The Natzweiler gas chamber

The Gas Chamber at Natzweiler-Struthof

The Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp was located on top of a 2,500 foot-high mountain in the Vosges mountain range, which was a ski area before the camp was built, and still is today.

Natzweiler-Struthof was not a death camp, specifically built for the mass extermination of the Jews; it was a camp for the imprisonment of convicted German criminals and Anti-Fascist resistance fighters. However, one of the reasons that it is so well known in America today is because a small number of Jews were killed there in a gas chamber, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The gas chamber building, shown in the photo above, has been preserved, but it was not open during the time that I visited. However, it is not necessary to examine the gas chamber because we have the confession of Josef Kramer, in which he said that he personally gassed 80 Jews.

Kramer made his confession after he was arrested at Bergen-Belsen when that camp was voluntarily turned over to the British on April 15, 1945.

Le Struthof, as the camp is known to the French, was located 31 miles from Strasbourg where Dr. August Hirt, a Professor at the University of Strasbourg, was conducting research on racial characteristics. When he requested Jewish skeletons that were undamaged by bullet holes or body blows, Heinrich Himmler ordered that Jews should be brought from Auschwitz to Natzweiler so that they could be killed in a gas chamber there.

In August 1943, a special gas chamber was constructed by adapting an existing building, formerly owned by the Struthof hotel, which was located on a side road, about a mile from the concentration camp. This room had previously been used as a refrigerator room by the hotel.

Killing the Jews in one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and shipping the skeletons to Strasbourg wouldn’t do – the skeletons had to be prepared with great care by Dr. Hirt himself.

According to a Tübingen Professor, Dr. Hans-Joachim Lang, two anthropologists, who were both members of the SS, Dr. Hans Fleischhacker and Bruno Beger, were sent in June 1943 to Auschwitz to select Jews to be gassed so that their skeletons could be added to the rassistische/rassenideologische collection of Dr. August Hirt. There were 57 men and 29 women in the group that was selected.

In the documents submitted to the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, it is mentioned that the Jewish victims were put into quarantine for a time at Auschwitz because there was a typhus epidemic in the camp; then they were brought to Natzweiler-Struthof.

The Nuremberg IMT documents show that 86 corpses were brought to the Anatomie Institute of the Reichsuniversitat Strassburg and that an assistant of Prof. August Hirt saw the tattoos on the arms and secretly wrote down the 86 numbers on a piece of paper.

Dr. August Hirt in his SS uniform

In a Military Tribunal conducted by the British after the war, Magnus Wochner, an SS staff member who was among the accused, testified as follows, according to a book entitled “The Natzweiler Trial,” written by Anthony M. Webb:

I recall particularly one mass execution when about 90 prisoners (60 men and 30 women), all Jews, were killed by gassing. This took place, as far as I can remember, in spring 1944. In this case the corpses were sent to Professor Hirt of the department of Anatomy in Strasbourg.

Contrary to the statement above, the gassing actually took place in August 1943, according to the confession of Natzweiler Commandant Josef Kramer, who was not among the accused at the trial where Wochner testified.

Dr. August Hirt doing an autopsy Photo Credit: USHMM

According to Dr. Lang, the files of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp show that there were 4 Jewish inmates in the camp on August 1, 1943 and one week later there were 90 Jews, indicating that a group of 86 Jews had arrived. The 29 women were gassed soon after arrival and the following week, there were 60 Jews in the camp. A week later, after the men had been gassed, there were only 3 Jews left in the camp since one of the male Jewish inmates had died during the week that the women were gassed.

When the Bergen-Belsen camp was turned over to the British on April 15, 1945, Commandant Josef Kramer volunteered to stay behind to help the British soldiers take over the camp, which was experiencing a horrendous typhus epidemic. Obviously, Kramer had no remorse for his crimes and did not expect to be arrested, or he would have escaped along with the other guards who left the camp before the British arrived. Instead, he met the British troops at the gate and offered his help in overcoming the typhus epidemic.

The photo below shows Josef Kramer, the Commandant of Bergen-Belsen and the former Commandant of Natzweiler, after he was arrested by the British on the first day after they took over the camp.

Josef Kramer, former Commandant of Natzweiler, under arrest at Bergen-Belsen

In the museum at Natzweiler-Struthof, Kramer’s confession is on display; he described how he personally mixed “salts” with water to produce a lethal gas. The gas was dumped through a hole which had been chiseled through the tiled wall of a room previously used for the refrigeration of perishable food. Then Kramer watched through a peephole as the Jews died from the fumes of the poison gas.

Josef Kramer was convicted by a British Military Tribunal held in 1945, and hanged for the crimes he had committed at Auschwitz II and Bergen-Belsen. The charges against Kramer at the proceedings of the British Military Tribunal did not include the crime of gassing Jews at Natzweiler-Struthof. Rather, he was charged with crimes committed at Bergen-Belsen and with gassing Jews at Auschwitz, where he was the Commandant of the Auschwitz II camp before being transferred to Bergen-Belsen in December 1944.

