SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

68 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
“The third torture place for Jews was the ‘death camp’ of Sobibór,
near W�odawa on the river Bug, to the south of Brze�� Litewski
[Brest-Litowsk], in the district of Lublin.
This camp was used for the concentration of Jews during both the
first and the second period of the liquidation of ghettos. In the first
period – August 1942 – enormous masses of Jews from the General
Government were brought to this camp to be destroyed in gas chambers.
Besides Jews from foreign countries, especially from Low
Countries and France, were brought there, who are given the assurance
of being sent to factories in the Reich, but in fact share the fate
of the Polish Jews in the gas chambers, whilst their luggage and
other movables become a booty of the warders. In summer 1943
large numbers of Jews from the district of Lublin and especially
from the neighbourhood of W�odawa and Hrubieszów are brought to
Sobibór. In the first half of 1943, a group of 1,000 Jews were murdered
in Sobibór who were employed in war factories and brought
from the Warsaw ghetto. These people had been previously promised
by the German authorities their lives would be spared in recognition
of their war effort. During the same period thousands of Russian
Jews were destroyed in Sobibór who had been deported in masses
from Mohilew, Smole�sk and Bobrujsk districts. In the second half of
October 1943, a sedition broke [out] in the camp of Sobibór among
several hundred of surviving Jews, who killed a number of hangmen,
SS men and Ukrainians, burned down the barracks and escaped.”
This is a decidedly insipid “historical reconstruction,” yet it entered
the official report of the Polish government by way of the Nuremberg
trial in an even more general form: 119
“This camp was used for the concentration of Jews during the
first and second extermination periods affecting the ghetto. Here, the
Jews were killed in gas chambers. The foreign Jews, especially those
from Holland and France, were brought to Sobibór under the pretext
that they would have to work in factories in the Reich, and then
executed. The high point of the executions was the year 1943. Thousands
upon thousands of Jews were deported and killed in gas
chambers.”
119 “The Polish Republic in the case against: 1. German war criminals; 2. Their corporations
and organizations indicated under indictment No. 1 before the International Military
Court,” p. 42. This is the official report of the Polish government for the Nuremberg tribunal,
document URSS-93.