SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 27
bibór as a transit camp. 28 Thus, the various reports differ radically even
at this early stage. If Rutkowski’s report were true, the small number of
Jews singled out for work would obviously have realized from the very
beginning what gruesome fate awaited the deportees.
Rutkowski (p. 3) accepts the figure of 250,000 victims set in 1947
by the “Main Commission for the Investigation of the German Crimes
in Poland” as well as the fact that the camp was in operation for only 17
months. Hence he has over 15,000 deportees arriving at the camp each
month – at least 500 per day. According to the official reports, the trains
departing from Sobibór were always empty. How could any of the
working Jews have any doubt concerning the fate that awaited their
brethren in section 3 of the camp?
Thus, Rutkowski’s assertion that even long-time detainees were unaware
of the real character of the camp is absurd, if we accept the standard
account of the events in section 3 of the camp. The story about
“the ‘old’ detainees who wanted to spare the new arrivals any overly
violent discoveries” and thus “did not tell them the whole truth about
Sobibór,” introducing them “only slowly, in a stepwise fashion, to what
Sobibór was,” reads like a bad joke.
2.3.4.2. Details of the events in camp III
On the subject of section 3 Rutkowski writes on p. 6:
“All detainees of this section were murdered without exception.”
Three pages further on we learn:
“Even in section 3, on the threshold of the gas chamber, so to
speak, there was resistance. […] In the winter of 1942/43 a group of
naked women rebelled and refused to enter the gas chambers, even
though the SS men and the guards beat them with sticks and poles.
Half of them were shot in front of the building with the gas chambers.
One time the victims succeeded in lifting the chamber door
from its hinges – probably because of a defective gas pipe. The
naked people ran all over section 3, which, in fact, was nothing but a
large cage made of barbed wire. The SS men shot them with their
submachine guns; Erich Bauer was one of them.” (p. 9)
Esther Raab is named as the source for this. She was a witness for
the prosecution at two trials in 1950 (Berlin and Frankfurt-upon-
Main). 29 How could she have known? She could not have learned any-
28 Cf. section 2.3.19.
29 Cf. section 6.2 f.