The corpse of a woman who was allegedly gassed at Natzweiler 

Photo Credit: USHMM

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, charges were brought by the American prosecutor against the Nazis for medical experiments performed at Natzweiler, but there were no documents introduced in which it was claimed that a gas chamber had been used there to murder Jews.

The abandoned Natzweiler camp was discovered by both French and American troops, so it was the responsibility of the French and the American prosecutors to introduce the evidence of the gas chamber there.

On December 9, 1944, Colonel Paul Kirk and Lt. Colonel Edward J. Gully of the US 6th Army made an inspection of the Natzweiler camp, three months after it had been abandoned by the Nazis.

According to Robert H. Abzug, the author of “Inside the Vicious Heart,” they qualified just about every observation that had to do with instruments of death and torture. The following is a quote from Abzug’s book:

They found, among other things, “what appeared to be a disinfestation unit” and “a large pile of hair appearing and reputed to be human female.” They were shown a building with a space “allegedly used as a lethal gas chamber. ” In this building was “a cellar room with a special type elevator,” and “an incinerator room with equipment obviously intended for the burning of human bodies…a cell room and an autopsy room.” Kirk and Gully then described in detail the “so-called lethal gas chamber,” noting every pipe and outlet and its two steel doors. In the cellar they found four coffins and a sheet metal elevator “of a size which would take a human body” with “stains which appeared to be caused by blood.”

Kirk and Gully wrote a report that was sent to the War Crimes Division, in which they referred to a “so-called gas chamber” at Natzweiler. Based on their report, there were no charges, pertaining to a gas chamber at Natzweiler, brought against the Nazis on trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The building described in the quote from Abzug’s book is shown in my photo below. This building is the crematorium which has an elevator, an incinerator room, a cell room and an autopsy room.

Crematorium building at Natzweiler-Struthof

The photo below shows water pipes going into what appears to be a shower room which is right next to the crematory oven. You can see a bit of the crematory oven in the lower right hand corner of the photo. It appears that the water for the room might have been heated by the oven, as shown in the second photo below.

Water pipes going into shower room next to the ovens

When I visited the Natzweiler camp in October 2004, the room next to the oven was not open to visitors. I peeked through the window shown in the photo above and saw what looked like a shower room. This is probably the “so-called lethal gas chamber” which the two American officers described in their report, but there was no sign which said that this was a gas chamber. This is not the room that Josef Kramer described in his confession.

Oven for cremating bodies at Natzweiler-Struthof

The photo above shows the crematory oven described by the American Army officers who investigated the Natzweiler camp in an attempt to find evidence of war crimes. The shower room is behind the oven and to the right. To the right in the photograph is a display of the shoes worn by the prisoners in the camp.

The Natzweiler camp had only one crematory oven since it was not intended to be a factory for mass murder.

Apparently Kirk and Gully were not told by their French guides that the actual gas chamber was located on a side road, about one mile distant from the camp. Since they never saw the real gas chamber, they didn’t include it in their report, and consequently no charges were brought at the Nuremberg IMT with regard to the gassing of Jews at Natzweiler-Struthof.

In 1989, a plaque was placed at Struthof, in memory of the “87 Jews who were gassed” there. This was accomplished through the joint efforts of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and a New Jersey lawyer, Stephen Draisin. The number 87 includes the 86 Jews who were brought from Auschwitz to be gassed and one Jewish inmate who died during the same time period.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the gas chamber was also used in pseudoscientific medical experiments involving poison gas. The victims of these experiments were primarily Roma (Gypsies) who had been transferred from Auschwitz. Prisoners were also subjected to experiments involving treatment for typhus and yellow fever.”

A book which I purchased from the Memorial Site has this to say about the gas chamber:

4. The affair of the Israelite corpses

Hirt, professor of anatomy in Strasbourg, received corpses from the camp of Russian war prisoners at Mutzig, but as he thought they were too lean, he asked for people in a good physical condition for studies on heredity.

87 Israelites (30 of whom were women) were sent from the camp at Auschwitz. They were shut up in block 13 at the Struthof where they were measured, and they had to undergo experiments on sterilization. On August 11, 13, 17, 19, 1943, under the direction of doctors from Strasburg, the S.S. gassed the 87 Israelites in the gas chamber at Struthof with cyanide. Death occurred after 30 to 60 seconds. The corpses were transported to the Institut d’Anatomie in Strasburg. 17 entire corpses (3 of which being women’s) were found at the liberation as well as many dissected pieces.

According to Dr. Lang, there were 16 of the 86 bodies (3 women and 13 men) that were found intact in November 1944, not 17, and an autopsy was performed on the bodies.

“The liberation” referred to in the above quote probably means the liberation of France in August 1944. The Natzweiler-Struthof camp was abandoned in September 1944 so it was not actually “liberated.”

Dr. Hans-Joachim Lang was able to identify the 86 Jews who were gassed at Natzweiler after locating their prisoner numbers in the Auschwitz archives. The 29 women and 57 men who were gassed had been deported to Auschwitz from Norway, Poland, Greece, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The bodies of the 86 victims are buried in the Jewish cemetery of Strasbourg and a grave stone with the 86 names was placed there in December 2005.

