SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

102 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
February 1943, in which it was said that “the visit was designed to mark
the completion of the first million Jews destroyed at Sobibór” 266 – yet in
reality little more than 100,000 Jews had been deported to the camp at
that time. Zelda Metz in her early post war testimony gave the number
of Sobibór victims as 2 million, 267 a figure which also appears in
Szmajzner’s book from 1968. 268 At the 1950 trial against the former
Sobibór SS men Hubert Gomerski and Johann Klier witnesses mentioned
the figure of more than 900,000 victims. 269 The above-mentioned
Kurt Ticho/Thomas 93 as well as Chaim Engel and Selma Engel-Wijnberg
270 spoke of 800,000 victims. Exaggerations of this magnitude are
hard to explain as simple misjudgments.
One also encounters false statements regarding the number and arrival
dates of transports. The witness Ursula Stern claims that, between
9 April 1943 and 14 October the same year, a transport of Dutch Jews
from Westerbork arrived at the camp “regularly every Friday” despite
the uncontested fact that the last transport of Dutch Jews to Sobibór left
Westerbork on July 20, 1943. 271
4.5. Testimonies by Former Camp Personnel
Jules Schelvis describes the testimonies left by former German and
Austrian Sobibór camp staff by writing: 272
“Still using their Nazi jargon, those who had once been in power,
showing no signs of emotion and giving only the barest of facts,
submitted their statements about what had happened at Sobibór.”
When it came to camp III and what had allegedly transpired there,
Schelvis adds: “the SS men were reluctant to reveal any snippets of information.”
273 Most of their declarations are indeed severely lacking in
detail, which should not come as a surprise, as their interrogators apparently
did not show much interest in how exactly the alleged mass killings
had been carried out, or even made possible. When we get extra
266 M. Novitch, op. cit. (note 39), p. 156.
267 Testimony by Zelda Metz, in: N. Blumental (ed.), op. cit. (note 22), p. 210.
268 S. Szmajzner, op. cit. (note 31), p. 270.
269 “Die Massenmorde im Lager Sobibór,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 22 August 1950, p. 4.
270 Statement by Chaim Engel and Selma Engel-Wijnberg, ROD, c[23.62]09, p. 3.
271 U. Stern, op. cit. (note 163), p. 11.
272 J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 71), p. 2.
273 Ibid., p. 112.