Sobibor: An Overview (Part 1 of 4)
To Part 2: Life and DeathTo Part 3: The Revolt
To Part 4: The Memorial
The Sobibor death camp was one of the Nazis' best kept secrets. When Toivi Blatt, one of the very few survivors of the camp, approached a "well-known survivor of Auschwitz" in 1958 with a manuscript he had written about his experiences, he was told, "You have a tremendous imagination. I've never heard of Sobibor and especially not of Jews revolting there."* The secrecy of the Sobibor death camp was too successful - its victims and survivors were being disbelieved and forgotten.
The Sobibor death camp did exist and a revolt by the Jewish workers did occur. Within this death camp, in operation for only eighteen months, at least 250,000 men, women, and children were murdered. Only 48 Sobibor prisoners survived the war.
Established
Sobibor was the second of three death camps to be established as part of Aktion Reinhard (the other two were Belzec and Treblinka). The location of this death camp was a small village called Sobibor, in the Lublin district of eastern Poland, chosen because of its general isolation as well as its proximity to a railway. Construction on the camp began in March 1942, overseen by SS Obersturmführer Richard Thomalla.Since construction was behind schedule by early April 1942, Thomalla was replaced by SS Obersturmführer Franz Stangl - a veteran of the Nazi euthanasia program. Stangl remained commandant of Sobibor from April until August 1942, when he was transferred to Treblinka (where he became commandant) and replaced by SS Obersturmführer Franz Reichleitner. The staff of the Sobibor death camp consisted of approximately 20 SS men and 100 Ukrainian guards.
By mid-April 1942, the gas chambers were ready and a test using 250 Jews from the Krychow labor camp proved them operational.
Layout
The Sobibor death camp was built just across the railroad tracks from the Sobibor train station. The camp was rectangular in shape (400 by 600 meters) and enclosed by three-meter-high barbed wire fence. Nearly surrounding the camp was a minefield - built not only to keep prisoners from escaping but also to hinder partisans from approaching and contacting the prisoners. Internally, the camp was divided into five sections.
Vorlager:
Lager I:
- The ramp
- Housing for the SS (including the "Swallow's Nest" and the "Merry Flea")
- Housing for the Ukrainian guards
- Armory
- SS kitchen
- Bakery
Lager II:
- Barracks for prisoners
- Workshops (such as tailor, shoemaker, carpenter, mechanic, etc.)
Lager III:
- Location where new arrivals were stripped of their possessions and clothing
- Location of processing objects taken from new arrivals
Lager IV:
- Gas chambers
- Pyres for burning corpses
- Housing for prisoners working in Lager III
- In summer 1943, warehouses began to be built to store captured ammunition
Part 2 of this series describes life and death within Sobibor.
* Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997) xxi-xxii.
Bibliography
Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Blatt, Thomas Toivi. From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997.
Novitch, Miriam. Sobibor: Martyrdom and Revolt. New York: Holocaust Library, 1980.
Rashke, Richard. Escape From Sobibor. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Map Copyright Jennifer Rosenberg, 1998
