Edinburgh, Monday, November 26, 2001
Mass Graves Confirm Sobibor Holocaust
Allan Hall
In Berlin
POLISH archaeologists have found mass graves at the Sobibor extermination camp -- damning evidence that gives the lie to Holocaust deniers.
Sobibor, one of the four main extermination camps of the Nazi regime, was evacuated and destroyed on the orders of the SS chief Heinrich Himmler in October 1943, after an uprising by inmates.
The British Holocaust denier David Irving claimed during his libel trial -- which he lost last year -- that he had never heard of the camp. In an exchange with a lawyer, he was asked about the existence of Nazi death camps in Poland and said: "Treblinka I am becoming uncertain about. Sobibor I know nothing of." [Website comment: See transcripts, page 242, day 2, Jan 12, 2000]
Like the three other extermination centres -- Belzec, Treblinka and Chelmno -- Sobibor was situated deep in Poland where an efficient rail network married to remote areas gave the Nazis the perfect means to build their human abattoirs. Sobibor was grassed over and reforested after the SS pulled out and has only recently been under forensic examination.
The discoveries of the seven mass graves will provide invaluable material for Holocaust academics about the numbers who died there.
According to official Polish accounts, 250,000 people were killed in Sobibor, which was opened in May 1942 and lies close to the eastern border with Ukraine. Most victims were from the Warsaw ghetto and died within hours of arriving there, although there was an adjacent work camp holding Russian prisoners of war.
The detainees were told they were going to be deloused and were led to the "showers." These were in fact gas chambers linked up to the exhaust systems of large diesel engines of the sort used in U-boats: it was a crude method of extermination; the victims, many of them children, often took up to 30 minutes to die.
"We uncovered seven mass graves with an average depth of 15ft. In them there were charred human remains and under them remains in a state of decay. That means that in the final stage the victims were burned," said Andrzej Kola, an archaeologist. He said the largest grave measured 210ft by 75ft, the others 60ft by 75ft.
"We also found a hospital barracks. The people there were probably shot, as we found over 1,800 machine gun cartridges," Mr Kola said. "In the woods we found remnants of barbed wire, which enabled us to reconstruct the boundary of the camp."
Just 52 people survived Sobibor from the thousands sent there. Among them were some of the 300 who broke out of the camp on 14 October, 1943. Eighty were caught soon after escaping, but a handful survived the war...
