Sobibor

   The Aktion Reinhard death camp was located near the village and railway station of Sobibor in the eastern section of the Lublin district in Poland. The camp was constructed in March 1942 after the extermination operations had already begun in Belzec. Under camp commandant Franz Stangl, the gassing of Jews by carbon monoxide commenced in May 1942. Stangl, like many of the operatives in the Belzec camp, came to Sobibor experienced in killing with gas because of his participation in Germany’s Euthanasia Program. Unlike Belzec, there was no barracks for the arrivals once they disembarked from the trains. Rather, the undressing took place in the railway square under the watchful eyes of the Ukrainian guards. In order to avoid panic, the victims were told upon arrival that following their baths, they would have their possessions returned to them and be sent to Ukraine, where they would be able to live and work. The sick and the infirm were told that they would be taken to the infirmary, but instead were taken to open ditches and shot. At the “Cash Office,” Jews were required to “deposit” their money and valuables, and were warned that they would be shot should they attempt to hide anything. The entire process, from their arrival at the camp to entry into the gas chamber, was often accompanied by beatings administered by German and Ukrainian guards. Jews were humiliated even more by a dog called Barry, which Schutzstaffel (SS) men had trained to bite, especially when the victims were naked. The humiliation was, however, calculated. The beatings, the dog’s bites, and the screaming guards had the effect of forcing the Jews to escape these indignities by running through a tube that led to the “baths” where they were gassed. Fewer convoys of Jews arrived at Sobibor than at Belzec, and their size rarely exceeded 20 freight cars with a total of 2,000 to 2,500 people. By September 1942, there was additional construction at the camp that resulted in a new building containing six gas chambers, which increased the extermination capacity to 1,200 to 1,300 people a day. In July 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered that Sobibor be converted to a concentration camp in order to store and process captured munitions. Before the conversion took place, however, a revolt of Jewish prisoners broke out in the camp on 17 October 1943. Despite the odds against a successful revolt, a number of prisoners managed to escape, and their accounts remain the most detailed sources that we have about Sobibor. The number of Jews exterminated in Sobibor range from a low estimate of 225,000 to a high of 250,000.

   See also Resistance.