Sobibór uprising

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The Sobibór uprising of around 600 prisoners took place on October 14, 1943 in the German extermination camp Sobibor in occupied Poland . It was the second, in some cases successful, uprising against the SS by the Jewish prisoners in an extermination camp after the Treblinka uprising . In the Sobibór extermination camp, the SS had up to 250,000 Jews gassed . Most of the victims came from Poland, around 33,000 from the Netherlands and a few thousand from Germany. After this uprising, the SS stopped using the extermination camp, but leveled it. To cover up the crimes, an unsuspicious looking farm was set up on the camp site and a forest was planted.

Sign of the Sobibór marshalling yard (2007)

Planning

There were attempts by inmates to escape from the Sobibór extermination camp, some of which were successful, before the uprising. Among the 47 survivors of the camp known by name were five men from the "forest command" who escaped during an earlier attempt to escape. Every attempt to escape resulted in the arbitrary shooting of prisoners as a measure of repression. In June 1943, a mine belt was laid around the camp to prevent escapes . Only at the main gate in front of the parade ground of the camp I were no mines, because the SS men's did not want to endanger themselves.

Resistance group

When fewer transports of Jews arrived in Sobibór in the spring of 1943, the prisoners realized that closing the camp would also mean their death, and a resistance group of ten to twelve people was founded under the leadership of Leon Feldhendler . There were plans to poison the SS personnel, set the camp on fire or dig several escape tunnels. The prisoners in Camp III began building an escape tunnel in the summer of 1943. When this was betrayed, the SS shot all the prisoners in this camp.

On September 23, a group of 80 Soviet prisoners of war arrived at the camp on a transport of 2,000 Jews , including Alexander Pechersky , a lieutenant in the Red Army . The combat experienced and tactically trained soldiers were able to plan actions militarily precisely and to carry them out in a disciplined manner. Feldhendler and Pecherski contacted each other and formed an underground committee made up of four prisoners of war and four of Feldhendler's men. The committee met continuously, exchanged information and drafted escape plans. An initially planned mass escape through a tunnel had to be abandoned due to the high groundwater level and the location of the mines. Thereupon Pechersky suggested luring SS men into locally different ambushes under the pretext of issuing special clothing and shoes for the women of the SS within a period of one hour before the mass escape and killing them silently. In order to cover up their disappearance, some of the prisoners of war were asked to wear SS uniforms.

The carpenters in Camp IV had axes, hammers and carpenters tools for their work. The men in the forge had made knives from sheet iron. The Soviet soldiers who were experienced in handling weapons were to receive the pistols of the SS men who were killed.

Planned process

To ensure secrecy, only 30 to 40 prisoners were privy to the plans, who in turn were to form combat groups. October 13 or 14, 1943, was set as the day for the escape, as the prisoners knew that the camp commandant, SS- Hauptsturmführer Franz Reichleitner , SS-Oberscharführer Gustav Wagner , who was considered to be particularly dangerous and brutal, and other SS men were not in the camp Would be camp. SS Oberscharführer Karl Frenzel , who was considered the most brutal SS man in the camp, was supposed to be lured into the carpenter's barrack on the day of the uprising and stabbed by Semjon Rosenfeld .

The start of the action was planned for 4 p.m., the escape from 5 p.m. The telephone connection to the outside should be cut at the beginning of the uprising. After the SS men had been switched off, the prisoners were supposed to line up on roll call square as usual at 5 p.m. The prisoners who were not informed about the plan were to be instructed there. Then the camp inmates were to march in closed rows to the main gate, where there were no mines. Soviet soldiers in SS uniform were supposed to accompany the marching prisoners as camouflage and give them German orders. The nearby forest offered cover and first hiding places in the falling darkness. If the way through the main gate was not possible, stones should be used to detonate the mines in order to create an alternative escape route. In this case, the Soviet prisoners of war wanted to open the wire fence with pliers and use the captured weapons to defend themselves against the remaining SS men and guards. The inmates distributed money and valuables among themselves for their escape.

