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Sobibor

Sobibor

A view within the Sobibor camp, summer 1943.

Sobibor, summer 1943. Johann Niemann album, US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Type
Extermination Camp
Location
Near the village of Sobibór, Lublin District, German-occupied Poland (about 50 miles east of Lublin)
Operational dates
Operational spring 1942 to 14 October 1943; dismantled by late 1943
Liberation
Dismantled before liberationDismantled by the SS in the weeks after the 14 October 1943 prisoner revolt; the site was ploughed over and planted with pine forest.
Approximate prisoner count
A killing center; the meaningful figure is the number deported and murdered there. Only a few hundred forced laborers were kept alive at any one time (about 600 at the time of the revolt).
Approximate death toll
At least 167,000 people, overwhelmingly JewsUSHMM states 'at least 167,000.' Because the camp was destroyed and records are fragmentary, this is a minimum; some scholars cite higher figures.
Primary prisoner categories
Overwhelmingly Jews, primarily from the ghettos of the northern and eastern Lublin District, and also deported from German-occupied Soviet territory, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Bohemia and Moravia, the Netherlands, and France.
Commandants
Franz Stangl, the first commandant (1942), was later convicted for Treblinka and died in a Düsseldorf prison in 1971. Franz Reichleitner, the second and last commandant (September 1942 to the camp's liquidation), was never tried; he was killed by partisans near Fiume, Italy, on 3 January 1944.

Sobibor was the second of the three Operation Reinhard killing centers, built in spring 1942 in a swampy, thinly populated corner of the Lublin District near the Bug River. Like its sister camps, it was run by a small German and Austrian staff assisted by Trawniki-trained guards, and it was designed to murder the Jews of the General Government and beyond; at least 167,000 people, almost all of them Jews, died there. The camp was laid out so that its killing area was deliberately hidden from the rest of the compound. What made Sobibor historically distinct was its ending: on 14 October 1943 the prisoners staged the most successful uprising of any Nazi killing center, killing eleven SS staff and enabling some 300 to break out. Roughly fifty escapees survived the war, and the revolt prompted the Germans to dismantle the camp entirely and erase its traces.

The people of Sobibor

Alexander Pechersky

1909 to 1990

Soviet Jewish Red Army officer; revolt leader.

Alexander Pechersky was born on 22 February 1909 in Kremenchuk and raised in Rostov-on-Don, and was captured as a Soviet prisoner of war before being deported from Minsk to Sobibor, arriving on 23 September 1943. Within about three weeks he had devised and helped lead the uprising of 14 October 1943, in which prisoners killed eleven SS personnel and a number of guards and some three hundred inmates broke out. He escaped into the forest, later fought with Soviet partisans, and survived the war. He returned to Rostov-on-Don, where he wrote an account of the revolt and lived until his death on 19 January 1990.

Leon Feldhendler

1910 to 1945

Polish Jewish resistance organizer; co-leader of the revolt.

Leon Feldhendler was born on 1 June 1910, the son of a rabbi, and organized the original prisoner resistance group at Sobibor, serving as the principal deputy and co-leader alongside Alexander Pechersky in planning the revolt. He took part in the breakout of 14 October 1943 and survived the war in hiding. In early 1945 he was living in Lublin, where he was shot dead in his apartment on 6 April 1945 under unexplained circumstances, one of many violent deaths of Jews in the region in the war's immediate aftermath.

Thomas (Toivi) Blatt

1927 to 2015

Survivor and author.

Thomas 'Toivi' Blatt was born on 15 April 1927 in Izbica, Poland, and was deported with his family to Sobibor in April 1943, where his parents and brother were murdered. Sixteen years old, he escaped during the revolt of 14 October 1943 and survived in hiding. He devoted much of his later life to documenting the camp and the revolt, including interviewing the former SS guard Karl Frenzel. In 2011 he testified at the Munich trial of the former Sobibor guard John Demjanjuk; he died in California on 31 October 2015.

Chaim Engel

1916 to 2003

Survivor and revolt participant.

Chaim Engel was born in 1916 in Brudzew, Poland, and had served in the Polish army before being deported to Sobibor, where the rest of his family was killed. During the uprising of 14 October 1943 he fought and killed an SS guard and escaped. He fled with Selma Wijnberg, a Dutch-Jewish prisoner whom he later married, and the couple was hidden by a Polish farmer for roughly nine months until the area was liberated by Soviet forces in 1944. After the war they lived in the Netherlands and Israel before settling in the United States, where Chaim died in Connecticut in 2003.

Subcamps

Sobibor had no subcamps; it was a single killing center internally divided into three zones (administration, reception, and the killing area).

Researched and written by · Fortitude Research

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