SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 67
tion according as he saw fit. The people he selected were allowed to
remain in the town and work, the others were loaded on trucks, taken
to Sobibór and executed there. (These Jews were sent to Sobibór
because Be��ec was, by then, ‘overcrowded.’) Out of the 5,000 persons,
1,000 were moved to Sobibór.”
In November of 1943, the underground press devotes a few lines to
the revolt at Sobibór. Informacja Bie��ca No. 44 of 10 November states
for example: 104
“The Jews have destroyed the Sobibór camp and escaped into the
woods.”
A furtive reference to Sobibór is made in the report from the Delegatura
for November/December 1943: 116
“The work camp at Lemberg with a few thousand Jews who still
remained there was dissolved. This also applied to 2 other, smaller
camps. This fact could not be prevented, although a Jewish group
had destroyed the camp and the execution site at Sobibór – as had
happened at Treblinka earlier on.”
Marsza�ek stresses that these meager rumors did not provide any information
on the organizational structure of the camp: 104
“Hence one did not know anything about the layout of the camp,
nor the kind of [supervisory] personnel; there was no information
about the Kommando that carried out the routine work for the operation
of the camp, nor any details of the extermination method. Furthermore,
there was no attempt at estimating the human losses.”
The situation was similar to that concerning the camps at Treblinka
and Be��ec, about which the most absurd rumors were bandied about
during WWII. 117
Hence, practically nothing was known about Sobibór. This made the
historical reconstruction of the camp particularly difficult, as we can see
from this text written in 1945 by the Polish War Crimes Office, which
attempted to give some kind of historical shape to the vague rumors: 118
116 Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau (ed.), Faschismus – Getto – Massenmord, Dokumentation
über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten
Weltkrieges, Röderberg-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1960, p. 366.
117 Cf. in this respect: C. Mattogno, J. Graf, op. cit. (note 10, Engl. ed.), pp. 47-69; C. Mattogno,
op. cit. (note 11, Engl. ed.), pp. 9-34.
118 “Report by the Polish War Crimes Office, Dr. J. Litawski, Officer in charge, on the
German crimes in Poland,” 1945. AGK, MSW London [In the original, the name “London”
is in Polish], 113, p. 626.