The camp guard consisted of around 25 to 30 German SS members, 18 of whom were always present at the same time, and around 90 to 120 Ukrainian guards, the so-called Trawniki men . Their behavior was the greatest uncertainty factor in the plan. The committee hoped that the Trawniki guards would not become suspicious if the Soviet soldiers dressed in SS uniforms gave orders in German to the marching camp inmates.

The mass escape was originally planned for October 13th. Since an SS crew from another camp unexpectedly found themselves in the Sobibór extermination camp that day, the action had to be postponed for a day.

revolt

Memorial in the camp (2007)

At 4 p.m. on October 14, 1943, the uprising began as planned. He was led by Pechersky in Camp I and field traders in Camp II.

Elimination of the SS

As planned, the SS men were silently killed. The SS-Unterscharfuhrer Josef Wolf was killed by an ax while trying on a leather coat in the sorting barracks, the 17-year-old Yehuda Lerner and Arkadij Wajspapir killed the commander of the Ukrainians, Siegfried Graetschus , and the Ukrainian guard Rai Klatt with axes. SS-Untersturmführer Johann Niemann , the deputy camp commandant, was struck down by two ax blows while trying on a leather jacket. With Niemann and Graetschus, the decisive SS officers who were in command of the camp on October 14, 1943, were eliminated. Stanisław Szmajzner took three rifles from the armory. The telephone connections to the outside were cut.

SS man Werner Dubois was shot and seriously injured by an ax. Camp inmate Chaim Engel and Kapo Pożyczki stabbed the administrators of Camp II, SS-Oberscharführer Rudolf Beckmann and SS-Scharführer Thomas Steffel . SS-Scharführer Fritz Konrad and Josef Vallaster were killed in the cloth- making shop , SS-Scharführer Friedrich Gaulstich was killed with an ax in the carpenter's workshop by Schlomo Lajtman . SS man Walter Ryba died in the garage. In addition, SS men Nowak, Max Bree and Ernst Stengelin were killed by the prisoners. That meant that twelve SS men from the guard were dead and Dubois was critically injured; another twelve of the total of 29 SS men who were part of the guards at the time of the uprising were not present that day. Two Trawniki men were also killed: an unknown Ukrainian security guard and Klatt (the only Trawniki man who did not beat the inmates of the Sobibór extermination camp).

Escape

Frenzel did not appear at the meeting point and SS- Unterscharfuhrer Walter Ryba met an insurgent prisoner who stabbed him to death in an unplanned way. This threatened the danger that the murdered person and thus the uprising would be discovered. Pechersky then decided to give the signal for evening roll call ten minutes early, which caused unrest among the prisoners. They were irritated because the signal came too early and Frenzel, who was responsible for the roll calls, did not appear. A Ukrainian wanted to bring order to the ranks of the prisoners who stood and was killed as a result. When SS-Oberscharführer Erich Bauer arrived in a truck, he found that a dead security guard was lying on the floor between the prisoners and immediately shot them with a pistol. Panic then broke out and the approximately 600 prisoners fled without coordination. The Ukrainian guards began firing from the watchtowers and Frenzel fired a machine gun at the inmates. 60 prisoners from Camp IV were held back by the guards on their way to the roll call area because of the gunfire, arrested and shot during the night.

In their desperate attempts to get over the barbed wire fence and the mine fields, the escaping prisoners got caught in the hail of bullets from the guards, got caught in the wire fence and stepped on mines. Around 365 people initially managed to escape from the extermination camp, but only 200 made it to the nearby forest edge. About 150 prisoners remained in the camp.

After the uprising

It was only around 8 p.m. that Bauer and Frenzel succeeded in re-establishing the telephone connections and summoning reinforcements. All the prisoners who remained in the camp were murdered by the SS. Those who had reached the forest were later followed by 400 to 500 SS men and Ukrainian guards who killed around 100 fugitives in the process. The surviving prisoners joined the partisans or went into hiding.

