SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

180 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
lying on the ground with broken limbs, were given the coup de
grace.
Witness Chaim Engel told the court that Gomerski had boasted of
having killed a detainee with twelve blows, and Mrs. Engel-
Weinberg, the only Dutch Jewess to have survived Sobibór, confirmed
that Gomerski always took part in the gassings and the shootings.”
Obviously, this was nothing but black propaganda of the crudest
kind, but there was one passage in the article which should have alerted
a critical reader: it was Zelda Metz’ account of the detainees who “had
to fetch water from a village” when “some detainees killed the Ukrainian
guard” (not: a Ukrainian guard). If Sobibór had really been an inferno
where the detainees had to suffer the most atrocious ordeals day
after day and were facing death at any moment, the SS would hardly
have taken the risk of sending out a platoon of detainees to fetch water,
guarded by a single Ukrainian. It is obvious that, under the circumstances,
desperate behavior had to be reckoned with at any time. That
kind of operation was possible only if the camp command felt that there
was little danger of an attempt at escaping – as the detainees did not
have strong enough a motive to risk their lives doing so.
The Frankfurt trial of Gomerski and Klier strictly followed the pattern
laid out by the trial of Bauer in Berlin, and so we will limit our description
and quote only a few significant passages from the reasoning
of the sentence on the subject of Gomerski: 514
“From the testimony furnished by the witness R. we may conclude
that the defendant himself has shot a group of about 40 persons
coming from another camp and destined to be killed. At the
time, the witness was employed in the armory and asserted that on a
certain day the defendant arrived to pick up a pistol and some ammunition.
In doing so, he said that there were only 40 persons that
day. Soon after, the witness heard shots.”
So a Jewish inmate was working in the armory, and a SS-man had to
pick up a pistol there, apparently because he did not own one?
We see that Esther Raab did not claim to have seen Gomerski shooting
40 people with his pistol. She merely stated that he had picked up a
pistol with some ammunition and that shots rang out a little later. Nonetheless,
the court sentenced Gomerski i.a. “because he has shot a con-
514 LG Frankfurt, op. cit. (note 503), p. 4.