Dr. Lang has published a book with the names of the 86 Jews who were gassed at Natzweiler. His book can be purchased at this web site:

http://www.die-namen-der-nummern.de

Refusal to bake a gay wedding cake compared to the Holocaust

You can read about it in this news article: https://reason.com/volokh/2018/06/04/the-masterpiece-cakeshop-decision-leaves

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote

Do bakers have a First Amendment right to refuse to bake cakes for same-sex weddings, even if there’s a state law banning sexual orientation discrimination by such businesses?

Do they have a First Amendment right to refuse to bake such cakes that contain text or symbolism (e.g., rainbow striping) that the bakers disapprove of?

How about wedding photographers or videographers, who create products that (unlike most cakes) are traditionally seen as speech? How about calligraphers or graphic designers, who have an objection to personally writing or typing certain messages?

End quote

So how does not baking a cake compare to the Holocaust?

During the Holocaust, gay men were arrested and sent to concentration camps — for breaking the law, not for being gay.  It was against the law in Germany for men to engage in homosexual acts.

The story of Dachau, as told to tourists

My photo of a sculpture in the Dachau museum

You can read all about the museum at Dachau on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/KZDachau/DachauLife01B.html

It all started at Dachau, the first concentration camp in Germany .

The Auschwitz Album shows photos of the Jews who were gassed by the Nazis

You can see the Auschwitz Album photos at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOIHRQlQqwU

You can see a video of the liberators saving the Jews below:

The story of the Gypsies in the Holocaust

You can read about the Gypsies in the Holocaust at https://www.thoughtco.com/gypsies-and-the-holocaust-1779660

Photo of a  Gypsy wagon

A Short History of the Gypsies

Approximately a thousand years ago, several groups of people migrated from northern India, dispersing throughout Europe over the next several centuries.

Though these people were part of several tribes (the largest of which are the Sinti and Roma), the settled peoples called them by a collective name, “Gypsies” — which stems from the one-time belief that they had come from Egypt.

Nomadic, dark-skinned, non-Christian, speaking a foreign language (Romani), not tied to the land – the Gypsies were very different from the settled peoples of Europe. Misunderstandings of Gypsy culture created suspicions and fears, which in turn led to rampant speculations, stereotypes, and biased stories. Unfortunately, too many of these stereotypes and stories are still readily believed today.

Throughout the following centuries, non-Gypsies (Gaje) continually tried to either assimilate the Gypsies or kill them. Attempts to assimilate the Gypsies involved stealing their children and placing them with other families; giving them cattle and feed, expecting them to become farmers; outlawing their customs, language, and clothing as well as forcing them to attend school and church.

Decrees, laws, and mandates often allowed the killing of Gypsies. For instance, in 1725 King Frederick William I of Prussia ordered all Gypsies over 18 years of age to be hanged. A practice of “Gypsy hunting” was quite common – a game hunt very similar to fox hunting. Even as late as 1835, there was a Gypsy hunt in Jutland (Denmark) that “brought in a bag of over 260 men, women, and children.”¹

Though the Gypsies had undergone centuries of such persecution, it remained relatively random and sporadic until the twentieth century when the negative stereotypes became intrinsically molded into a racial identity, and the Gypsies were systematically slaughtered.

The Gypsies Under the Third Reich

The persecution of Gypsies began in the very beginning of the Third Reich – Gypsies were arrested and interned in concentration camps as well as sterilized under the July 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. In the beginning, Gypsies were not specifically named as a group that threatened the Aryan, German people. This was because, under Nazi racial ideology, Gypsies were Aryans.

Thus, the Nazis had a problem: how could they persecute a group enveloped in negative stereotypes but supposedly part of the Aryan, super race?

After much thinking, Nazi racial researchers found a “scientific” reason to persecute at least most of the Gypsies. They found their answer in Professor Hans F. K. Günther’s book Rassenkunde Europas (“Anthropology of Europe”) where he wrote:

The Gypsies have indeed retained some elements from their Nordic home, but they are descended from the lowest classes of the population in that region. In the course of their migrations, they have absorbed the blood of the surrounding peoples, and have thus become an Oriental, western-Asiatic racial mixture, with an addition of Indian, mid-Asiatic, and European strains. Their nomadic mode of living is a result of this mixture. The Gypsies will generally affect Europe as aliens. ²

With this belief, the Nazis needed to determine who was “pure” Gypsy and who was “mixed.” Thus, in 1936, the Nazis established the Racial Hygiene and Population Biology Research Unit, with Dr. Robert Ritter at its head, to study the Gypsy problem and to make recommendations for Nazi policy.

