Section 81: Sobibór—A Temporary Camp Which Only Existed for 15 Months
Sobibór
was located on the outskirts of the town of Sobibór in the Lublin Voivodeship
of occupied Poland. The Sobibór camp was, like Belzec, selected for its
locality to the labor camps of Lublin.
Construction
of the camp was completed in April 1942, and, according to Holocaust “expert,”
Raul Hilberg, a diesel engine was installed by the same people who built the
“gas chambers” at Belzec to run a killing center very similar in design to that
of Belzec (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Holmes &
Meier, 1961 p. 229.).
Hilberg
based his claim of a diesel engine on “survivor accounts,” but it is
significant to note that other Holocaust “experts” have claimed that it was a
gasoline engine.
This
claim has most probably emerged after the problems inherent in diesel gassing
methods were realized by the Holocaust storytellers. As a result, considerable
debate still persists amongst “official” Holocaust historians over this point,
and it has never been finally settled.
It is
claimed that the first mass gassing took place in Sobibór in May 1942, and that
the operation was so successful that a “new” set of “gas chambers,” modeled
exactly on Belzec, were built in September 1942. The camp ceased operation in
October 1943, which meant that it was only operational for 15 months.
Once
again, just like Belzec, the shortness of its lifespan militates strongly
against the idea of a “killing center” and in favor of it being a transit and
dispersal camp to the surrounding factories and resettlement areas.
Section 82: Chlorine and Electricity: “Survivors” Claim Bizarre Execution Methods in Sobibór
Despite
the “official” version of the gassing procedure being one of carbon monoxide poisoning
in gas chambers, a number of “survivor eyewitnesses” have alleged that chlorine
was used to kill prisoners at Sobibór. “Survivor” witness Hella
Fellenbaum-Weiss explained how Jews on their way to Sobibór were gassed with
chlorine: “The arrival of another convoy distressed me in the same way. It was
thought to come from Lvov, but nobody knows for sure. Prisoners were sobbing
and told us a dreadful tale: they had been gassed on the way with chlorine, but
some survived. The bodies of the dead were green and their skin peeled off”(
Miriam Novitch, ed., Sobibór: Martyrdom
and Revolt, Holocaust Library, 1980, p. 50.).
Another
“survivor eyewitness,” Zelda Metz claimed that the “victims” entered the
“wooden building where the women’s hair was cut, and then were asphyxiated with
chlorine. After 15 minutes, they had all suffocated. Through a window it was
checked whether they were all dead. Then the floor opened automatically. The
corpses fell into the cars of a train passing through the gas chamber and taking
the corpses to the oven” (Testimony of Zelda Metz, in N. Blumental, ed., Dokumenty i materialy, vol. I, Lódz
1946, p. 210).
“Survivor”
Leon Feldhendler also claimed that chlorine was the “death-gas” (N. Blumental,
ed., op. cit. note 2, p. 204). Yet
another “survivor eyewitness,” Alexander Pechersky alleged that some type of
“heavy, black substance” was the death-gas (A. Pechersky, The Sobibór Revolt, State Edition Der Emes, Moscow 1946, in Yuri
Suhl, Edessi si ribellarono. Storia della
resistenza ebraica contro il nazismo, Milan, 1969, p. 31).
One
Sobibór “witness” claimed the Jews were killed with electricity and gas (Jules
Schelvis, Sobibór: A History of a Nazi
Death Camp, Berg, 2007, p. 215). Finally, some other witnesses claimed that
Zyklon-B gas was used.
The
mainstream historians of Sobibór have abandoned the “chlorine death gas” and
“trap-door-in-the-gas-chamber” stories—once again, an implicit concession that
they are both false.
The
contradictory nature of the “eyewitness” accounts of the method of execution
has never been sorted out, and is unlikely to be so.
The
most obvious reason for the widely differing “witness” accounts is that they
were probably never actually witnesses, but were merely repeating rumor and
hearsay, a common enough event which plagues the entire Holocaust story.
Section 83: Yitzhak Arad’s Contradictory Official History of Sobibór
The
most widely quoted “official” history of Sobibór is Israeli historian Yitzhak
Arad’s Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka: The
Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Indiana University Press, 1987).

In this
book, Arad republished a large part of the “Kurt Gerstein document” (dealt with
elsewhere in this work), which specifically claims that a diesel engine was
used at Sobibór as a gassing instrument.
On page
101 of his book, Arad quotes Gerstein as being told by SS and Police Leader
Odilo Globocnik that his duty was to “improve the service of our gas chambers,
which function on diesel engine exhaust.”
Arad’s
book then however goes on to quote the (equally dubious) testimony of a former
SS soldier Erich Fuchs, who claimed to have operated the engine that Gerstein
supplied—except that he identified the machine as a “heavy Russian benzene
engine (presumably a tank or tractor motor) at least 200 horsepower (V-motor, 8
cylinder, water cooled).”
Not
even the official book on Sobibór can decide for sure if a diesel or benzene
engine was supposedly used at Sobibór.
