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In total, some 170,000 to 250,000 people were murdered at Sobibor, making it the fourth-deadliest Nazi camp after Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Belzec. The camp ceased operation after a prisoner revolt which took place on 14 October 1943. The plan for the revolt involved two phases.
May 17, 2021 · During the first week of October 1942, the camp authorities resume mass murder operations in the gas chambers of Sobibor. Between October 8 and October 20, more than 24,000 Slovak Jews are brought there from the transit camp-ghetto Izbica.
Operations at Sobibor ceased right after the uprising. SS men murdered those inmates who had not escaped. Subsequently, on Himmler’s orders, they totally dismantled Sobibor’s killing facilities, bulldozing much of what had been there and planting trees to cover the site.
Aug 20, 2024 · Sobibor, Nazi German extermination camp located in a forest near the village of Sobibór in the present-day Polish province of Lublin. Built in March 1942, it operated from May 1942 until October 1943, and its gas chambers killed a total of about 250,000 Jews, mostly from Poland and occupied areas.
- Michael Berenbaum
- Background
- Prisoner Life in The Camp
- Further Reading
- Other Websites
Operation Reinhard
Sobibor was one of four extermination camps established as part of Operation Reinhard, the deadliest phase of the Holocaust. In September of 1939, the Nazis invaded and occupied Poland. After that, all across Europe, the Nazis began deporting Jews from ghettos and sending them to forced labourcamps.
Experiments with poison gas
In December 1941, SS officials at Chełmno did the first experiments to find ways of killing Jews using poison gases. At first, the Nazis used carbon monoxide gas to kill prisoners in vans. To get the carbon monoxide gas, they used a gasoline engine. They would connect the engine's exhaust pipe to pipes that led to the van's gas chamber. Carbon monoxide poisoningwould kill all of the prisoners in the van. At the Wansee Conference on 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich announced a plan for syste...
Layout
Sobibor was surrounded by double barbed wire fences which were thatched with pine branches in order to block the view inside. At its southeast corner, it had two side-by-side gates. One was for trains; the other was for foot traffic and vehicles. The site was divided into five compounds: the Vorlager and four Lagers numbered I-IV.
Because Sobibor was an extermination camp, very few prisoners actually lived there. While survivors of Auschwitz use the term "selected" to mean being selected for murder, at Sobibor being "selected" meant being selected to live, at least temporarily. Around 600 slave labourers were 'selected' to live and were forced to help the Nazis run the camp....
Bialowitz, Philip; Bialowitz, Joseph (2010). A Promise at Sobibór. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-24800-0.Blatt, Thomas (1997). From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-8101-1302-2.Freiberg, Dov (2007). To Survive Sobibor. Gefen Publishing House. ISBN 978-965-229-388-6.Lower, Wendy (2011). The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia. Rowman Altamira. ISBN 978-0-75912-078-5.In the summer of 1943, rumors began to circulate that Sobibor would soon cease operations. The prisoners understood that this would mean certain death for them all, since the final cohort of Bełżec prisoners had been murdered at Sobibor after dismantling their own camp.
The Sobibor uprising was a revolt of about 600 prisoners that occurred on 14 October 1943, during World War II and the Holocaust at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland. It was the second uprising in an extermination camp, partly successful, by Jewish prisoners against the SS forces, following the revolt in Treblinka .
