The notorious Nazi concentration camp Sobibor became the site of massacres of Jews. Gas chambers were used to kill. In 1943 there was an uprising in the Sobibor concentration camp, after which it was closed and destroyed by the authorities of Nazi Germany.
Sobibor Construction
In the spring of 1942, Operation Reinhardt began in Poland occupied by the Third Reich. Its purpose was the mass extermination of the Jewish and gypsy population. For this, several death camps were built, including the Sobibor concentration camp. He received the name of the nearby village, located near Lublin. The institution functioned a little over a year. During this time, 250 thousand Jews perished within its walls. The campaign for their genocide for a reason was concentrated on the territory of Poland. About 3 million Jews lived in this country on the eve of World War II.
Sobibor Concentration Camp was a rectangle with a width of 600 meters and a length of 400 meters. A high fence was built around the perimeter with barbed wire, carefully covered with tree branches. The walls hid from the inhabitants of the surrounding villages the horrors that were happening there at the behest of the authorities of Nazi Germany.
Infrastructure
Sobibor, a tragic concentration camp, stood out even from other similar institutions. His goal was precisely the physical extermination of prisoners. Most of the other camps exploited the prisoners as free labor, used in inhuman living and working conditions.
The purpose that the concentration camp of Sobibor had had also affected its layout. It was divided into three buildings. The German administration was located in one, the second received prisoners and properly executed, the third was necessary to destroy the recently arrived prisoners. The main tool for eliminating Jews in this camp was gas chambers. They looked like showers, which could fit up to 170 people. Tank engines were installed near the chambers, which were turned on to produce carbon monoxide that entered the room through special pipes. Almost all Jews were killed in this way on the first day after their arrival. They were informed that they had entered a transit camp, and now they are waiting for the road to labor. Before setting off on a further journey, each arrivals had to take a shower. In addition, the camp administration took away clothes for disinfection to prevent diseases and epidemics from spreading.
Sonderkommandy
Men and women were separated, and each group went to its cell. The prisoners were stripped and forced to remove valuable jewelry. Children were sent along with women. To conduct these operations, special sonderkommands were created. They were collected from the strongest and healthiest prisoners. Sonderkommandy did not warn about their mission. They had to send people to gas chambers. Of course, someone doubted, and someone resisted, so the administration often resorted to threats and violence. Such special forces were created due to the fact that ordinary SS officers, knowing what they would need to do, simply could not cope with their work and were mentally broken. In the Sonderkommands for the same reason there were frequent cases of suicide.
The Nazi concentration camp Sobibor (like Treblinka and Belzhets) was created specifically for the Jews and was particularly cruel. After enough people gathered in the gas chambers, they were sealed. Carbon monoxide entered the room, and after 20 minutes there was not a single living person inside. In total, the procedure from arrival to the massacre took no more than 3 hours. The camp worked in several shifts with almost no breaks. When the cameras were opened, the members of the Sonderkommando had to remove the corpses and pull out their golden teeth. Everything was done as quickly as possible, because after one train with the Jews a new one arrived. Later the bodies were burned.
Camp life
Jews began to be killed in a concentration camp even before Sobibor was finally built. The death conveyor began operating at full capacity in May 1942. Jews were brought there from neighboring Polish cities, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Germany. In July, the railway on which trains arrived at the concentration camp was closed for repairs, and he temporarily stopped working. But just then, the Germans took advantage of the pause for the construction of several more gas chambers, which replenished the arsenal of the stronghold of genocide (Sobibor). Life and death in the camp were later documented by the testimonies of employees and escaped prisoners. Some testimonies were used at the Nuremberg trials.
In the fall of 1942, trains began to run to the camp again. Most of the arrivals began to come from Eastern Galicia and Lublin (almost 200 thousand people). There were many Jews from Holland. The last victims of Sobibor were prisoners from Lithuanian and Belarusian ghettos. The Jews who arrived had to write letters to their relatives that they had arrived safely in the labor camp. This was done to misinform society. Everything that happened in the death camp was a state secret. The bodies were burned for the same purpose - to hide evidence of crime.
Preparation for the rebellion
In early 1943, some prisoners were left in the camp for serving labor duties. They continued to rebuild the camp and lived in barracks near gas chambers. In this environment a group of daredevils appeared who decided to organize an uprising. In the fall of 1943, Jews from occupied Soviet regions began to arrive in Sobibor. Among the arrivals was Alexander Pechersky.
This native of Kremenchug became the leader of the underground group. The first plan of the prisoners was a dig. In order to make it, it was necessary to go through twenty cubic meters of land and hide them under the floor. Digging could be done only at night. Pechersky dedicated a relatively small group of 65 people to his plan. All of them wanted to leave Sobibor as soon as possible. The uprising in the death camp, however, had to be organized in conditions of deep conspiracy. The fugitives spoke of their intentions with caution, since a person could have come across who would surrender the entire SS group. It was at this stage that most of these plans in other concentration camps failed.
For example, Alexander Pechersky, before getting to Sobibor, was in a transit camp in Minsk. There was an unsuccessful escape attempt. 50 Jews (there was a ghetto nearby) seized weapons and agreed with the driver that he would take them out for a fee in due time. This man surrendered to the conspirators, after which they were tortured and set dogs. Half-dead prisoners were cooked alive in local baths. Nevertheless, the Jews of Sobibor were lucky. Nobody has revealed their secret.