Arad
also differed with a number of other accounts on the size and number of the
“gas chambers” at Sobibór, as no one, not Jewish “witnesses” or German
“confessors” can agree on the exact nature or functioning of the execution
facility.
This
complete lack of uniformity rings alarm bells as to the overall accuracy of the
story, as well it should.
The
“witnesses” also disagree with each other on every other major issue about the
camp. Some say that the bodies were removed from the “gas chambers” by drop
trapdoors, while others say they were manually removed.
Some
say the bodies were taken away on narrow gauge train lines, while others say
they were carried away manually or by cart.
The
“witnesses” all disagree on how the bodies were burned, with some saying that
kerosene was used, while others say coal and yet more say wood. Finally, one of
the most improbable “witnesses” of all alleges that hammers were used to crush
bones on the ground. The incredible nature of that allegation becomes more
breathtaking when it is considered that the official account claims that at
least 200,000 people were killed at Sobibór.
Teeth
and bones do not burn completely, even in conventional crematoria, much less in
an open fire. To think that the teeth and bones of 200,000 people could be
pulverized by hand-held hammers beggars belief—because it is simply
unbelievable.
Below: Excavations at the Sobibór site
were carried out by Polish and Israeli experts in 2009. They failed to find any
trace of “gas chambers.”

Section 84: Official Documents Show Sobibór’s True Function
Fortunately,
a few secret documents have survived which explain the camp’s function. On July
5, 1943, SS chief Heinrich Himmler sent a personal directive to several top SS
leaders. In this directive, Himmler ordered the “Sobibór transit camp in the
Lublin District to be transformed into a concentration camp. A center for
dismantling captured ammunition is to be established in the concentration
camp.” Note the use of the words “transit camp”—this order was issued at the
same time that Sobibór was supposedly already functioning as an “extermination
camp.” Himmler’s direct reference to Sobibór as a “transit camp” and its
request to be turned into a “concentration camp” clearly shows its function at
that time.
This
was confirmed in a letter dated July 15, 1943 from the head of the SS
concentration camp system, Oswald Pohl, back to Himmler which said that a
center for dismantling captured Soviet ammunition could be set up at Sobibór
without having to transform it into a concentration camp. Sobibór could, Pohl
wrote, remain a “transit camp with a special section for dismantling
ammunition.”
This
correspondence, entered in the Nuremberg trial records as document file NO-
482, clearly shows that neither Himmler nor Pohl regarded Sobibór as an
“extermination center.”
In
fact, the only documentation which exists at all alleging that Sobibór was an
“extermination camp” is the notorious “Gerstein Statement.”
Suffice
to say here, the Gerstein statement, made after the war, contains absurd
allegations about the Reinhard camps, including the claim that the Nazis gassed
25 million people and that 700–800 victims were crammed into gas chambers 25
meters square (in which case they would have died from suffocation first). It
also describes a visit by Hitler to an extermination camp which even the
“official” Holocaust historians admit ever took place.
Section 85: The Sobibór Trials
It took
until 1965 for the commandant of the forced labor camp at Sobibór, Karl
Frenzel, to be arrested and put on trial in Germany for his work at the camp.
Like
all similar trials, his only real option was not to say that murders had not
taken place, but rather to deny any involvement with them.
He was
in fact in charge of organizing the labor sections of the camp—a fact which
once again reinforces the original purpose of the camp.
Despite
his denials and the total lack of any other evidence, Frenzel was convicted of
46 counts of murder and “participation in a further 250,000 counts of murder”
(that was the number of victims claimed in the 1960s. That figure has been
reduced in the official versions since then). He was released in 1982 and died
in 1996.
Another
of the accused, Kurt Bolender, had been in charge of the guards at Sobibór, but
was accused of “running” the “gas chambers.” He was arrested in 1961 and when
he finally appeared in court four years later, admitted to being at Sobibór but
denied gassing anyone. He committed suicide before the end of the trial.
SS-Unterscharführer Erich
Fuchs was accused of building the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibór, and
Treblinka. Despite the enormity of this alleged crime (and Fuchs’s compliant
statements), Fuchs was sentenced to only four years in prison, being found
guilty only of what the court described as “experimental gassings” in which, it
was claimed, some 3,000 Russian prisoners were killed.
Franz
Stangl, who for a while was chief commandant of Sobibór and later of Treblinka,
escaped to Syria and then to Brazil after the war. He was arrested in Brazil in
1967 and sent back to West Germany for trial.
At his
first hearing at the West German court, Stangl freely admitted to being
commandant at Sobibór and Treblinka, but denied outright that he had anything
to do with the mass killing of Jews. His task, he said, had been solely to
supervise the collection and shipment of valuables brought into the camp by the
victims—a job which was indeed the entire original purpose of Aktion Reinhard.
Despite his protestations, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and died in
prison shortly afterwards under mysterious circumstances, conveniently only a
few hours after allegedly giving a “full interview” to Jewish journalist Gitty
Sereny. The bizarre details of this interview are discussed below under the
Treblinka section.
