Sobibor - Holocaust Propaganda And Reality - Unity of Nobility ...

18 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
Some 450 to 500 persons entered the chambers at a time. Everything
was done on the run, accompanied by shouts, beatings, and warning
shots. The victims were in a state of shock and did not grasp what
was happening to them. When the gas chambers were jammed full of
people, they were closed and sealed and the gas was piped in. Within
twenty to thirty minutes, everyone inside was dead.
The bodies were then removed from the gas chambers and buried,
after the gold teeth had been extracted from their mouths. The
whole procedure, from the arrival of the train to the burial of the
victims, took two to three hours. In the meantime the railway cars
were cleaned up, the train departed, and another twenty cars, with
their human load destined for extermination, entered the camp.
The first stage of the extermination operation went on for three
months, from the beginning of May to the end of July 1942. The Jews
who were brought to Sobibór during this period came from the Lublin
district in Poland, and from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Austria.
The latter - those from countries outside Poland - had first been
taken to ghettos in the Lublin district, and from there were deported
to Sobibór. Some 10,000 Jews were brought from Germany and Austria,
6,000 from Theresienstadt, and many thousands from Slovakia;
all in all, between 90,000 and 100,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibór
in this first stage. The transports came to a temporary halt at
the end of July, to enable the Lublin-Chem railway line to undergo
repairs.
In Sobibór’s first three months of operation, the Germans found
that the gas chambers, which had a total capacity of fewer than six
hundred persons, created a bottleneck in the murder program. The
halt in camp operations during August and September of 1942 was
therefore used to construct three more gas chambers. These were
put up next to the existing chambers under the same roof, with a
hallway separating the old chambers from the new. With a new capacity
of twelve hundred persons, the rate of extermination could be
doubled. At the end of August 1942, Stangl, the commandant of Sobibór,
was transferred to the Treblinka extermination camp, and his
place was taken by SS-Obersturmführer Franz Reichleitner.
Second Stage. By the beginning of October 1942, work on the
railway line was completed and the transports to Sobibór could be
renewed. Until early November, the arriving transports brought
more Jews from towns in the Lublin district; in the winter, following