Sobibór

was a World War II Nazi German extermination camp located on the outskirts of the village of Sobibór in occupied Poland within the semi-colonial territory of General Government. The camp was part of the secretive Operation Reinhard which marked the deadliest phase of the Holocaust in Poland. Its official German name was SS-Sonderkommando Sobibór. The camp was situated near the rural county’s only major town of Włodawa (called Wolzek by the Germans). Jews from Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union, as well as the Soviet prisoners of war, were transported to Sobibór by rail and suffocated in gas chambers fed by the exhaust of large petrol engines. Up to 200,000 people were murdered at Sobibór, and possibly more. During the postwar trial against the former SS personnel of Sobibór, held in Hagen, Professor Wolfgang Scheffler estimated the total figure of murdered Jews at a minimum of 250,000.

During a revolt of October 14, 1943, about 600 prisoners tried to escape; about half succeeded in crossing the fence, of whom around 50 evaded capture. Shortly after the revolt, the Germans closed the camp, bulldozed the earth and planted it over with pine trees to conceal its location. The site is occupied by the Sobibór Museum, which displays a pyramid of ashes and crushed bones of the victims, collected from the cremation pits thereafter.

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