Newsgroups: alt.revisionism Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Sobibor: the Summer of '42 Reply-To: kmcvay@nizkor.almanac.bc.ca Followup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA Keywords: Sobibor Archive/File: holocaust/poland/reinhard/sobibor sobibor.07 Last-modified: 1993/03/24 During the summer of 1942 "...trains hauled prefab houses and barracks and building materials to Sobibor, and the Nazis expanded the camp into a little city with four boroughs. In the Officers' Compound next to the main gate and parallel to the railroad, the Germans threw up living quarters for thirty-five SS men and barracks for two hundred guards, a laundry and barbershop, kitchen, bakery, canteen, garage and armory, and a jail for Ukrainians. On the south side of Sobibor, far from the main gate, the Nazis built Camp I, where all the Jews slept and some worked. A Ukrainian guarded the only gate into Camp I, in the northeast corner, and it was shut at night with a padlock and chain. To make Camp I even more escape-proof, the Nazis erected two more barbed-wire fences around it. On the edges of Camp I sat buildings of all sizes: a mechanic and blacksmith barracks, two tailor shops and shoe shops -- one for the SS and one for the Ukrainians -- a kitchen, a paint and carpenter shop where Jews built furniture for the new German and Ukrainian quarters, and barracks for the Jews to sleep in. To make the `processing' of new Jews even more efficient, the Germans expanded Camp II, at the center of Sobibor. Wooden barracks in which to store clothes, linens, shoes, and household goods they stole from the Jews; open sheds in which to sort and bundle them; a barracks for ironing clothes; an Administration Building with a room for the diamonds, gold, and silver they took, and vegetable gardens, stables, pigsties, chicken coops, and rabbit pens. In the northwest corner of Sobibor, Camp III, the Nazis doubled the gas chambers, to six. They could hold between five hundred and six hundred Jews at a time, enabling the Nazis to process a large transport in a few hours. To clean out the gas chambers and bury the corpses, the Nazis kept a work force of a hundred Jews, who ... slept in the barracks next to the `showers' and the shed where Jewish dentists chiseled gold from teeth. To make Sobibor run still more smoothly, the Nazis built a high-powered generator that provided enough light so that they could gas Jews at night, and a small train with dump cars like those used to haul coal in the mines south of Krakow. The train tracks began at the unloading platform in front of the Officers' Compound, stretched into Camp II past the warehouses where the sorted clothes were stored, along the sorting sheds, parallel with the tube leading to Camp III, to the rear of the gas chambers, and then to the mass graves. The miners' train toted suitcases from the boxcars to the sorting sheds, bundles of clothes from the warehouses to the empty cars sitting on the spur inside the camp, wood to Camp III, and corpses from the gas chambers to the burial pits. Excerpted from:-------------------------------------------------------------- Rashke, Richard. Escape From Sobibor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982) 51-52
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