through starvation,
lethal injections and gassings. The victims included mentally-disoriented elderly persons
from bombed-out areas as well as German soldiers deemed psychologically incurable.
The T4 program predated the genocide of European Jewry, the Holocaust, by approximately two years.
Historians estimate that the program claimed the lives of 250,000 men, women, and children.
In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany implemented a plan to systematically murder the 2 million
Jews living in German-occupied Poland. The plan was codenamed “Operation Reinhard and as part
of this action, three killing centers were established: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
.
Rudolf Beckamnn helped establish the Sobibor killing center in spring 1942
when he became the camp’s head of the sorting commands being in charge of sorting the clothing
and other possessions from murdered Jews. In addition to this, Beckmann was also in
charge of administration matters and was responsible for tending to the horses.
German SS and police officials conducted deportations to Sobibor between May 1942,
when the regular gassing operations began, and the fall of 1943. Most of the Jews
brought to Sobibor were immediately gassed by carbon monoxide which had been piped into
the gas chambers from an engine. About 250,000 victims were murdered in this killing center.
Approximately 50 German and Austrian personnel served at the
site and they were generally of lower-middle-class backgrounds.
According to the survivors, female local civilians from the village of Sobibor were often employed in
the camp as housekeeping staff and cooks. These civilians not only had economic incentives of the
camp’s existence, but it is believed that they also knew what was going on inside the camp.
The Germans constructed Sobibor as a rectangle - 1312 by 1969 feet.
A double barbed-wire fence, woven with tree branches, surrounded the perimeter of the
camp. This design was intended to hide the view of what was inside. It had two side-by-side gates,
one for trains and another for foot traffic and vehicles. The Nazis paid special attention to the
front compound which consisted of living quarters and recreational buildings for the camp personnel.
The SS officers lived in cottages with colorful names which helped conceal the
purpose of the camp from new arrivals, who would arrive on the adjacent ramp.
When the transports of 40 to 60 freight cars arrived at the Sobibor railway station,
only 20 cars at a time were taken into the camp,
while the rest of the victims remained locked in the rail cars.
The victims were brought into the so-called arrival area where an SS man would give a speech
welcoming them saying that they reached a transit camp on their way to labor camps.
They were also told that before embarking on the next part of their journey, they were to
take showers, have their clothes disinfected and get a meal. The men and women were the separated.
Children were sent with the women. The Nazis ordered the victims to remove their clothing
and hand over their valuables. The Jews were then marched on the run to the gas chambers.
The honking of the geese would obscure the cries of victims from those still sitting in the locked
rail cars as they were being beaten, screamed at, and having warning shots fired at them.
About 450-550 Jews were forced into the chambers at a time. The gas chambers were then sealed
once the maximum number of victims were inside. Poisonous gas was then piped in. Within 20-30
minutes, all those inside were dead. Those who were too ill, weak,
or elderly to make walk to the gas chambers, were shot in an open pit.
The SS personnel working at Sobibor enjoyed a number of privileges such as higher pay
and regular visits home – every three months they could visit their families for 2 weeks.
The SS also stole possessions of the victims such as gold, food, hair and
other valuables. The guards would even take toys from murdered children home to their families.
It is believed that Rudolf Beckmann participated in this plunder as with some of his fellow
Nazi colleagues such as Johann Niemann who made sizable deposits of money each time he went home.
Between the transports the SS personnel were not only drinking
but also playing music as well as enjoying card and board games.
All of this was going on in a camp where thousands of people were being murdered.
As an award, they even had an official trip to Berlin and Potsdam.
During the year and a half that Sobibor was operational,
several attempts were made by the prisoners to escape.
On one such occasion when 72 Dutch Jews were organizing an escape and were betrayed by
the kapo, they were executed on the order of Johann Niemann, the camp’s deputy commander.
Afterward in the summer of 1943, rumors began to circulate that Sobibor would soon cease operations
and the prisoners understood that this would mean certain death for all of them.
The Sobibor prisoners knew this since the Belzec prisoners had sewn messages into their clothing
before they were killed: “ We worked at Belzec for one year and did not know where
we would be sent next. They said it would be Germany... Now we are in Sobibor and
know what to expect. Be aware that you will be killed also! Avenge us! “ And they did!
In September 1943 twenty Jewish Red Army prisoners of war, the soldiers who had the
necessary expertise to pull off an escape, arrived at Sobibor on a transport from the Minsk Ghetto
and were selected for labor. One of them, Alexander Pechersky,
would become a leader of the revolt which began late in the afternoon on the 14th of October 1943.
The targets were carefully selected and the first person to be assassinated by the prisoners was
deputy commander of Sobibor Johann Niemann who was the highest-ranking SS officer on duty that day.
On that day at 4 PM, Johann Niemann, after a ride on horseback, was lured to the scheduled
appointment with a tailor in a tailors’ barracks with the promise to be fitted
for a leather jacket taken from a murdered Jew. When Niemann arrived at the tailors’ barracks
armed with his pistol and whip as usual, Alexander Shubayev, a Jewish Red Army prisoner,
was already waiting for him with an axe in his hand. When Niemann came inside and asked
the tailor what Shubayev was doing there with an axe, the tailor replied that he was
there to repair the table. The tailor then asked Niemann to remove his pistol holster,
put on the jacket and turn around and check if any alterations were needed in the back.
When Niemann complied, Alexander Shubayev snuck up behind him and buried the axe
into the back of his head splitting his scull open. Niemann was dead on the spot.
The next target was Rudolf Beckmann, then 32 years old.
Even though the conspirators had originally planned to lure
Beckmann to the scheduled appointment in the storage barracks, where they would kill him,
Beckmann, on his way to his appointment, had suddenly turned around and headed back to his
office in the administration building. Chaim Engel, a Polish Jew together with
a kapo named Pozyczki volunteered to kill Beckmann in his office. Engel and Pozyczki
went to the administration building where they found Beckmann behind his desk. While Pozyczki
restrained Beckmann, Engel stabbed their overseer and with every stab Chaim cried, "This is for my
father, for my mother, for all the Jews you killed." Beckmann tried to fight back causing
Engel's knife to slip, cutting his own hand and covering him with blood. When Beckmann was dead,
the two, not having enough time to better hide his body, pushed Beckmann under the
desk and took his rifle. In total 11 SS officers were killed by the rebels.
Chaos then took over; prisoners had to escape by climbing over a barbed wire fences
or running out the main gate through a mine field under heavy machine gun fire.
Some stepped on mines. Some gave up and didn't run at all. Chaim Engel, who had killed Beckmann,
belonged to those who did. He grabbed his girlfriend Selma, ran into the woods and
hid in a Polish farmer's hayloft for nine months before finding their way to Holland.
Approximately 300 prisoners were able to escape, but most of those were chased down and killed.
Those prisoners who had not joined the escape were killed, as well.
But some 50 of the escapees did survive the war.
After the prisoner revolt, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered that the Sobibor camp be closed
After a funeral was held for Beckmann and the other officers killed during the uprising,
the widow of Johann Niemann, the first Nazi officer who had been killed,
was sent her late husband’s belongings including two photograph albums he had
compiled containing images of his Holocaust-era service. The collection of photographs
is known as the “Sobibor perpetrator album” and was made public only in 2020.
There were no tears shed for Rudolf Beckmann.
thanks for watching the world history channel please help us to create more videos
by clicking on the donation link thank you and see you next time on the channel
you