In the spring of 1942, the Germans began the construction of the SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor extermination facility. Located near a minor railway station, the camp was surrounded by several rows of barbed wires, ditches with water, and a minefield. Swamps and marshes stretched from the west and north. They were a natural obstacle preventing the prisoners from escaping.

The complex was divided into several parts. The barracks for the SS crew and guards were located in the so-called camp foreground, in the immediate vicinity of the railway ramp. Jewish forced labourers were detained behind that sector, in camp I. Camp II comprised of warehouses for plundered property as well as the technical facilities of the camp infrastructure. Camp III was strictly separated from the other parts. It was there, that the gas chambers were located and the bodies of the murdered would be buried.

In the first days of May 1942, the systematic process of extermination began. Mass transports from parts of the Lublin district began to reach Sobibór. On May 3, about 2,000 Jewish men, women, and children were brought from Komarów. On May 5, Jews from Opole Lubelskie, Dęblin, Ryki, Józefów, Końskowola, Baranów, Markuszów, Puławy, Michów and Łysobyk were deported to the facility. By May 12, the number of victims of the camp reached almost 20,000. A displacement action of children was carried out in the Włodawa Ghetto located a few kilometers from Sobibór. Richard Nitschke, the head of the local Border Police office, lured a group of 107 children under 14 to a sports ground under the pretext of sanitary control. The children were loaded onto trucks that took them to the extermination centre. At the same time, transports from Western Europe, including Austria, Germany, Czechia, and Slovakia, would reach Sobibór. Between March and July 1943, the perpetrators sent 19 transports from the Netherlands to the facility. In total, 34,000 Dutch Jews were deported. The overall balance of victims according to the estimated data amounted to 180,000.

On October 14, 1943, an uprising broke out in Sobibór. After killing nine members of the SS crew and two guards, the prisoners stormed the camp fence. About 300 detainees managed to escape, but only 46 insurgents and several other prisoners who had earlier fled the facility lived to survive the war. Immediately after the uprising, the Germans decided to liquidate the camp. Prisoners brought in from Treblinka demolished most of the buildings. The authorities ordered that the usable materials would be retrieved. The gas chambers were destroyed and their remains removed.

In the photographs:

View of the railway ramp and spur line at the former Nazi death camp in Sobibór. On the right, partly obscured by trees, the building of the pre-war post office, in which the German and Austrian SS men arranged their quarters, including the apartment of the camp’s first commandant, Franz Stangl. Date taken: October 1, 1975.

The SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor plan prepared by the State Museum at Majdanek. It represents the state of the death camp’s infrastructure in the last weeks of its operation.

The plan is also available here: THE SS-SONDERKOMMANDO SOBIBOR PLAN

Canteen recovered during the archaeological excavations at the former camp. An inscription OPOLE LUBELSKI[E] was carved at its bottom. It indicates the object’s place of origin – a town about 150 km away from Sobibór. Between March 1941 and October 1942, a ghetto was functional in Opole Lubelskie. Over 9,000 Jews were resettled there, including those from other localities, as well as from Slovakia, and Austria. In May 1942, a total of 4,000 Jewish victims were brought to the extermination camp from those territories.