The SS members who were killed were buried with military honors in the Chełmer military cemetery. The Sobibor camp was abandoned and razed to the ground. A harmless looking farm and a reforested young forest were supposed to cover up the crimes on the former site of the extermination camp.

At the end of the war, 47 of the former inmates of the Sobibor extermination camp were still alive, including 8 women. At least 42 of the refugees were survivors of the uprising, four or five more had already fled from the "Forest Command" on July 27, 1943. The survivor Jules Schelvis later wrote: "Without the uprising [of Sobibór] there would have been no survivors who could have testified to the mass murder."

The Sobibor trial in the mid-1960s was a trial against 12 former SS members of the Sobibor extermination camp before the Hagen district court. It was preceded by two Sobibor trials that took place in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main in 1950. Trials for the crimes in Sobibor continued in the 1970s and 1980s.

On October 14, 2013, the 70th anniversary of the uprising, survivors from Sobibor, including Thomas Blatt and Philip Bialowitz , relatives, politicians, young people and clergymen , commemorated the victims of Sobibor. Gabriele Lesser criticized in the Jüdische Allgemeine that the Federal Republic of Germany has not yet contributed to the costs of the redesign of the memorials. Poland's Vice Minister for Culture and National Heritage, Piotr Zuchowski, told the newspaper: "We do not expect the Germans, who at least built these death factories on Poland's soil, to bear all the costs for the memorials, but some of them." He will send an official request to Berlin, "because our German partners want it that way". The German Minister of State Cornelia Pieper , who is responsible for relations with Poland, stated that the Polish State Secretary Władysław Bartoszewski had made it clear to the German Ambassador in Poland a few days earlier that “we are still not expecting any support from Germany for Sobibor, but he has noted that we are still ready to support this project ”.

The Jewish Museum in Moscow commemorates the extermination camp and the uprising there with the participation of Soviet soldiers.

Semjon Rosenfeld died on June 3, 2019 at the age of 96 in a hospital in Israel. He was the last survivor involved in the uprising.

See also

Movies

Spellings

Sobibór is the Polish spelling of the name of a nearby village, after which the SS named their extermination camp. The simplified spelling “Sobibor” is often used in German and English.

literature

Web links

Commons : Sobibór extermination camp  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp . P. 11 (see literature).
  2. ↑ a b Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp . Pp. 197/198.
  3. ↑ Thistle: Sobibór . Pp. 393-395 (see literature).
  4. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp . P. 180.
  5. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp . P. 179/180.
  6. ↑ a b Schlevis: Sobibór extermination camp . P. 181.
  7. ↑ a b c thistle: Sobibór . P. 398.
  8. ↑ Thistle: Sobibór . P. 395.
  9. ↑ Christoph Gunkel: "We wanted to die like people" In: one day , October 14, 2013.
  10. ↑ Thistle: Sobibór . P. 396/397.
  11. ↑ a b Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp . P. 191.
  12. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp . P. 309 and 295.
  13. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp . P. 201.
  14. ↑ Jan Friedmann, Klaus Wiegrefe : “The world should experience what it was like in Sobibor.” In one day , May 12, 2009, interview with Thomas Blatt .
  15. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp . Pp. 191/192.
  16. ^ Website of the Wlodawa Museum (Poland) ( Memento from May 31, 2009 in the Internet Archive ): pictures of the burial of the military ceremony; Text in Polish
  17. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp . P. 12.
  18. ↑ Gabriele Lesser : Sobibor. Future of remembrance. Financial worries on the anniversary of the uprising . In: Jüdische Allgemeine , October 17, 2013.
  19. ^ Sabine Adler : Quarrels about the museum in Sobibor , Deutschlandfunk, article from October 14, 2013.
  20. ^ Anne Lepper: Obituary for Semyon Rozenfeld. The last survivor from the Sobibor murder camp . from June 14, 2019, on Spiegel Online . Retrieved June 14, 2019.