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Hidden History: The Sobibor Rebellion [1]
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Date: 2025-02-11
In October 1943, inmates at the Nazi extermination camp in Sobibor, in Poland, organized an uprising that destroyed the camp and led to the escape of hundreds of prisoners.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
Sobibor camp in 1943 photo from WikiCommons
In January 1942, a group of fifteen Nazi government officials met in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin with Reinhard Heydrich, second-in-command of the SS under Heinrich Himmler. The purpose of the “Wannsee Conference” was to map out a detailed plan for what was euphemistically called “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question”--the systematic extermination of all the Jews in German-occupied areas. At that time, about half of the 11 million Jews in Europe were in territory that was under Nazi control, and SS "Einsatzgruppen" units in occupied Russia and Poland were already carrying out “Special Actions” in which large numbers of local Jews were being machine-gunned and the bodies buried in pits.
But now the remaining Jews in Europe were to be deported to special camps in eastern Europe and “liquidated”. It was decided that three extermination camps would be built for the task of murdering all of the Jews in Poland–at Belzec (which was already under construction), Treblinka, and Sobibor.
Just five months after the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich himself was assassinated in Prague by resistance fighters who had been trained in Britain. In retaliation for Heydrich's death, the Czech town of Lidice was burned to the ground and all of its 500 inhabitants were either shot on the spot or deported to the concentration camps. The plan to carry out the extermination of the Polish Jews was then renamed “Operation Reinhard” in Heydrich’s honor.
All of the previous Nazi concentration camps had been constructed for the purpose of confining political prisoners and other “enemies of the state”. But the new camps were different—they were expressly designed for the sole purpose of killing people, en masse, as efficiently as possible.
The experiments with gas began at the Chelmno camp, in Poland, in December 1941. (Chelmno was not one of the three “Operation Reinhard” camps, but it had the same purpose.) Here, prisoners were packed into large sealed trucks in which the exhaust gases were piped by hose into the rear compartment, and were driven around until they were all dead. It was quickly decided that it would be more efficient to have purpose-built gas chambers to handle larger numbers at a time, and in January 1942 some experiments were carried out at the work camp in Auschwitz using the exhaust from surplus truck engines. The new extermination camps would expand and improve upon these methods.
Construction began at Sobibor in the fall of 1941, and accelerated in January 1942 when SS Hauptsturmführer Richard Thomalla, a former construction contractor who had just finished building the death camp at Belzec, took command. The site was formerly a small village, and some of the pre-existing buildings were adapted for camp use. A forester’s cabin served as the camp headquarters, and the post office became a barracks for the SS guards. The site also included the forestry fire-watch tower (which became one of the 12 guard towers) and the chapel. The camp was provided with a bar, a bowling alley, a hairdresser, and a dentist. A 1,000-yard length of track was added to the nearby railroad which ran to the front gate.
The camp measured about 150 acres, and was built in three sections or “lagers”. The reception area, “Lager 1”, was in front next to the railroad stop. It was intentionally made to look like an ordinary work camp, with manicured lawns, gravel paths, trees, and attractively-painted buildings. “Lager 2”, the administration area, contained the camp headquarters and the cottages where the SS staff and Ukrainian guards lived. There were also a number of workshops that were manned by prisoners, including a bakery, a sign-painting workroom, a carpentry, a kitchen, and a tailor shop, and a segregated set of barracks where the 500 or so Sonderkommandos (prisoners who had been selected to do the work) lived. At the rear of the camp was the killing area, “Lager 3”, which contained the gas chambers. The fenced pathway leading from the reception area to the killing zone was dubbed “The Tube” (it was also sometimes called “The Road to Heaven”). Also in this area was the isolated barracks for the 50 or so special Sonderkommandos who were forced to dispose of the bodies, and who were kept segregated from the other work areas.
The extermination camp began operation in April 1942, when, after a test run on 40 Jewish women from the nearby labor camp at Krychow, Sobibor began receiving Jews from cities in Poland and the Soviet Union. At this time, the camp was commanded by SS Obersturmführer Franz Stangl, who would soon be transferred to the larger death camp at Treblinka. Most of the SS officers including Stangl had come from the Nazi’s “Aktion T4” euthanasia program, which had murdered German people with “mental or physical defects” (officially classed as “lives not worth living” or as “useless mouths”).
As the prisoners arrived at the Sobibor train stop, they were divided into two groups. Those few who looked healthy or who had particularly useful skills were selected for the camp’s work force and were led away to Lager 2. The rest were sent down The Tube to Lager 3. Here they were told that they would be given a delousing shower before being sent on to a work camp, then were stripped of clothing and possessions and herded into the gas chambers, where they were killed by carbon monoxide fed into the building from a discarded Russian tank engine. When they were all dead, the Sonderkommandos were sent in to remove the corpses. The original gas chambers had wooden walls: these were quickly replaced with larger ones made of brick.
At first, the bodies were simply buried in a nearby field. In the summer of 1942, however, the Nazis ordered all of the dead bodies to be dug up and burned atop metal grates in an open pit. (Unlike the Belzec camp, Sobibor never had ovens for incinerating bodies.)
