Gas chambers discovered at Nazi death camp Sobibor

September 20th, 2014

More than 250,000 Jews were killed at the Sobibor death camp in what is now Poland. The SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered Sobibor to be destroyed after a successful prisoner uprising in which around 300 of those being held there escaped. He ordered all traces of the camp to be removed, and the area planted with trees.

The rooms were locked with steel doors equipped with peep-holes. It took just 20 to 30 minutes to murder each group of victims.

“These finds are all that remained of those who were murdered here,” one of the archaeologists told Süddeustche Zeitung newspaper. “We will learn more from them on how the murder in the camp was carried out and what the Jews went through before they were murdered.”

There was no chance of survival for those sent to Sobibor. Unlike other concentration camps such as Auschwitz, prisoners were not kept alive to work as forced labourers: they were all sent to the gas chambers. The camp was built expressly for the purpose of carrying out the Holocaust, and the overwhelming majority of those who died there were Jewish.

Jewish slave labourers were forced to build the camp, and shot dead the moment it was completed.

Jewish prisoners led an uprising at the camp on October 14 1943, in which they killed 11 SS officers and a number of camp guards.

Some 300 of the 600 prisoners in the camp at the time escaped, but only 50 to 70 of them are believed to have survived. Others died in the minefields that surrounded the camp, or were recaptured in the days that followed.

World War Two

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