Uprising At Sobibir

[Tankanator]

A Nazi German extermination camp created exclusively for killing Jews and POWs operated near the village of Sobibor in southeast Poland from May 15, 1942 to October 15, 1943.
Every day, up to six trains, each carrying 2,000 adults, elders and children, arrived at the camp. People were told they would be working. The new arrivals were met with an orchestra and neat flowerbeds near the entrance. In reality, they were all supposed to die and the majority of them were murdered on arrival day.
SS Hauptsturmführer Franz Paul Stangl was the commandant of the camp from April 1942. He was in charge of about 30 SS officers, mostly euthanasia experts. Initially, collaborators of Ukrainian origin from Soviet POWs acted as guards. From 1943, there were many fighters of the Galicia 14th volunteer SS division among the camp’s guards.
Sobibor had one of the most efficient systems the Nazis invented for the annihilation of humans. The gas chamber, called the “sauna” by prisoners, could contain up to 800 people and had a special dolly track built beneath the floor. After the execution, the floor moved apart and the corpses fell down. A group of doomed prisoners put these corpses onto trolleys in the basement and carried them to a big ditch in the forest. The prisoners who dealt with corpses were periodically shot. According to different sources, the Nazis killed up to 250,000 people during the existence of Sobibor.
Alexander Pechersky
In the camp, the Nazis kept about 500 prisoners for necessary work. In September 1943, a group of Soviet POWs arrived at Sobibor. Red Army Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky was one of them.
Together with the son of a Polish rabbi, Leon Feldhendler, Pechersky managed to plan and lead a revolt in the camp. According to the initial plan, the prisoners were supposed to lure SS officers into a trap one by one under different pretexts and kill them. After this, the prisoners were to take weapons in the camp’s depot and kill the remaining guards. In the end, the prisoners were partly successful. They managed to kill 11 (12 according to different information) SS officers from the camp’s personnel and several guards. But they failed to seize the arms depot as they had planned. The rebels rushed to the central gates under submachine gun fire. They thrashed the guards literally with their bare hands. In some places, the prisoners opened the barbed wire fence and ran across a mine field.
There were about 550 prisoners at the time of the revolt in Sobibor. Over a hundreds of them refused to take part in the revolt, hoping for mercy from the Nazis. The Germans killed all of them the next day. Over the following two weeks, the Nazis hunted the runaways with the help of military police and the camp’s guards. They caught and immediately shot about 170 people. Before Poland’s liberation, about 90 former prisoners of the camp were betrayed by the local population or killed by collaborationists. Only a little more than 50 participants in the revolt survived till the end of the war. Pechersky and Feldhendler were among them. However, on April 2, 1945, Feldhendler was mortally wounded through a door in his flat. Despite receiving medical attention, he died four days after the attack. The most likely explanation is that he was murdered by members of the Polish nationalist underground.
When SS Reich Fuehrer Heinrich Himmler was told about the revolt in Sobibor, he became furious and ordered the camp’s liquidation. On the site of the former camp, the Nazis turned up the soil and planted cabbage and potatoes in a bid to conceal their crimes and destroy the memory of what the camp’s prisoners accomplished. But the Nazis failed again. The events of Sobibor were added to the charges at the Nuremberg Trials. Many books and a number of movies are based on the accounts of witnesses and rebels.