Sobibor - The Layout of the Extermination Camp

Sobibor - The camp was divided into three to four sections; Lager I to IV.

Lager I included the administration and garrison area including the main gate entrance for the road-bound traffic and living quarters for the staff. Nearest the ramp and next to the Commandant's villa were the SS quarters, canteen and armoury. Directly behind the administration and garrison area prisoner's barracks were built, leading to the work area.

Lager II  included the railway platform, where the victims were taken off the trains, as well as barracks where vital services for both the killing process and the everyday operation of the camp were carried out by Jewish Sonderkommando. Lager II also contained the warehouses used for storing the items taken from the victims, including clothes, food articles, cut-off hair, gold, and all other valuables. This section also housed the main administration office.

At Lager II the Jews were prepared for their death. Here they undressed, women's hair was shaved, clothing was searched and sorted, and documents were destroyed in the nearby furnace. The victims' final steps were taken on a path surrounded by barbed wire. It was called the "Road to Heaven", or der Schlauch (the hose) and led directly to the gas chambers I Lager III.

Lager III is where the victims were killed in brick gas chamber with metal roofing.  It was in the northwestern part of the camp, where were only two ways to enter the camp, from Lager II. The camp staff and personnel entered through a small plain gate. The entrance for the victims descended immediately into the gas chambers and was decorated with flowers and a Star of David above the entrance to the gas chambers. In the Sobibór gas chambers 500 people were murdered at a time.

Copyright: W. Rutherford.Only recently, following an eight-year-long investigation, Polish and Israeli researchers have 'confirmed' the 'exact' location of the gas chambers at Sobibór (I shall briefly discuss the relevance of these findings later and I am sure it will become clear why I have hi-lighted the words confirmed and exact). The discovery of the remains of the building's foundations, unearthed in 2014, was confirmed by Tomasz Kranz, the director of Poland's Majdanek State Museum at Lublin. In May 2013, archaeologists conducting excavations near Camp III unearthed an escape tunnel, an open-air crematorium, human skeletal remains, as well as a substance that appeared to be blood, and the identification tag of a Jewish boy who was murdered in the camp.  Dr. Kranz also commented that "the whole former camp is one huge crime scene", with traceable evidence of the Holocaust present everywhere although the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp to be destroyed and the area planted with trees.