As with the Jews, the Nazis needed to determine who was to be considered a “Gypsy.” Dr. Ritter decided that someone could be considered a Gypsy if they had “one or two Gypsies among his grandparents” or if “two or more of his grandparents are part-Gypsies.”3 Kenrick and Puxon personally blame Dr. Ritter for the additional 18,000 German Gypsies that were killed because of this more inclusive designation, rather than if the same rules had been followed as were applied to Jews.4

To study Gypsies, Dr. Ritter, his assistant Eva Justin, and his research team visited the Gypsy concentration camps (Zigeunerlagers) and examined thousands of Gypsies – documenting, registering, interviewing, photographing, and finally categorizing them.

It was from this research that Dr. Ritter formulated that 90% of Gypsies were of mixed blood, thus dangerous.

Having established a “scientific” reason to persecute 90% of the Gypsies, the Nazis needed to decide what to do with the other 10% – the ones that were nomadic and appeared to have the least number of “Aryan” qualities. At times Himmler discussed letting the “pure” Gypsies roam relatively freely and also suggested a special reservation for them. Assumably as part of one of these possibilities, nine Gypsy representatives were selected in October 1942 and told to create lists of Sinti and Lalleri to be saved.

There must have been confusion within the Nazi leadership, for it seems that many wanted all Gypsies killed, with no exceptions, even if they were categorized as Aryan. On December 3, 1942, Martin Bormann wrote in a letter to Himmler:

. . . special treatment would mean a fundamental deviation from the simultaneous measures for fighting the Gypsy menace and would not be understood at all by the population and lower leaders of the party. Also the Führer would not agree to giving one section of the Gypsies their old freedom.5

Though the Nazis did not discover a “scientific” reason to kill the ten percent of Gypsies categorized as “pure,” there were no distinctions made when Gypsies were ordered to Auschwitz or deported to the other death camps.

By the end of the war, it is estimated that 250,000 to 500,000 Gypsies were murdered in the Porajmos – killing approximately three-fourths of the German Gypsies and half of the Austrian Gypsies.

So much happened to the Gypsies during the Third Reich, I created a timeline to help outline the process from “Aryan” to annihilation.

End of article.

Gypsies are shown in the photo below.

• 

The Gypsies who were murdered in the Holocaust

You can read about the fate of the Gypsies in the Holocaust here: https://www.thoughtco.com/gypsies-and-the-holocaust-1779660

The following quote is from the article above:

Begin quote

The Gypsies of Europe were registered, sterilized, ghettoized, and then deported to concentration and death camps by the Nazis. Approximately 250,000 to 500,000 Gypsies were murdered during the Holocaust – an event they call the Porajmos (the “Devouring”).

A Short History

Approximately a thousand years ago, several groups of people migrated from northern India, dispersing throughout Europe over the next several centuries.

Though these people were part of several tribes (the largest of which are the Sinti and Roma), the settled peoples called them by a collective name, “Gypsies” — which stems from the one-time belief that they had come from Egypt.

Nomadic, dark-skinned, non-Christian, speaking a foreign language (Romani), not tied to the land – the Gypsies were very different from the settled peoples of Europe. Misunderstandings of Gypsy culture created suspicions and fears, which in turn led to rampant speculations, stereotypes, and biased stories. Unfortunately, too many of these stereotypes and stories are still readily believed today.

Throughout the following centuries, non-Gypsies (Gaje) continually tried to either assimilate the Gypsies or kill them. Attempts to assimilate the Gypsies involved stealing their children and placing them with other families; giving them cattle and feed, expecting them to become farmers; outlawing their customs, language, and clothing as well as forcing them to attend school and church.

End quote

What was “The Holocaust?”

Beginners, who know nothing, can start with this website: http://www.projetaladin.org/holocaust/en/40-questions-40-answers/basic-questions-about-the-holocaust.html

The following quote is from the website cited above:

Begin quote

What does the term “Holocaust” mean?

The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. Gypsies, people with mental and physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons.

What does “Final Solution” refer to?

The term “Final Solution” refers to Germany’s plan to murder all the Jews of Europe. The term was used at the Wannsee Conference, which took place in Berlin on January 20, 1942, where German officials discussed its implementation. The Nazis used the term “Final Solution” to conceal the plan that, in its entirety, called for the murder of all European Jews by shooting, gassing and other means. Approximately six million Jewish men, women, and children (1.5 million children) were killed during the Holocaust — two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe before World War II.

How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust?

Between five and six million Jews – out of a Jewish population of nine million living in Europe – were killed during the Holocaust. It is impossible to know exactly how many people died as the deaths were comprised of thousands of different events over a period of more than four years. About half of the Jewish victims died in concentration camps or death camps such as Auschwitz. The other half died when Nazi soldiers marched into many large and small towns in Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union and other areas and murdered people by the dozens or by the hundreds.

End quote

You can read the official, kosher, version of the Holocaust on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/USHMM/Intro.html

You can also read about the Holocaust at https://www.thoughtco.com/holocaust-facts-1779663

“evil stands at the door and knocks”

The words in the title of my blog post today are the last words in this news article: http://chimes.biola.edu/story/2018/apr/25/holocaust-fades-americas-memory/

The article includes a photo of the Arbeit macht Frei gate — this is my photo of that gate

It is hard to get a photo of the gate into  the Auschwitz camp because when the gate opens, there is an endless march of tourists through the gate. I took the photo above just before the gate opened, but note that there are tourists who have entered before the gate officially opened. After I took the photo above, I also entered the camp before it was officially open. I wanted to take a few photos before thousands of people entered.

