SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 55
guards” and “often surpassed their German instructors in cruelty.” They
would “form a cordon to prevent the newcomers from escaping.” (English
version, pp. 34f., 62)
Was the speech needed to prevent any kind of resistance? Hardly,
for the deportees were much too tired after the long trip and too scared
to fight. Without fail, they would have obeyed any orders that would
have been barked at them by the guards.
Then why harangue them? Why did the SS man tell them that Sobibór
was a transit camp and that they would soon move on into
Ukraine or to Riga?
Anyone in possession of his mental faculties can find the answer by
himself.
2.3.20. Conclusions
The official version of the history of the camp, still in effect to the
present day, was essentially defined by the 1947 report edited by the
“Main Commission for the Investigation of the German Crimes in Poland”:
Sobibór was an extermination camp for Jews from various European
countries. Except for a small number of “working Jews,” the new
arrivals were immediately killed by means of engine exhaust gases in a
“gassing building” subdivided into several chambers. The corpses were
burned on pyres in the open. The number of victims amounted to some
250,000.
Since then, the Sobibór literature has, by and large, adopted this version,
even though some authors, such as S. Szmajzner, claimed far
higher numbers of victims. The only major revision on the part of any
orthodox historian is due to Jules Schelvis. He reduced his figure to
170,000 when the Höfle message became known.
The attentive reader will have noticed that over a period of twenty
years (between 1947 and 1967) not a single book, not even an article of
any serious nature was written about Sobibór. Among novelists and historians
an interest in this camp increased only at the end of the 1970s.
The reason for this phenomenon is obviously the increasing Jewish influence
in the world. Its most noticeable characteristic has been the intensification
of “Holocaust” propaganda. When we look at this literature,
we see right away that the publications repeat over and over again
a mass of unproven assertions, a never-ending line of the same horror
stories and anecdotes, and promote to exhaustion the heroic tale of the
uprising on 14 October 1943. Indeed, the available material does not