Killing begins at Sobibór

In early May 1942 the second German extermination camp of Operation Reinhard began operating in the forest by the Bug, next to Sobibór railway station on the line from Chełm to Włodawa. According to the chronology of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the first of the regular transports arrived on 3 May: about two hundred Jews from Zamość, who were gassed in three chambers in a brick building at the edge of the camp. From that day further trains rolled onto the siding from the ghettos of the Lublin District, and soon also from the Reich, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and Slovakia. Almost everyone brought there was killed within a few hours of arrival.

Which day

The exact date on which the mass murder at Sobibór began cannot be fixed with certainty, because the camp’s records have not survived and the accounts of the perpetrators and of the few survivors differ in detail. The USHMM gives 3 May. The Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad and the Polish investigating judge Zbigniew Łukaszkiewicz, who led the first post-war inquiry into the camp, wrote more generally of “the first days of May”. Some works give the middle of May (16 or 18 May), while some authors link the camp’s start with the first trains at the end of April. The Lublin historian Robert Kuwałek (PL), for his part, believed that the killing began even earlier: Jews from Kazimierz Dolny and Wąwolnica were to have died here as early as the turn of March and April, and more than two thousand from the transit ghetto in Rejowiec (PL) in early April. These earlier transports are usually regarded as part of a trial period, and the first days of May as the start of the camp’s regular operation. This article follows the date in the USHMM chronology.

Building in the forest by the Bug

Sobibór was the second camp, after Bełżec, where the killing had begun in March, built under the plan to murder the Jews of the General Government. The plan was directed from Lublin by the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District, Odilo Globocnik, whom Heinrich Himmler had entrusted in 1941 with building an SS base in the east. Preparations for building the camp at Sobibór most probably began in the autumn of 1941, and the first building materials were brought in at the turn of 1941 and 1942. The site was remote – forests and marshes by the Bug – but it had the rail connection the organisers needed.

The actual work began in March 1942. It was directed by the SS engineer Richard Thomalla of the SS construction office in Zamość, who had earlier supervised the building of Bełżec. In March a railway siding ending in a ramp was laid. The work was done by Poles from the surrounding villages and by Jewish forced labourers from nearby ghettos, among them Chełm and Włodawa. The Jewish labourers were beaten, some were killed on the spot, and once the building was finished the rest were murdered.

The camp was divided into several sections surrounded by a barbed-wire fence woven with branches so that no one could see inside. By the ramp lay the fore-camp with the staff barracks, then Camp I with the prisoners’ barracks and workshops, and Camp II, where the victims undressed and handed over their money and valuables, and where the plundered belongings were later sorted. From there a wire-fenced path about 150 metres long, screened with branches, called the “Schlauch” (tube) by the Germans and the road to heaven by the prisoners, led to Camp III, with the gas chambers and the pits for the bodies. Exhaust fumes were piped into the chambers by an engine in an adjoining shed; according to some sources a petrol engine, according to others a diesel.

Stangl and the trial gassings

At the end of April 1942 – on 28 April according to the USHMM – Franz Stangl, an Austrian policeman who had previously worked at the “euthanasia” centre at Hartheim Castle, became commandant of the camp. Before taking over Sobibór he went for guidance to Bełżec, to its commandant Christian Wirth, who in time became inspector of all the camps of the operation. Stangl had a reputation as a meticulous organiser, and Globocnik later praised him as the best commandant of his camps.

As at Bełżec, Sobibór’s staff were mostly men from Aktion T4, the murder of the mentally ill and disabled in the Reich, formally halted in August 1941. Some twenty to thirty German and Austrian SS men were in the camp at any one time, and about a hundred passed through it over its whole existence. They were backed by a company of about 120 guards trained at the SS training camp at Trawniki (PL), most of them former Soviet prisoners of war. The gas chambers were operated by the SS NCO Erich Bauer, known in the camp as the “Gasmeister”.

Before the camp opened, the Germans tested the chambers. According to most accounts, in the second half of April or at the turn of April and May, in the presence of Wirth and Stangl, a group of Jewish women from the nearby labour camp at Krychów (PL) was gassed. Sources speak of 30–40 women in a single test, while Arad estimates that a total of about 250 people from Krychów died in the tests. Two or three people who escaped from the camp during the tests reached Włodawa; there they were betrayed and executed.

Arrival

Trains of forty to sixty goods wagons stopped at Sobibór station, from where a locomotive pushed about twenty wagons at a time onto the camp siding. The gate was shut immediately behind the last wagon. SS men and guards drove the people out onto the ramp and led them to Camp II, where one of the SS men, Hermann Michel (PL), dressed as a doctor in a white coat, announced that after a bath and disinfection the new arrivals would be sent to work. People undressed and handed over their money and valuables, and the women’s hair was cut. Then they were driven along the path to the chambers. The elderly, the sick and those unable to walk were taken to the so-called Lazarett, in reality to a pit at the back of the camp, where they were shot. From each transport a few people were sometimes picked out for work in the camp; all the others died that same day.

The first weeks

In May and June 1942 Sobibór was one of the deadliest places in occupied Europe. Those brought here were above all Jews from the counties of Chełm, Hrubieszów, Krasnystaw, Puławy and Zamość, and also from Biała Podlaska. According to a website devoted to Operation Reinhard, a large transport from Zamość arrived on 11 May. Jews deported earlier from the Reich and the Protectorate to transit ghettos of the Lublin District, such as Izbica, were also brought here, and from the end of May direct trains came from Central Europe: from Hesse (26 May and 1 June), from the Theresienstadt ghetto (25 May, 12 and 14 June) and from Vienna (5 and 14 June), from where several thousand Jews had been deported to the General Government as early as February and March 1941. In early June about ten transports arrived from Slovakia, eight to nine thousand people in all.

Estimates of how many were killed in the camp’s first phase, up to the end of July 1942, vary. The USHMM gives at least 61,400 victims, Kuwałek almost 65,000 in May and June alone, and the British Holocaust Historical Society 90,000–100,000.

The camp’s toll

At the end of July 1942 the transports almost stopped, because the railway line between Lublin, Chełm and Włodawa was closed for repairs. The Germans used the pause to build a new building with six larger gas chambers. At the end of August Stangl was transferred to Treblinka, and Franz Reichleitner became commandant of Sobibór. The killing resumed in the autumn of 1942, and in 1943 transports also came from the Netherlands, mainly from the Westerbork camp – more than 34,000 people, of whom about a dozen and a half survived – as well as from France, from the Galicia District and from the ghettos being liquidated in Belarus and Lithuania.

The total number of Sobibór’s victims remains disputed. In 1947 Łukaszkiewicz adopted 250,000, and that figure was long repeated in the literature; the dzieje.pl website also gives it. According to the surviving telegram of Globocnik’s deputy Hermann Höfle and the report of the SS statistician Richard Korherr, 101,370 people had been brought to Sobibór by the end of 1942; historians disagree on whether this figure covers only Jews from the General Government or all transports. The Dutch survivor and researcher Jules Schelvis (PL) calculated about 170,000 victims, Kuwałek 170,000–180,000, and the USHMM gives at least 167,000. In the 1960s the West German courts in the trials of the staff adopted 152,000 as a minimum.

What came next

Sobibór operated until the autumn of 1943. Its end was hastened by the prisoners’ revolt of 14 October 1943, after which Himmler ordered the camp to be liquidated and the site ploughed over and planted with trees. Together with Bełżec and Treblinka, Sobibór was part of a system in which about one and a half million Jews, most of them from occupied Poland, were murdered in 1942–1943. Of the people who arrived here in May 1942, almost no one survived.