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote

Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp

Auschwitz was a network of concentration camps built and operated by Nazi Germany. However, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in particular, went on to become an extermination camp and a major site of the Nazis’ final solution to the Jewish question. Between early 1942 and late 1944, an estimated 1.3 million Jews were sent by transport trains and entered the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Written over the gate were the words “Arbeit macht frei,” or “work sets you free.” But those who entered would not be working long—1.1 million would leave through the chimney tops, gassed with hydrogen cyanide.

To put these numbers into perspective, Biola’s total Fall 2017 student enrollment was 6,172 students. Auschwitz-Birkenau gassed men, women and children at the rate of the entire Biola student population every four days for two years. Or, considering Anaheim, Calif.’s population of 336,265, it would be equivalent to erasing the population of Anaheim every eight months for two years.

When we reflect on the Holocaust, it is not enough to reflect on it as an episode in the remote past in remote lands. The Holocaust tore the heart of Western Civilization: it inspired a generation of soldiers to “pursue the ranks of the guilty to the uttermost ends of the earth,” and it eviscerated a Jewish generation. The Holocaust reminds us that no matter how far we have progressed or how much we have been blessed, evil stands at the door and knocks.

End quote

Everything you ever wanted to know about Sobibor

Sobibor is back in the news: https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/why-a-gory-holocaust-film-is-a-blockbuster-in-russia-1.6091467

The Sobibor Death Camp Memorial Site

Railroad Station at Sobibor, former camp location on the left

Photo Credit: Alan Collins

Sobibor was a death camp, built by the Nazis in March 1942 for the sole purpose of killing European Jews in gas chambers. An estimated 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor during a period of only 18 months, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The old train station at the village of Sobibor is shown on the right side of the photograph above; train service to Sobibor was discontinued in 1999. Also on the right side of the photo is the house where the Commandant of the camp formerly lived.

Franz Stangl was the first Commandant of the camp. Stangl had previously headed the euthanasia center at Hartheim Castle in Austria where physically and mentally disabled Germans were killed with carbon monoxide in a gas chamber. After six months at Sobibor, Stangl was transferred to the Treblinka death camp where he served as the Commandant.

A list of all the SS men who worked at Sobibor can be found on this web site.

The train tracks are barely visible on the left side of the photo above. A railroad spur line was built at Sobibor in order to take the train cars inside the camp. The location of the former camp is to the left, across from the station, in the photo above.

Entrance to the Memorial Site with the Museum in the background Photo Credit: Alan Collins

The plaques on the wall at the entrance have the same message in several different languages. The English version reads:

At this site, between the years 1942 and 1943, there existed a Nazi death camp where 250,000 Jews and approximately 1,000 Poles were murdered. On October 14, 1943, during the revolt by the Jewish prisoners the Nazis were overpowered and several hundred prisoners escaped to freedom. Following the revolt the death camp ceased to function. “Earth conceal not my blood” (Job)

Museum at the Memorial Site, built in 1993

Photo Credit: Alan Collins

Alan Collins, the photographer who took all of these photos, wrote the following about Sobibor:

This is one of the lesser known camps though there was a Hollywood film regarding the mass escape from it. It was a bit of a disappointment with 2 monuments next to each other and a third close by. The museum was small with not much of an exhibition. Whilst I was there a coach party arrived. It took them 5 minutes to walk to the monuments, 10 minutes to walk around them and take photographs, and 5 minutes to walk back to their coach. It took me just 10 minutes to walk slowly around the museum. Though the area is well tended I feel more of an effort could have been made considering tens of thousands of people were murdered there. The camp is open daily from 1st May to 14th October between 0900-1400.

The Sobibor camp was on the eastern edge of German-occupied Poland, five kilometers west of the Bug river. The Bug river was as far as trains from western Europe could go without changing the wheels to fit the train tracks in the Soviet Union, which were a different gauge.

On the other side of the Bug river from Sobibor was Ukraine, which had belonged to the Soviet Union until it was taken by the Germans shortly after their invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

The unsuspecting victims who arrived at Sobibor were told that they would be sent to work camps in Ukraine after they had taken a shower, but instead, the Jews were immediately killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

Sobibor was one of the three Aktion Reinhard camps which were set up following the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 when “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe” was planned. The head of Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard) was SS-Brigadeführer Odilio Globocnik, who had previously been the Gauleiter of Vienna, Austria.

Globocnik and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler both committed suicide after being captured by the British. [Or were they murdered by the British?]

The other two Aktion Reinhard camps were Belzec and Treblinka.

The first Commandant at Belzec was Christian Wirth, who was also the Inspector of the Aktion Reinhard camps. Belzec and Treblinka were also very near the Bug river which formed the eastern border between German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. Across the Bug river from Treblinka was Belorussia (White Russia) which is now called Belarus.

