Sobibor Claimed 200, 000 Victims

Estimated 200,000; the precise death toll is unknown, since no complete record survives. Estimates range from 170,000 to 250,000 with 200,000 believed to be closer to the true number of victims. 

As a killing center rather than a labor camp, Sobibor existed for the sole purpose of murdering Jews. The vast majority of prisoners were gassed within hours of arrival. Those not killed immediately were forced to assist in the operation of the camp, and few survived more than a few months.

Sobibor is unique because it was essentially closed by its inmates – after they executed a highly successful revolt on October 14, 1943. After the revolt, the SS was forced to close and destroy the camp and cover up their crimes.

Nothing is known for certain about the early planning for Sobibor; however, it appears that the decision to build this particular killing center was made sometime in October of 1941 – concurrently with decisions to set up such centers in Chelmno (Kulmhof) and Belzec. Local witnesses support this assessment.

We do not know when the construction work on this death factory started – we only know that In March 1942, SS-Hauptsturmf;hrer Richard Thomalla took over construction work at the site.

Thomalla was a former building contractor and committed Nazi whose service as an auxiliary police commander and adviser on Jewish forced labor had earned him a high-ranking position in Odilo Globocnik’s construction department.

Globocnik was the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district of the General Government – and the CEO of Operation Reinhard. It is believed that at a two-hour meeting with Himmler on October 13, 1941, Globocnik received verbal approval by the latter to begin construction of the Belzec extermination camp, the first such camp in the General Government. It is possible that at the same meeting a decision was made to construct the killing center in Sobibor.

Having previously overseen the construction of Belzec death factory, Thomalla allotted a much larger area for Sobibor than he had for Belzec, providing space for all of the camp’s facilities to be constructed within its perimeter.

The first gas chambers at Sobibor were built following the model of those at Belzec, but without any furnaces. To provide the carbon monoxide gas, SS-Scharf;hrer Erich Fuchs acquired a heavy gasoline engine in Lemberg (Lviv), disassembled from an armored vehicle or a tractor. Other sources claim that the diesel engine of captured Soviet T-34 tank was used.

Fuchs installed the engine on a cement base at Sobibor and connected the engine exhaust manifold to pipes leading to the gas chamber. In mid-April 1942, the Nazis conducted experimental gassings in the nearly finished camp.

Christian Wirth, the commander of Belzec Inspector (Chief Operating Officer) of Operation Reinhard, visited Sobibor to witness one of these gassings, which murdered thirty to forty Jewish women brought from the labor camp at Krych;w.

The initial construction of Sobibor was finished by summer 1942, and a steady stream of victims began arriving thereafter (although regular gassings began earlier – in mid-May).

After only a few months of operation, the wooden walls of the gas chambers had absorbed too much sweat, urine, blood, and excrement to be cleanable. Thus, the old gas chambers were demolished in the summer of 1942, and new larger ones were built made out of brick.

Because Sobibor was the death factory, the only prisoners who lived there were the roughly 600 slave laborers forced to assist in the operation of the killing center. The harsh conditions in the camp took the lives of most new arrivals within a few months – others were periodically gassed and replaced with new arrivals.

Trains entered the railway siding with the unloading platform, and the Jews on board were told they were in a transit camp. They were forced to hand over their valuables, were separated by sex and told to undress.

The nude women and girls were met by the Jewish workers who cut off their hair in mere half a minute. The victims, assembled into groups, were led along the 100m -long “Road to Heaven” to the gas chambers, where they were murdered using CO released from the exhaust pipes of a T-34 engine. The dead bodies were collected by Sonderkommandos and buried in mass graves or cremated in the open air.

On the afternoon of October 14, 1943, members of the Sobibor underground covertly killed eleven of the on-duty SS men and then led roughly 300 prisoners to freedom (47 survived the war).

Fearing exposure of SS crimes, Himmler on October 19th ordered that the camp be closed and demolished. Jewish slave laborers were brought to Sobibor from Treblinka in order to dismantle the camp.

They demolished the gas chambers and most of the camp buildings. The work was finished by the end of the October, and all of the Jews brought from Treblinka were shot during the first decade of November.