In all, somewhere around 200,000 prisoners were murdered at Sobibor, most of them Polish and Russian Jews but also around 35,000 from the Netherlands and thousands of others from Germany, Austria, France and Czechoslovakia. Some estimates range as high as 350,000. The majority of the prisoners were dead within an hour of arrival.
By the autumn of 1943, though, most of the extermination work was being redirected to the newer and larger death camp at Birkenau inside the sprawling Auschwitz compound (which had been designed using the lessons learned at Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor), and the remaining prisoners began to see signs that the camp was slowing down and would likely be closed soon. Construction had begun on an armory to store captured Russian weapons, and it looked as if Sobibor would be converted into an ordinary military base. From other prisoners, they had already learned that when the Belzec camp had ceased operations, the Nazis had killed all of the prisoners there to prevent word of the mass murders from leaking out—and they knew what their fate would be when Sobibor was closed down.
In response, a small group of prisoners began to develop a plan to fight back. They were led by Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, a Red Army Lieutenant and political Commissar who had been deported a month before from a Jewish work camp at Minsk in the USSR. Pechersky organized his resistance with military precision. Only a tiny number of people—a dozen or so, mostly Pechersky’s fellow Russian POWs—ever knew of the plans, so none of the other prisoners could reveal anything under torture. At this time, there were around 550 prisoners in Sobibor, and the camp was staffed by 20 German SS and 100 Ukrainian guards (the Ukrainians had been recruited from captured POWs).
At first Pechersky considered the idea of digging a tunnel out of the camp, but that was quickly rejected as too risky—previous attempts had been discovered and had resulted in reprisal executions with around 20 prisoners being shot. Then Pechersky’s idea grew in scope, and he came up with a way to, he hoped, free all of the prisoners in one fell swoop. It would be an open armed uprising.
The plan went into action on the afternoon of October 14, 1943, on a day when the camp commander, Franz Reichleitner, was away on leave. One by one, Pechersky and his men lured SS officers into the camp workshops on various pretexts such as fitting a new uniform, obtaining some stolen clothing to sell, receiving some shoes. As they entered the building they were struck on the head with a hatchet or knifed and silently killed. Within an hour 11 of the SS men lay dead, their bodies hidden in piles of rags and discarded clothing. Pechersky’s men clothed themselves in the SS uniforms and picked up their pistols. (The prisoners had already smuggled out some rifles and grenades from the Ukrainian barracks.)
One of the Sonderkommandos now gave the signal for work to stop and for all of the camp inmates to assemble on the main yard for roll call. Pechersky’s plan was bold in its simplicity—while impersonating the camp’s SS staff, he intended, if he could, to simply march the entire prisoner population right out the front gate, unchallenged by any of the Ukrainian guards. If that failed, they would fight their way out.
But the plan was now disrupted by a chance occurrence: at that moment, SS Oberscharführer Erich Bauer, the camp’s mechanic, drove a truck up to the front gate, having returned from town with some cases of vodka. Seeing what was going on, Bauer pulled a pistol and fired several shots at the crowd of prisoners, and that led to the Ukrainian guards in the tower opening fire with machine guns.
In the chaos, many of the prisoners escaped by climbing ladders over the fence or by running through the front gate. Others who had picked up guns from the dead SS began shooting back at the Ukrainians. Some tried unsuccessfully to break into the camp armory. Around 300 of the prisoners managed to get through the fence, through the surrounding minefields, and run into the nearby woods. The rest were trapped inside.
Pechersky had already made sure that all of the camp’s phone and power lines had been cut, so the remaining SS officers were unable to call for help. A German runner was quickly sent to the nearby mounted-police station, who frantically sent a message to the regional police headquarters in Lublin: “Jews revolted. Some escaped. Some SS officers, noncoms, foreign guards dead. Some Jews still in camp. Send help.” By the time Military Police and SS reinforcements arrived, the escaped prisoners had all disappeared into the woods. The Nazis, expecting the escapees to try to make their way east across the Bug River to the Russian lines, sent ground and air patrols to scour the area, but most of the prisoners had gone to the north, aiming for Polish cities. Only about half of the escapees were found.
In all, about 150 people got away from Sobibor, and around 50 of these would go on to survive the war. One of those who successfully made his way to the USSR was Pechersky, who joined a unit of Russian partisans and later wrote his memoirs of Sobibor before dying in 1990.
The Nazis, after executing all of the escapees they had re-captured as well as all those who had been unable to escape, now tried to erase any trace of the Sobibor death camp. All of the buildings were bulldozed, everything was plowed over, and dozens of trees were planted (using slave laborers from the Treblinka camp—which had itself undergone a prisoner revolt the previous August and was in the process of being dismantled). A unit of collaborationist Ukrainian troops was assigned to a new barracks camp that was built on top of the site. Today all that remains of the original Sobibor death camp are some fragments of the railway and the former post office building.
In retaliation for the escape, SS commander Heinrich Himmler ordered that the “liquidation” of the Jewish ghetto in Lublin begin immediately. During a six-day period in early November, some 43,000 Jews from Lublin were sent to the camp at Majdanek, where they were killed.
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