According to the figures given by the Nazis at the Wannsee Conference, there were approximately 5 million Jews in the Soviet Union in January 1942, including 2,994,684 in Ukraine and 446,484 in Belorussia. There were another 2,284,000 Jews in the area of German-occupied Poland known as the General Government. At the Conference, the Nazis claimed that they were planning to resettle some of the Jews who were living in the General Government into Ukraine, an area of the Soviet Union which Germany controlled at that time.

The Nazis claimed that the Aktion Reinhard camps were transit camps for the “evacuation of the Jews to the East,” a euphemism for the genocide of the Jews. Unlike the death camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek, the three Aktion Reinhard camps did not have ovens to cremate the bodies. The Jews were not registered upon arrival at the Aktion Reinhard camps and no death records were kept.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946, documents were introduced which showed an exchange of letters in 1943 between Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the head of all the concentration camps, and Richard Glücks, the Inspector of the Concentration Camps. In this letter, Glücks suggested that Sobibor  should be converted into a concentration camp.

In a letter dated 5 July 1943, Himmler rejected this idea. This indicates that Sobibor was not a concentration camp, but rather a place that was not part of the Nazi concentration camp system.

The three Aktion Reinhard camps were all in remote locations, but “each site was on a railroad line linking it with hundreds of towns and villages whose Jewish communities were now trapped and starving” in the spring of 1942, according to Martin Gilbert’s book entitled “The Holocaust.”

Sobibor was linked by rail with many large Jewish communities, including Lublin, Wlodawa and Chelm. Jews were also brought from the Theresienstadt ghetto, located in what is now the Czech Republic, and from the Netherlands, to [allegedly] be gassed at Sobibor.

The city of Lublin in eastern Poland was the headquarters of Aktion Reinhard. The clothing taken from the victims at the three Aktion Reinhard camps was sent to the Majdanek camp in Lublin to be disinfected with Zyklon-B before being shipped to Germany. There were no disinfection chambers for delousing the clothing at Sobibor.

Deportations to Sobibor began in mid April 1942 with transports from the town of Zamosc in Poland, according to Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert. The Jews from the Lublin ghetto were also sent to Sobibor to be gassed, although there were several gas chambers at Majdanek just outside the city of Lublin.

During the first phase of the extermination of the Jews at Sobibor, which lasted until July 1942, around 100,000 Jews were allegedly gassed to death. Their bodies were buried in mass graves, then dug up later and burned on pyres.

During the next phase, the bodies were burned immediately, according to Toivi Blatt, one of the few survivors of Sobibor. At the age of 15, Blatt had been selected to work in sorting the clothing in the camp.

Sobibor was initially divided into three camps (Lager 1, Lager II and Lager III) but a fourth camp was added later to store munitions captured from the Soviet Army.

Lager I was where the Jewish workers in the camp lived. A moat on one side of this camp prevented their escape. Lager II was where the victims undressed; Jewish workers sorted the clothing in this camp. The barracks for the German SS administrators of the camp were located in the Vorlager.

From Lager II, an SS man escorted the victims through a path lined with tree branches to the gas chambers in Lager III. Only the Ukrainian SS guards and the German SS officers were allowed in Lager III.

The Sobibor camp was 400 meters wide and 600 meters long; the entire area was enclosed by a barbed wire fence that was three meters high. On three sides of the camp was a mine field, intended to keep anyone from approaching the camp. The watch towers were manned by Ukrainian SS guards who had been conscripted from captured soldiers in the Soviet Army to assist the 30 German SS men who were the administrators of the camp.

In 1965, a German court put 11 of the German SS guards on trial; 6 of them were sentenced to prison, and one committed suicide during the trial; the others were acquitted.

The victims arrived on trains which stopped at the ramp across from the Sobibor station, or in trucks from nearby Polish villages. Most of the Jews were transported in cattle cars, but the 34,000 Dutch Jews who were sent to Sobibor arrived in passenger trains, according to Toivi Blatt. The luggage of the Dutch Jews was transported in separate cars and the victims were given tags which they were told would be used to reclaim their bags. All of the belongings of the Jews were confiscated upon arrival.

At the entrance to the camp, the victims were instructed to deposit their hand baggage and purses before proceeding along the path, called the “Himmelfahrtstrasse” (Street to heaven), which led to the spot where the hair was cut from the heads of the women, and then on to the gas chambers disguised as showers.

According to Toivi Blatt, all documents, photos and personal items were removed from the confiscated baggage and anything that could not be recycled to send to Germany was burned in open fires that lit up the night sky.

The photo below shows the spot in Camp III where a brick building with gas chambers once stood. A large block of stone represents the gas chambers in two buildings at Sobibor, which were torn down long ago. Survivors of Sobibor do not agree on the number or size of the gas chambers. The victims were killed with carbon monoxide from the exhaust of engines taken from captured Soviet tanks, which were stored in Camp IV. There is also disagreement on whether these were diesel engines or gasoline engines.

