SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 51
not be identified in documents, but one should note that A. Rutkowski
speaks of only one train of deportees from Minsk which arrived at Sobibór
on 19 September 1943 with 2,000 Jews on board, including Pechersky.
76
On this basis we may surmise that Schelvis’ figure of 68,795 Jews
who came to Sobibór in 1943 – and thus his total of around 170,000 deportees
– is too high and should probably by reduced by several thousand.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that his order of magnitude is
correct.
In order to prove that the deportees were actually gassed except for a
handful of them, Schelvis has to show, first of all, that Sobibór was indeed
equipped with homicidal gas chambers. Let us now examine how
he approaches this problem in his chapter on “The Gas Chambers.”
On the first four pages of this chapter he sketches the origins of the
(alleged) Be��ec gas chambers on the basis of witness testimonies. He
starts out with a statement made in 1945 by Stanis�aw Kozak, a Pole
who claimed to have participated in the construction of the first gas
chambers at Be��ec. According to Kozak it was a building 12 by 8 meters
in size and some 2 meters high, subdivided into three rooms by
wooden partitions (p. 97f., English version). Schelvis then quotes several
witnesses and goes on to say:
“The first gas chambers at Sobibór were built to the same specifications
as the original ones at Be��ec. […] A big engine, which was
to produce the toxic gas, was picked up from Lemberg and connected
to the pipelines. Erich Fuchs, who collected the machine, remembered
[…]”
Then we have the statement made by E. Fuchs, a former SS man,
during his interrogation at Düsseldorf on April 2, 1963 (p. 100f., English
version).
This statement is followed by others made by former members of the
Sobibór camp personnel in the 1960s, among them a statement by Erich
Bauer made on 6 October 1965 during the Sobibór trial at Hagen.
Schelvis comments on Bauer’s explanations in the following manner:
“From his account it can be deduced that the gas chambers at
Sobibór were indeed identical to those at Be��ec. Towards the end of
April 1942 further trial gassings took place at Sobibór.” (p. 101,
English version)
76 A. Rutkowski, op. cit. (note 27), p. 27.