72 years after the liquidation of the Sobibór camp, the number of its victims remains the subject of disputes among scientists. Most often it is said about 250 to 300 thousand. murdered Jews. Meanwhile, the latest research shows that there were almost half as many of them!
We owe the new estimates to Robert Kuwałek from the State Museum at Majdanek, who, unfortunately, died in 2014 before the publication of his last work. It concerned the number of victims of the Sobibór camp. According to the scholar, it was not greater than approx. 170,000–180,000. Over 93,000 of them were Polish citizens before the war.
Works related to the construction of a new museum are underway on the site of the former death factory. It is very important that the information presented in it is consistent with the latest historical knowledge and - of course - as close to the truth as possible. So far, there was a plaque on the stone wall at the entrance to the museum saying about 250,000 murdered Jews.
Plaques at the entrance to the museum in Sobibór (photo:Bmalina, public domain).
Difficult estimates
The extermination of Jews in Sobibór lasted less than two years, from the turn of April and May 1942 to October 1943. The number of victims murdered there until mid-December 1942 is known. It was given in one of the German telephonograms intercepted and decoded by the English, and it amounts to 101,370 people. Unfortunately, there is no similar source for 1943.
Robert Kuwałek undertook the tedious task of tracing the sources scattered in many countries which could help to establish not only the total number of the victims of the camp, but also their place of origin and the time of arrival in Sobibór. It took into account the files of the Jewish Social Self-Help, post-war accounts of survivors and memories of witnesses of deportations from individual towns, as well as testimonies collected during investigations and trials of SS-men.
These data are often incomplete and even contradictory, so the exact number of those murdered will probably never be determined.
The material is based on a scientific article published in the periodical "Zeszyty Majdanka".
It is worth emphasizing, however, that the estimates for 1942, obtained with the same method as for 1943, gave a result very similar to the information from the aforementioned intercepted telephony. Therefore, one should agree with Robert Kuwałek that:
The closest number to the truth will be about 170,000-180,000 victims. It should be remembered that behind each of them is the unimaginable suffering of individuals and that Sobibór, next to Bełżec and Treblinka, will always be a symbol of a monstrous mass crime which only a few are aware of today.
It is hoped that the new museum in Sobibór will contribute to a better dissemination of knowledge about the camp and its victims.
The source of the above news is:
Robert Kuwałek, New findings regarding the number of victims of the German death camp in Sobibór , "Majdanka notebooks", vol. 26 (2014), pp. 17-59.
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