Two Monuments at the entrance, erected in 1965

Monument at the Entrance to former camp

Photo Credit: Alan Collins

The red stone sculpture shown in the photos above represents a woman, looking up at the sky, holding a small child in her arms. In the background can be seen the huge mound of ashes that is located in the former Camp III. These are the ashes of the Jews who were gassed and burned at Sobibor.

Sobibor Monument Photo Credit: Alan Collins

The photo above shows a huge mound of ashes and bone fragments surrounded by a stone wall. In front of the wall is a glass display case which contains a small amount of ashes and bone. There is also a display of ashes and bone fragments in the Museum at Sobibor.

The same procedure of first burying the bodies and then exhuming them for burning was also followed at the Belzec, Treblinka and Chelmno extermination camps.

In an attempt to destroy all the evidence, the ashes of the victims at Chelmno were hauled away secretly during the night by the SS men and taken to another town where they were dumped into a river. The ashes at Treblinka and Belzec were buried to destroy the evidence.

Only at Sobibor and Majdanek were the ashes of the victims left as incriminating evidence. There is a similar mound of ashes at the Memorial Site of the Majdanek death camp where, according to the most recent information given at the Museum, 78,000 people died including 59,000 Jews. Majdanek was both a death camp and a work camp.

Majdanek Mausoleum contains the ashes of victims beneath the dome Photo Credit: Simon Robertson

During World War II, and for years afterward, the Sobibor camp was virtually unknown. William Shirer did not even mention it in his monumental 1147-page book entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”

It was not until the release of a 1987 TV movie, “Escape from Sobibor,” based on a book with the same name, that the public knew of this remote spot where thousands of Jews lost their lives. The movie tells the story of the revolt during which around 300 prisoners escaped; no more than 50 of them survived to the end of the war.

According to an article in the Liverpool Daily Post, a prisoner named Leon Feldhendler had been formulating plans for an escape for many months but it wasn’t until the arrival in Sobibor of a transport of Soviet prisoners of war, among them Red Army Officer Alexander ‘Sasha’ Pechersky, that the plan of action really began to take shape.

Initially Feldhendler and his conspirators had thought of poisoning the camp guards and making their escape but the guards discovered the poison and shot 5 prisoners in reprisal. Another idea, to set fire to the camp and escape in the confusion, had to be abandoned when the Germans planted mines around the camp perimeter.

Feldhendler met with Pechersky and with the aid of another man, Solomon Leitman, who acted as the interpreter, became Pechersky’s main collaborator in the plot. With his military experience, the former Red Army Lieutenant quickly assumed the leadership of the escape plan.

The following quote about the Sobibor uprising on October 14, 1943 is from the Liver Pool Daily Post:

Pechersky successfully escaped into the woods, but about 80 prisoners were killed during the escape. 130 of the 550 prisoners at Sobibor at the time chose not to take part in the uprising remaining in the camp.11 SS Officers, and an unknown number of Camp Guards had been killed.

Of the escapees, 170 were later rounded up and executed, along with those that had remained in the camp and took no part in the uprising.

By this stage of the war the Allies still didn’t have the full picture of what Hitler’s concentration camps were about. Fearing the escapees would tell the story to the World, and as anxious to save his own neck as ever he was, within days of the escape Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp closed down, dismantled, and planted with trees to hide the evidence.

Pechersky survived the war, the undoubted ringleader and hero of the uprising was Portrayed by Rutger Hauer in the dramatised TV film version of the story ‘ Escape From Sobibor ‘ in 1987. He died in 1990.

Leon Feldhendler was shot and killed through the closed door of his flat in 1945.

53 Sobibor escapees survived the war.

End quote

One of the survivors of the escape from Sobibor was Esther Terner Raab, who made her home in New Jersey in the USA after the war. A theatrical production called “Dear Esther” is based on letters written to her by students who heard her speak at schools and colleges.

In a TV documentary, Esther told about a party that the SS had before the escape. The SS men told Esther that they were celebrating the fact that one million Jews had been killed at Sobibor. Unlike the other Nazi death camps, the SS barracks were located inside the Sobibor camp. According to Toivi Blatt, the Jewish workers in the camp socialized with each other and sometimes with the SS guards.

Another Sobibor survivor, Moshe Bahir, testified in 1965, at the trial of several of the Sobibor perpetrators in Hagen, Germany, that he was a witness to a celebration by the Germans in February 1943 after one million Jews had been killed at Sobibor. However, Raul Hilberg wrote in his book entitled “The Destruction of the European Jews” that the number of Jews killed at Sobibor was estimated to be 200,000.

The exact number of Jews who were murdered at Sobibor is unknown since the bodies were burned on pyres and the train records were destroyed. Estimates range from 170,000 to 250,000 deaths in the short time that Sobibor was in operation.

According to Dutch historian Johannes Houwink ten Cate, the transportation list of the Jews sent on 19 trains to Sobibor from the transit camp at Westerbork in the Netherlands contains the names and place of birth of the 34,000 Dutch Jews, but the names of the Jews sent from other countries to Sobibor are unknown. Approximately 33,000 Dutch Jews were killed in the gas chambers at Sobibor and 1,000 were chosen as workers at Sobibor, or to be sent to a nearby labor camp. Only 19 Dutch Jews survived.

