SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 19
the closing of the Be��ec camp, and in the spring and summer of
1943, Sobibór also received transports from Eastern Galicia. […]
From October 1942 to June 1943, a total of 70,000 to 80,000 Jews
from Lublin and the Eastern Galicia districts were brought to Sobibór;
the number of victims from the Generalgouvernement was between
145,000 and 155,000.
By the end of October 1942, 25,000 Jews from Slovakia had been
killed at Sobibór. In the second half of February 1943, Heinrich
Himmler paid a visit to the camp. While he was there, a special
transport arrived with several hundred Jewish girls from a labor
camp in the Lublin district. Himmler watched the entire extermination
procedure. In March of that year, four transports from
France brought 4,000 people, all of whom were killed. Nineteen
transports arrived from the Netherlands between March and July
1943, carrying 35,000 Jews. The Dutch Jews came in regular passenger
trains, were given a polite welcome, and asked to send letters
to their relatives in the Netherlands to let them know they had arrived
at a labor camp. After they had written these letters, they were
given the same treatment that was meted out to all the other transports.
Within a few hours they all perished.
The last transports to arrive at Sobibór came from the Vilna,
Minsk, and Lida ghettos, in the Reichskommissariat Ostland; 14,000
Jews came on these transports in the second half of September 1943,
following the liquidation of the ghettos in these cities. This brought
the total number of Jews killed at Sobibór throughout the period of
the camp’s operation to approximately 250,000.
At the end of the summer of 1942, the burial trenches were
opened and the process of burning the victims’ bodies was begun.
The corpses were put into huge piles and set on fire. The bodies of
victims who arrived in subsequent transports were cremated immediately
after gassing and were not buried. [16]
Resistance and Escape. On July 5, 1943, Himmler ordered the
closing of Sobibór as an extermination camp and its transformation
into a concentration camp. On a piece of land added to the camp
area and designated as Camp IV, warehouses were built to store
captured Soviet ammunition, which the prospective camp prisoners
were scheduled to handle.
16
Earlier, it was said that the corpses were unearthed and burned “towards the end of
1942.” Author’s comment.