Sobibor

Sobibór , of its official German name S - Sonderkommando Sobibor , was a Death camp Nazi located in current the Poland of south-east. It was located in the voïvodie Lublin, district of Włodowa, with orée of a sparse forest of pines. The camp is precisely located at 12 km in the south of the village of Sobibór in the forest, with a place known as called Stare Kolonia Sobibór . From May 1942 at the summer 1943, the German authorities made there assassinate approximately 250.000 Juif S. the camp had occurred within the framework of the Reinhard Operation like complement of the death camp of Belzec.

History

The Death camp of Sobibór resembled on many points the installation of Belzec. The commander, Franz Stangl, had adopted the technique of extermination of the commander de Belzec, Christian Wirth. Its assistant was Gustav Wagner. In Sobibór the Jews were assassinated in gas chambers; at the end 1942 and in 1943 the camp reached a “capacity” of approximately 1.300 victims by gazage.

The victims were primarily Juif S, of Poland (especially of Lublin and Galicie of the east - between 145 000 and 150 000), of Czech Republic and Slovakia (31 000), of Germany and Austria (10 000), of France (2 000), of Lithuania (14 000), and of the Netherlands (34 313). Gipsy S and of the nonJewish Poles also counted among the victims. Two convoys conveyed Juifs of France for the site of Sobibór, the convoys n°52 and 53 of the March 23rd and 25th 1943, whose only five deportees were entered like survivors in 1945.

The plan of the camp was inspired to him also typical system by extermination in mass of the Jews during the Second world war. After their arrival, under the pretext of make them take a shower, one led the Jews in the gas chambers by the “pipe” - a long passage of approximately 200 meters surrounded by electric fences, camouflaged with branches. Then, the personnel sent in the rooms of exhaust fumes of a Diesel engine containing Carbon monoxide. The victims were initially thrown directly in common graves of contiguous wood, then they were burned as from the summer 1942. Among the newcomers the garrison chose approximately 600 to 1.000 “Jews of work” which were to undertake work to the camp before being finally assassinated.

The camp employed some 30 members of the Action T4 and approximately 100 Trawnikis , prisoner of war Soviet whose perhaps John Demjanjuk keeps it.

Revolt of October 14th, 1943

As from July 1943, the camp was to be transformed into Concentration camp. However, after a revolt aiming at a massive escape the October 14th 1943, it was definitively closed.

This revolt, one of the three which burst in the Death camps (with that of Treblinka the August 2nd 1943 and that of Birkenau the following year), was especially the fact of Soviet prisoners of war of Jewish origin of Bielorussia under the direction of an officer of the Red Army , Alexander Petcherski (also called " Sasha"), and of the civil prisoner Leon Feldhendler. 300 prisoners succeeded in indeed fleeing, of which only 47 could see the end of the war. At the time of this riot nine members of the S and two guards trawnikis, Volksdeutsche, also perished. After the S assassinated almost all the prisoners of camp who had not been able to flee or even of had not taken part anything in resistance. That made still at least several hundreds of people. Only some were led in other camps.

The events of Sobibór inspired the film Escape from Sobibor, whose authenticity is not perfect, and the novel Flucht aus Sobibor of Richard Rashke. The scenario writer Claude Lanzmann, realizer of “Shoah” carried out in 2001 a documentary heading Sobibor, October 14th, 1943, 16 hours on the revolt of the prisoners of the camp

After the camp had been closed definitively, the S tried to dissimulate the traces of their crimes. Inter alia it built a farm of aspect pain-killer and planted many trees on the old ground of the death camp.

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