In 1999, Jules Schelvis, the sole survivor of a transport of Dutch Jews from Westerbork on June 1, 1943, founded Stichting Sobibor. The foundation’s goal is to keep the memory of the Sobibor camp alive.

As of August 2008, Philip Bialowitz was one of the few survivors of the revolt at Sobibor in October 1943 who was still alive. By the time of his escape, an estimated 250,000 Jews, including most of Bialowitz’s family, had been murdered at Sobibor. After the revolt, the killing stopped at Sobibor, according to Bialowitz, who emigrated to America after the war.

In his book entitled “The Holocaust,” Martin Gilbert wrote about another survivor of Sobibor, Dov Freiberg, who was a 15-year-old boy on a transport of 2,750 Jews from the town of Torobin in Poland on May 12, 1942. The Jews were assembled in the town square and told that they were going to be “resettled in the Ukraine,” according to Freiberg. They were then taken to the nearest railroad station at Krasnowka, where they were joined by Jews from other nearby towns and villages. When their train arrived at the camp, the story of resettlement seemed to be coming true: a sign at the entrance to the camp said “SS Sonderkommando Umsiedlungslager.” which means “SS special unit resettlement camp” in English.

According to Freiberg, there was a band playing at the entrance. The women and children “went straight to the gas chambers,” but since the gas chamber “didn’t really operate in the night,” the men “stayed there on the spot during the night.” Freiberg was one of 150 Jews from this transport who “were sent to work” in the camp itself, sorting the belongings of the victims.

Martin Gilbert wrote that in the month of May 1942, there was a total of 36,000 Jews, from 19 communities between the Vistula river and the Bug river, who were transported to Sobibor and immediately killed in the gas chamber. This was the largest number of Jews gassed that month in any one camp, surpassing Auschwitz, Belzec and Chelmno. The Treblinka camp was not yet open at that time.

At the age of 15, Yaakov Biskowitz was sent on a transport of 3,400 Jews to Sobibor from the town of Hrubieszow in Poland on June 1, 1942. According to his testimony at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, Yaakov and his father were among 12 Jews who were selected to work in the Sobibor camp.

As told by Martin Gilbert in his book entitled “The Holocaust,” Biskowitz recalled how those who were too sick or too old to walk the length of the path to the gas chamber were taken to the so-called Lazarett (hospital) on a small rail spur used to carry coal. Men who could not run fast enough, and small children, would be thrown into the coal wagons and sent to the hospital where they would be shot by the Ukrainian guards.

According to Yaakov Biskowitz, as reported by Martin Gilbert, there were 8 Jews who were forced to work in Camp 3, burning the bodies of the victims who had been gassed. These 8 Jews also sorted the belongings and burned all damaged clothing, personal documents and photographs. Biskowitz testified at the Eichmann trial that his father was shot at the Lazarett (hospital) because he came down with typhoid. (The German word for typhoid is “spotted fever,” the same as the word for typhus; it is more likely that Biskowitz had typhus, which was a problem in the camps in Poland.)

On November 30, 2009, John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old alleged Ukrainian SS guard at Sobibor, was put on trial in a German court. Demjanjuk was convicted of the crime of being an accessory to the murder of around 27,900 Jews, based on 23 eye-witness accounts that he was one of the men who led the victims to the gas chambers at Sobibor. The eye-witnesses had given their testimony to interrogators of the Soviet Union many years ago and were all dead at the time of the trial.

Demjanjuk had been previously tried and convicted 20 years ago in an Israeli court after he was identified by eye witnesses as a Ukrainian guard nicknamed “Ivan the Terrible” at Treblinka. He spent 7 years in prison in Israel before he won the case on appeal.

Young girl leaped from a moving train on her way to the gas chamber

On my blog post today, I am commenting on this news article: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article210286509.html

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote

Rachel Black almost always writes [music] in a plaintive minor key, but the Lawrence singer knew that this personal piece — the true tale of the moment her great-grandmother forced her daughter to leap from a moving cattle car on the way to the gas chambers of the Holocaust — cried out to be written in a major key. To Black, 33, that’s the sound of bravery, hope and a mother’s sacrificial love.

“This song is very much about the strength of mothers,” Black said recently. She sat in the living room of the Americana Music Academy, 1419 Massachusetts St., where she is executive director. Her voice is clear, her long, straight hair the color of her name. “I’m here because of their strength.”

End quote

This reminds me of the old expression: “Throw mama from the train a kiss”. [It should be “Throw a kiss to mama from the train.”

Did the Nazis really tell the Jews that they were on a train that was headed to a gas chamber? I don’t think so.

Many years ago,I lived in Germany for 22 months while my husband was in the American Army there, and I talked with a lot of German people. My impression was that the German people were very, very intelligent and they were always careful not to make mistakes.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article210286509.html#storylink=cpy