SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

32 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
“In the month of February, 1943, Himmler visited Sobibór a
second time. […] Two days after the visit I heard a conversation between
Beckmann and Bredov. One said to the other that the visit was
designed to mark the completion of the first million Jews destroyed
at Sobibór.” (p. 155f)
As we have already mentioned, up to the end of 1942 exactly
101,370 Jews had been deported to Sobibór – but deported is not synonymous
for annihilated.
If we follow Bahir, the deadly gases were fed into the gas chamber
by means of the pipe work of a shower; the chamber had a collapsible
floor, which was opened after each gassing so that the corpses could fall
into the cars waiting below. 40
The account given by the witness Hella Felenbaum-Weiss is also in
blatant disagreement with the official version of Sobibór:
“One day, a convoy brought to the camp prisoners in striped pyjamas.
They were extremely thin, and their heads were shaved;
women and men looked alike and they could hardly walk. Rumors
spread that these people, about 300 of them, came from Majdanek
where the gas chambers were out of order. When they alighted from
the train, they literally collapsed. SS Frenzel met them and poured
chloride on their heads, as though they were already dead. The arrival
of another convoy distressed me in the same way. It was
thought to come from Lvov, but nobody knew for sure. Prisoners
were sobbing and told us a dreadful tale: they had been gassed on
the way with chlorine, but some survived. The bodies of the dead
were green and their skin had peeled off.” (p. 50)
Thus, the victims were not gassed in gas chambers but gassed along
the way before they ever arrived, and it was not done by means of exhaust
gases but with chlorine! As we have seen, this murder tool was also
mentioned in the testimonies by Leon Feldhendler and Zelda Metz
immediately after the war. The origin of this version of the gassing
myth becomes clear when we read the sentence “SS man Frenzel went
towards them and poured chlorine over their heads as if they were already
dead”: The corpses of dead detainees were indeed treated with
chloride of lime (not: “chlorine”) before they were buried in the mass
graves to prevent the spread of diseases. This, by the way, has been
40 Cf. chapter 3.