Sobibór Extermination Camp

Constructed in 1942 as part of the Nazi’s Final Solution, the concentration camp at Sobibór in eastern Poland was among the bloodiest but least known of the extermination camps. Because of its geographical location along the Polish-Ukrainian border and because of its proximity to a major railroad line, Sobibór processed Jews forcibly evacuated not only from within Poland but also from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, France, and from as far away as the Netherlands. Unlike the network of forced labor camps the Nazi regime had been constructing since 1933, the Sobibór camp, along with nearby camps at Treblinka and Belzec, was designed entirely to expedite the extermination of Jewish prisoners through mass suffocations using carbon monoxide gas. Holocaust researchers estimate that during Sobibór’s full operation, just under two years, between 175,000 and 230,000 Jews were killed, although testimony after the war from the camp’s Nazi administrators puts the number closer to 350,000.

Background

The Nazi extermination program was officially known as Operation Reinhard. It was named in honor of the SS general Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942), known as The Hangman, who, before his assassination at the hands of British spies in Prague, spearheaded the construction of the massive operations system to be built inside occupied Europe designed exclusively for exterminating the Jewish population. The Third Reich command began construction of a camp facility in the remote swamplands outside the town of Włodawa on the Bug River as early as 1940, initially as a forced labor camp where Jewish prisoners were to build a model agricultural trade center to serve the eastern sectors of occupied Poland, a plan abandoned as the massive war effort increasingly took precedent. In the spring, 1942, camp prisoners were engaged to construct a series of buildings that would become the extermination camp.

The camp was small, barely three football fields long. Unlike most of the other concentration camps, the staff of 150 would live on site to maintain secrecy. In addition to expanding administrative offices and residences, small warehouses were constructed to store supplies and property confiscated from incoming prisoners. A spur was added to the railroad line to enable trains to pull directly into the camp. Several small barracks were completed to house prisoners. Finally, in a back section of the camp, three small windowless brick buildings with metal roofs, each essentially a large chamber equipped with shower heads, were built, ostensibly as facilities to disinfect incoming prisoners. In the final stages of construction, a large diesel engine, most likely taken from a captured Soviet farm tractor, was attached through a series of water pipes to the chamber’s shower heads.

In late April 1942, construction was largely completed. The Jewish prisoners who had been forced to construct the buildings were the first to be gassed to test the extermination apparatus. When operations commenced in May 1942, under the direction of Commandant Franz Stangl (1908–1971), trains, pulling anywhere from forty to sixty transportation cars full of Jewish prisoners, arrived at the Sobibór station. Twenty cars at a time were directly moved into the camp. These trains would be quickly emptied, the prisoners, many of them entire families, were reassured by camp administrators dressed as doctors that they were only being processed to be dispatched to forced labor camps. First, those with potentially serviceable skills to help maintain camp operations were separated. About one thousand prisoners were used as carpenters, tailors, seamstresses, cooks, and blacksmiths, as well as to conduct the extermination operations. Then guards separated the infirm, the elderly, the feeble, or those who were simply exhausted for summary execution.

The rest of the arrivals were instructed to proceed to the shower facility at the camp’s northern point. After relinquishing identity papers and surrendering all their possessions, they were told to disrobe and the women were quickly shaved—the SS used the hair to make upholstery and slippers). Naked, they followed a short path, which the Nazis derisively termed "The Pathway to Heaven," and were crowded into the three brick buildings. Each could fit about 160 people. The doors were locked and the huge engine engaged. Gassing would be complete in ten minutes—and Jewish camp prisoners would clear out the buildings of bodies (nearly five hundred at a time) and dispose of them in mass graves. In an effort to hide the camp’s operations, in late fall, 1942, prisoners were instructed to exhume all the bodies, cremate them, and crush the remaining bones to dust.

Overview

Within the annals of the Holocaust, the death camp at Sobibór is most remembered for a revolt staged by more than three hundred of the camp’s more than six hundred Jewish prisoners late in the afternoon of October 14, 1943. The plan was simple—kill the guards and, taking advantage of the camp’s remote location and the onset of night, disperse into the surrounding woods. Planned for months by Polish and Russian prisoners versed in paramilitary operations, the leaders—who worked as tailors—seized an opportunity when SS guards were impacted by assignment reallocations. Initially killing eleven guards with axes that had been used to clear trees around the camp to put in a minefield, the prisoners bolted through the camp’s only gate and headed for the woods. Many were killed crossing the mine field, most were tracked down and shot within hours; historians believe fifty-seven prisoners managed to escape.

The Nazi high command, realizing the implications of the revolt, moved quickly in November 1943, to shut down the camp, directing most of the remaining prisoners to bulldoze the camp buildings and to erase any evidence of the camp operations. When the Allies arrived in 1945, they found only an open field. Only testimony at numerous war crimes investigations revealed the extent of Sobibór’s operations. Stangl (living, incredibly, under his real name) was arrested in Brazil in 1961, extradited to Germany, and sentenced to life in prison. The camp site has become an archeological project for Holocaust researchers; careful and painstaking digs have recovered many of the foundations of the camp’s principal facilities, including the gas chambers and the crematoriums. The camp’s location is marked only by a single, sobering monument, a pyramid constructed from the ashes and crushed bones recovered on the site.

Bibliography

Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. Print.

Bialowitz, Philip Fiszel, et al. A Promise of Sobibor: A Jewish Boy’s Story of Revolt and Survival in Nazi Occupied Poland. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2010. Print.

Blatt, Thomas Torvi. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1997. Print.

Fischler, David. Escape from Sobibor. Amazon Digital, 2011. Kindle file.

Paczkowski, Andrezej. The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom. State College: Penn State UP, 2003. Print.

Raske, Richard. Escape from Sobibor. 1982. Rev. ed. Open Road Media Digital Books, 2013. Digital file.

Rohde, Alexsandra. The German Occupation of Poland. Silver Spring: Dale Street, 2014. Print.

Schelius, Jules. Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print.