SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 117
How many of the alleged victims were buried prior to being exhumed
and cremated, and how many were incinerated immediately after
having been gassed? Schelvis has calculated the total number of deportees
to be 170,165, rounded off to 170,000. 330 As we know from the
Höfle telegram, 101,370 Jews were sent to Sobibór up until 31 December
1942. It follows from this that (170,165 – 101,370 =) 68,795 deportees
arrived during 1943. According to orthodox historiography they
were all cremated without prior interment. Schelvis states that this
group was comprised of Jews from the Netherlands (34,313), France
(3,500), Reichskommissariat Ostland (13,700), Skopje (2,382), and the
General Government (14,900). 330
The victim figure for 1943, however, has to be slightly reduced.
Schelvis admits that, according to “rough estimates,” approximately
1,000 Dutch Jews were transferred from Sobibór to labor camps in the
Lublin district. 331 Despite the fact that those Jews did not perish in Sobibór,
Schelvis has included them in his victim figure. 332 The real number
of hypothetical victims for 1943 should therefore be 67,795.
Next we must determine how many Jews were deported to the camp
from 1 st October to 31 st December 1942. According to Arad a total of
31,300 – 32,300 Jews were sent to Sobibór during this period. 333 Arad
assures his readers that his lists of transports are based on “existing information.”
However, these lists consist to a large degree of figures
lifted from testimonial evidence, estimates made by Jewish resistance
members, or arrived at by mere conjecture. 334 For example, the lists for
Treblinka 335 indicate that 824,170 Jews were deported to that camp during
1942, whereas the Höfle telegram shows that the actual figure
amounted to 713,555 – an exaggeration of 16%. Faced with this tendency,
we find it more reasonable to accept Gilead et al.’s estimate that
80,000 Jews arrived at the camp prior to the interruption of burials. 336 In
330 J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 71), p. 198.
331 Ibid., p. 14.
332 Witnesses quoted by Schelvis speak of at least 40 French Jews transferred from Sobibór
to Lublin and of 830-880 Byelorussian Jews transferred to Trawniki, but it is unclear
whether those groups are included in the victim figure or not; ibid., pp. 217, 219f.
333 Y. Arad, op. cit. (note 49), pp. 390f.
334 Cf. C. Mattogno, J. Graf, op. cit. (note 10, Engl. ed.), pp. 102f.
335 Y. Arad, op. cit. (note 49), pp. 392-397.
336 I. Gilead, Y. Haimi, W. Mazurek, op. cit. (note 293), p. 25. Schelvis (op. cit. (note 71),
pp. 112, 116 n. 64) writes that “there were already more than 100,000” corpses in the
mass graves at the time cremations began, giving as his source a court document (VoHa-
66-61b), but here he is clearly contradicting himself, as this would mean that cremations
did not commence until early 1943.