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

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 281
man and Ukrainian camp personnel near a hollow not far from the
camp road.”
This would mean that the people who would have corresponded best
to the category of euthanasia victims were not led to the gas chambers
in the Aktion Reinhardt camps but taken to a fake “sick-bay” and shot.
There is no sensible motive for such a procedure. From all traditional
points of view, these people would have constituted a group of victims
whose fate would not even have had to be discussed in any way. The
only open question could have possibly been whether they should be
given a gas chamber of their own, all the more so as Himmler, who had
been disgusted by the shooting of the Jews, is said to have ordered Artur
Nebe, the head of Einsatzgruppe C, in August of 1941 to devise a
more humane system of killing. Eventually, this effort is said to have
resulted in the invention of the “gas wagons,” 852 alleged gas chambers
like those at Sobibór but mobile rather than stationary.
In conclusion we can say that, even if Brack’s “gassing devices”
were perfectly documented, the detachment of the staff of the euthanasia
program to the Aktion Reinhardt camps would not necessarily demonstrate
that these camps were sites of mass exterminations.
8.6. Himmler’s Cremation Order
Mainstream Holocaust historiography postulates another basic order
which is, however, no less elusive than the Führerbefehl: Himmler’s
order to disinter and cremate the corpses in the Aktion Reinhardt camps.
As we have seen in chapter 2.5., it is certain that Himmler paid a brief
visit to Sobibór on 19 July 1942. He arrived there after a visit to
Auschwitz (17 and 18 July), about which Franciszek Piper asserts: 853
“It cannot be ruled out that his observations resulted in the decision
to cremate the bodies instead of burying them. In fact, shortly
after Himmler’s visit, Standartenführer Paul Blobel of Eichmann’s
office arrived at Auschwitz with orders to exhume all the buried bo-
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M. Beer, “Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden,” in: Vierteljahrshefte
für Zeitgeschichte, 35(3), 1987, p. 407.
F. Piper, “Gas Chambers and Crematoria,” in: Yisrael Gutman, Michael Berenbaum
(eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis
1994, p. 163.