Sobibor, Poland

Sobibor Extermination camp near the village and railway station of Sobibor, in the eastern part of the Lublin district in Poland, not far from the Chelm-Wlodawa railway line. Established as part of Operation Reinhard, the camp was built in a sparsely populated, woody, and swampy area beginning in March 1942. The camp staff included 20 to 30 German SS men, most of whom had previously taken part in the euthanasia program, as had camp commander Franz Stangl. 90 to 120 Ukrainians served in the camp. Most were Soviet prisoners of war who had been trained for the job at Trawniki. The camp was in the form of a rectangle 1,312 by 1,969 feet (400 x 600 m) in area, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence 9.8 feet (3 m) high, with tree branches intertwined in it to conceal the interior. There were three camp areas, each individually fenced in: the administration area, the reception area, and the extermination area. Camp I, which was fenced off from the rest, contained housing for the Jewish prisoners and the workshops in which some of them were employed. The reception area, also known as Camp II, was the place where Jews from the incoming transports were brought, to go through various procedures prior to their being killed in the gas chambers - removal of clothes, cutting of women's hair, and confiscation of possessions and valuables. The extermination area, or Camp III, located in the northwestern part of the camp, was the most isolated. It contained the gas chambers, the burial trenches, and housing for the Jewish prisoners employed there. The procedure for the reception of incoming transports was based entirely on misleading the victims and concealing their fate. When a train arrived, the deportees were ordered to disembark and were told that they had arrived at a transit camp from which they would be sent to labor camps; before leaving for the labor camps, they were to take showers, and at the same time their clothes would be disinfected. Following this announcement, the men and women with children were separated. The victims had to take off their clothes and hand over anything valuable. Everything was done on the run, accompanied by shouts, beatings, and warning shots. Then followed the march to the gas chambers. When the gas chambers were jammed full of people, they were closed and sealed and the gas was piped in. Within twenty to thirty minutes, everyone inside was dead. The whole procedure, from the arrival of the train to the burial of the victims, took two to three hours. In the meantime the railway cars were cleaned up, the train departed, and another twenty cars, with their human load destined for extermination, entered the camp. Several hundred able-bodied Jews were chosen from among the first few transports to form work teams. Some were employed in the workshops as tailors, cobblers, carpenters, and so on, to serve the needs of the German and Ukrainian camp staff; all the other work assignments related to the processing of the victims along the route that led from the railway platform to the burial trenches. A total of about 1,000 prisoners, 150 of them women, were eventually put into these teams. Other work teams were assigned to the reception area, to handle the clothing and luggage left there by the victims on their way to the gas chambers. These groups had to sort out the clothing and prepare it to be sent on to a destination outside the camp; to search for money and other valuables that might have been left behind. In the extermination area, two hundred to three hundred Jewish prisoners were kept, whose task was to remove the bodies of the murdered victims from the gas chambers, take them to the burial ground, and then clean up the chambers. A special team of prisoners, nicknamed "the dentists", was charged with extracting gold teeth from the mouths of the victims before their bodies were put into the trenches. Toward the end of 1942, in an effort to erase the traces of the mass killings, the bodies were exhumed and cremated; this task too was carried out by a special team of prisoners. Transports of Jews from Poland, France, Austria and Czechoslovakia arrived at Sobibor. The total number of Jews killed at Sobibor throughout the period of the camp's operation stands at approximately 250,000. Throughout the camp's existence, attempts were made to escape from it; some of them were successful. In retaliation for these attempts, the Germans executed many dozens of prisoners. In July and August 1943, an underground group was organized among the Jewish prisoners in Sobibor. The group's aim was to organize an uprising and a mass escape from the camp. In the second half of September, Soviet Jewish prisoners of war were brought to the camp from Minsk; they joined the underground group and took part in the uprising. The uprising broke out on October 14, 1943, and in its course eleven SS men and several Ukrainians were killed. Some three hundred prisoners managed to escape, but most of them were killed by their pursuers. Those who had not joined the escape for various reasons and had remained in the camp were all killed as well. At the end of the war, about fifty Jews survived of those who had escaped during the uprising. In the wake of the uprising the Germans decided to liquidate Sobibor, abandoning the idea of turning it into a concentration camp. By the end of 1943 no trace was left; the camp area was plowed under, and crops were planted in its soil. A farm was put up in its place. Eleven of the SS men who had served at Sobibor were brought to trial. The proceedings took place in Hagen, West Germany, from September 6, 1965, to December 20, 1966. One of the accused committed suicide; one was sentenced to life imprisonment; five were given sentences ranging from three to eight years; and four were acquitted. The camp area was designated by the Polish government as a national shrine and a memorial was erected on the site.