SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 69
At Nuremberg this passage was adopted in an even more succinct
way by L.N. Smirnov, the Soviet prosecutor, who declared during the
hearing of 19 February 1946 with reference to the official report of the
Polish government: 120
“[…] I call the attention of the Tribunal to Page 136 on the reverse
side of the document book; this is from a report of the Polish
Government, which shows that the Camp Sobibur [121] was founded
during the first and second liquidation of the Jewish ghetto. But the
extermination on a large scale in this camp really started at the beginning
of 1943.”
In the years 1944-1946 witnesses still ascribed the most fanciful methods
of killing to the alleged Sobibór killing installations. On 10 August
1944 Ber Moiseyevich Freiberg, a former Sobibór detainee, declared
the following: 122
“When a group of eight hundred people entered the ‘bathhouse,’
the door closed tightly. […] In a separate building, there was an
electric machine which released deadly gas. Once released, the gas
entered tanks, and from there, it came through hoses in the chamber
to be asphyxiated [sic]. There were no windows in the building. A
German, who was called the ‘bathhouse attendant,’ looked through
a small glass opening on the roof to see if the killing process was
completed. Upon his signal, the gas was shut off, the floor was mechanically
drawn apart, and the corpses fell below. There were carts
in the cellar, and a group of doomed men piled the corpses of the
executed onto them. The carts were taken out of the cellar to the
woods in the third camp. A huge ditch had been dug there, and the
corpses were first thrown into it and then covered up with dirt. The
people who delivered and disposed of the corpses were immediately
shot.”
Alexander Pechersky a.k.a. Alexandr Peczorskij had this to say: 123
“He was an old inmate who worked at sorting out the clothing of
those who were killed. He was well-informed. From him we learned
where our comrades had disappeared and how the whole thing operated.
He spoke simply, as though it were a conversation about or-
120 Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal (subsequently
quoted as IMT), vol. VII, p. 576.
121 Phonetic transliteration of Sobibór.
122 I. Ehrenburg, V. Grossman, op. cit. (note 95), p. 439.
123 A. Pechersky, Revolt in Sobibór, Yiddish translation by N. Lurie, Moscow, State Publishing
House Der Emes, 1946. Reprinted in: Yuri Suhl, (ed.), op. cit. (note 26), p. 20.