On the eve of escape
However, it soon became clear that the idea of digging should be abandoned. Firstly, 65 people simply physically would not have time to escape through a narrow hole in one night, until security came to their hut. Secondly, even if everything had succeeded, the Nazis would not have got what they deserved. Shortly before the uprising, the captive workers were locked in one hut, and additional security was put around the building.
The shooting started in the camp. The conspirators were already afraid that their plans were revealed. However, the reason for the unrest was different. On that day, October 11, 1943, another batch of suicide bombers arrived at the camp. These people somehow found out how Sobibor would meet them. The concentration camp, whose history is an ongoing chronicle of murders and genocide, was again flooded that day. The Jews, learning about the purpose of the "showers", already stripped, scattered all over the place. The crowd scattered the Sonderkommand in a panic, but she had nowhere to go. The maximum where suicide bombers could run was to the walls with barbed wire. There they were met by organized sentinel fire.
The killings of SS officers
Interestingly, Sobibor’s guards were assembled from captured Red Army soldiers who agreed to become collaborators. Most of them were trained in another Polish concentration camp - Travniki. But the main goal of the rioters was not they, but the SS officers who led the life of the camp. A place of secret reprisals was a tailor workshop.
On October 14, the local Untersturmfuhrer Berg, who came to measure the new uniform, was first killed. When he was distracted by his clothes, one of the conspirators hit the officer with an ax in the head. He fell lifelessly. The corpse was laid on the bed, covered with clothes. The next killed the head of the camp guard Michel. At the same time, a specially selected group of saboteurs cut the telephone wires.
After the first secret killings, the fugitives had 11 pistols taken from the Nazis in their hands, and another 6 rifles that had been stolen and hidden in a drainpipe in advance. The arsenal was more than modest. At the appointed minute, the camp zone heard a whistle. It was a signal of rebellion. The warned Jews lined up in a convoy. So began an open riot in Sobibor. Less than half of the prisoners knew about the uprising. The rest, for the most part, remained in their huts and passively watched what was happening. They were afraid of reprisal and hoped to preserve their lives with their loyalty. Time has shown that they were wrong.
Revolt
When the column of rebels was built, Pechersky sent her to the arsenal. If the group took possession of a large number of weapons, it would be possible to kill all Germans in general. However, there were machine gun points near the arsenal. Their heavy fire did not give any opportunity to break through to the weapon. Then Pechersky decided not to take risks, but to run away from the camp through the gate located next to the officers' houses. A shootout ensued, but in the end the sentries were killed.
Now the fugitives faced the most difficult thing - to pass the minefield that surrounded the camp. The rioters strove to find themselves in the forest as quickly as possible, where they could scatter in all directions. Many on the way to the trees died from mine explosions. Nevertheless, some managed to leave Sobibor. The concentration camp, whose list of prisoners is now in the National Holocaust Museum of Israel, has long been under the scrutiny of the SS, and officers continued to search for escaped prisoners.
Pechersky certificate
The rebellion of the Jews in the death camp (Sobibor was called that) was the only case of a successful escape from such a Nazi institution. On October 14, there were 550 prisoners. 80 people died while trying to escape, about 170 more Germans were caught and killed during the search. A significant part of the prisoners did not take part in the escape. All these people remained in the camp. They were killed by the Germans almost immediately after order was restored in Sobibor.
53 daredevils managed to escape. Some of them, like Alexander Pechersky himself, took part in the formation of partisan detachments in the rear of the Germans. The leader of the rebels first visited Moscow, where he was sent in defiance of the established rule to send surrendered Red Army soldiers to fines. In the capital of the USSR, Pechersky testified at the state commission. It then included writers: Benjamin Kaverin (also a Jew) and Pavel Antokolsky. They recorded the incredible story of Pechersky. His story was so surprising that before him no one had managed to escape from the concentration camp and survive. Kaverin and Antokolsky soon prepared an essay on the uprising in Sobibor. He entered the Black Book - a collection published by the forces of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. After the war, this organization became the object of repression of the Soviet state. Therefore, the readers of the USSR did not see the essay of the two writers until censorship was canceled.
The fate of the camp
The successful escape of the prisoners from the concentration camp (Sobibor was a really scary place) forced the authorities of the Third Reich to reconsider their attitude to this place. As early as the beginning of 1943, Heinrich Himmler came here - the Reich Minister of the Interior of Germany and the man who became the main conductor of the policy of the final solution of the Jewish question after the Fuhrer. Over time, he decided to turn the death factory into a regular concentration camp. Then the first Jewish workers' groups appeared there. As we know, some prisoners were able to leave Sobibor. The uprising in the death camp infuriated Berlin. It was decided to destroy him. All infrastructure was liquidated, and the territory was plowed and turned into a vegetable plantation.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, a Polish government commission set off for Sobibor. Excavations have been carried out. Specialists managed to detect numerous traces of crimes and the bodies of unburned victims of the camp. Today in its place is a memorial commemorating the victims of the Third Reich.