The
deputy commander of the Sobibór, Gustav Franz Wagner, was arrested in 1978 in
Brazil under an extradition order from West Germany. Wagner declared that there
was no truth to the “extermination” story and that Sobibór had only been a work
camp. The evidence he presented was conclusive, and the extradition appeal was
turned down. Wagner was released and went home—but was murdered on his farm a
few months later, knifed in the chest, another “convenient” end to an SS man
who denied the extermination claims.
Section 86: Archaeological Digs Fail To Find Sobibór “Gas Chamber”
Archaeological
digs at the Sobibór site were carried out in 2001 by a team directed by Andrzej
Kola, who had earlier excavated Chelmno. Kola’s dig found a number of burial
sites and a building which he called “E” and took to be the “undressing room”
where the clothes and belongings of inmates were supposedly stored (“Gilead, I
and others, Excavating Nazi Extermination Centers,” Present Pasts, Vol. 1, 2009).
Below: The foundations unearthed at
Sobibór in September 2014: an irregular-shaped building with a number of rooms
of different sizes, completely contradictory to the official Holocaust
Storyteller narrative of “four square meter chambers.” The irregular size of
the rooms is clearly visible in this photograph.

A
second excavation, carried out in October 2007 by Isaac Gilead and Yoram Haimi
from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel, and Wojciech
Mazurek from the Archaeological Division, Chelm, Poland, recovered about 1,000
artifacts which the archaeologists reported did “not seem to be associated with
gas chambers.”The
report was unable to identify any structure which could have been a “gas
chamber,” and ended its section on Sobibór with the sentence: “It is obvious
that the location of the gas chambers is a complex issue that has to be solved,
an important objective for future archaeological research at Sobibór.”
Once
again, the archaeological evidence simply does not back up the “extermination
claim.”
Section 87: 2014 Archaeological Dig Contradicts Earlier “Gas Chamber” Claims
In
September 2014, it was announced that Haimi and his team had discovered the
concrete foundations to a building previously covered up by post-war asphalt in
the immediate vicinity of a monument at the Sobibór site.
Despite
extensive media coverage of the find—and Haimi’s claims that these were the “gas
chambers” of Sobibór, there is in reality no evidence that the unearthed
foundations are anything else but a building at the camp.
In
fact, the unearthing of the foundations created more problems for the Holocaust
Storytellers’ narrative than anything else.
Previously,
it had been claimed that there were three, four, or six “gas chambers” at
Sobibór—but the September 2014 “discovery” announced that there were now
“apparently” eight “gas chambers”—this based purely on the number of rooms
unearthed in the foundations.
Photographs
of the 2014 excavation results shows an irregular-shaped building with at least
seven differing sized rooms, as can be seen in the image below, released by the
researchers.
This
layout completely contradicts all previous narratives of the Sobibór “gas
chambers”, which all claimed that the execution chambers worked with a two-door
system and floor extensions on either side of the building. These “gas
chambers” were, according to the “old” narrative, all the same size (four
meters square). On the one side of the “gas chambers,” the Holocaust
Storytellers claim, there was a ramp type affair used by the supposed victims
to enter the “gas chambers” and, on the other side were supposedly larger doors
through which the bodies were removed. As can be seen, the unearthed
foundations bear no resemblance to this narrative.
The
total lack of any confirming evidence was highlighted by media reports which
were careful enough to put in their coverage that the archaeological team had
unearthed what they “thought” were the “gas chambers.”
For
example, the Israeli Haaretz
newspaper quoted Haimi as specifically saying that the unearthed foundations
“apparently” served as gas chambers: “We have finally found the building that
apparently served as the gas chambers,” said Israeli archaeologist Yoram Haimi,
who has been coordinating excavations at the site for the past eight years”
(“Archaeologists uncover remnants of Sobibór gas chambers”, Haaretz, Sept. 17, 2014).
Israel’s
Ynet News also quoted Haimi as saying
only that he “believed” he had uncovered the gas chambers: “Up until now, we’ve
been waiting for the asphalt to be removed for the construction of the new
visitors center, and as soon as it was removed we found this big structure,
that we believe housed the Sobibór camp’s gas chambers” (“Sobibór’s last
survivor: There was no time to fear, only to live”, Ynet News, 09.18.14).
In its
coverage, the Reuters news agency also pointed out that the archaeologists
“believed” they had found the “gas chambers”: “Archaeologists excavated beneath
the road and found lines of bricks, laid four deep, where they believe the
walls of the gas chambers used to stand” (“Archaeologists uncover buried gas
chambers at Sobibór death camp”, Reuters,
Sep. 18, 2014).
The
same Reuters article then produced another example of how the Holocaust
narrative continually changes: it stated that prisoners were killed in “fifteen
minutes with carbon monoxide gas,” and—incredibly—that the Germans kept geese
to hide the screams of the dying from other prisoners.
The
structure of the unearthed foundations—in a place where no-one disputes that
there were buildings in the first place—is therefore totally at variance with
the “murder facility” claims.
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