Why Would The Nazis Keep Sobibor A Secret?

In the movie, Schindler’s female Jews were accidentally sent to Auschwitz instead of to Schindler directly. In real life, Jewish “deportees were forced to stand in crowded cattle cars without toilet facilities and upon arrival, were sorted into those fit for work and those— like children, the elderly, and frail— destined for the gas chambers. Camouflaged as shower rooms, the gas chambers held about twenty people each. Instead of water, the spigots released deadly Zyklon-B gas” (Berger 2). The women in the movie had to go through this horrific transition into an excruciatingly laborious and deadly place. In both—real life and the movie— “those not immediately killed had their arms tattooed with blue identification numbers and sent to work… literally until they dropped. They were clothed in stripped uniforms, fed rations of bread and watery soup, and forced to sleep in bunks crammed with other inmates” (Berger 3). Once Schindler released his Jews from Auschwitz, the women were deprived, starved, changed inside and out, and unhuman looking. One “hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand” (Berger 3). The concentration or death camps left the imprisoned and survivors forever scarred from the experience as a

There has been many stories on how cruel the victims of the Holocaust were treated, especially in the concentration camps. The Auschwitz concentration camps, out of many other camps is where this all occurred.The victims were abused and put through forced labor, it was physically and mentally hard for them to live in the camps knowing in the matter of days they will die. The prisoners in the camps were forced to work, the sick and disabled prisoners were killed as they were seen as “useless” since they were not capable of working. The labor consisted of digging ditches, leveling the ground, laying roads, and constructing new blocks and buildings for a tough 11-14 hours a day. During the tiring and inevitable hours of working, the prisoners had small rations of food.The meals were

The Jewish Concentration camps had substandard living conditions compared to the Japanese Internment camps, “Then Jack would snap back to reality, his stomach turning inside out from hunger, his body infested with lice, men around him dying from hunger, disease and sorrow” (Warren 72). This shows the reader the Jews

These train organizers worked in a classified (for the most part) office called GEDOB in Warsaw and Krakow. These men were in charge of organizing all trains headed to Concentration Camps. Although some Men in leadership positions knew and understood the details of their job, there was a varied degree of knowledge of where the trains were headed and why. Karl Heim, the Chief of GEDOB/9 passenger traffic, reflected “We came to the conclusion that Auschwitz must have been a metropolis” (Document F). Heim claims he didn’t know anything more about these trains then the fact they were going to Auschwitz. He and the rest of his team believed that Auschwitz must have been a city. The Nazis hid their plans even from chief of a group organizing trains leaving Krakow headed to a concentration camp. Ignorance of where these trains were headed, made it easier for Heim to complete his job. It is unclear whether he even really knew where these trains were going, he continued to follow commands and do his job. This is a case of how as concentration camps began to rise up over Europe, the men organizing them were ignorant about the details, but didn’t do anything stop these trains making them bystanders. Another man, Walter Stier, head of Department 33 “Jewish Special Trains”, claimed that everyone in his office was aware of the trains final destination, and yet they continued to work. Although he worked in a similar facility, his experience was quite different. He remembered “They were lying around openly and could be seen by anyone having access to our offices. We all knew where the trains were going” (Document D). At the time, Stier was working at a different office in Warsaw where Heim was in Krakow. Similarly to Heim he was a head of the office

Sobibor is a camp built in the early 40's. Sobibor is near the present-day eastern border of Poland. Policemen in Lublin had to murder Jews of the general government. Sobibor was surrounded by a minefield 50 feet wide. Commanders of the sobibor killing center were the first lieutenant franz strangle from April until August.

They were standing soldiers who could be seen patrolling towns and houses, checking to see if there was anyone hiding who was supposed to be in a concentration camp. Like the well known Anne Frank, many Jewish residence would turn to family and friends to hide them, in turn, putting themselves in danger. However, if they were caught hiding illegals by the Orpo, they would be assured deportation to Auschwitz or the death camp of Sobibor. Sobibor was established in 1942 as the second killing center within Operation Reinhard, a plan enacted by the German SS and Police Leader in Lublin to kill the majority of the Polish Jews in the General government. This operation alone is responsible for the murder of approximately 1.7 million Polish Jews deported from Ghettos, or areas created to segregate

“The Jews were transported, either by trains or trucks to six camps; Poland, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek-Lublin. These camps were called extermination camps. The trips on the train took a few hours and sometimes it took days. The people were crammed into boxcars until there was no room for anyone to move. Freight cars had no seats, no bathroom facilities, and only slatted openings as windows, so inside it was dark, and the air reeked with the smell of bodies and human waste” (Bachrach, 1994, p. 48). Mendy Berger, a Holocaust survivor remembered the train ride and stated, “One hundred people standing in a locked railroad car, no food, no water, people dying, the smell of the dead, and we had no toilets. We did it right where we were standing, and we couldn’t move away from it” (Adler 1989, p. 67). Arthur Rubin, another Holocaust survivor recounts “children were crying for water, and mothers’ hearts were torn because they were unable to help them…..The train stopped at various stations. There were women standing near the railroad tracks with

Although it was not the only concentration camp it was a place where they did experiments with a lot of the prisoners. For example they tried out medication to see the reactions, to see if salt water was drinkable. They also used gas chambers which they crowded as many inmates as they could fit in there tricking them they were going to be free as soon as they took a shower, but what it really did was intoxicate them with Zyklon-B and they died. Afterward there was not many to speak of what had happened so the rest really believed that they were going to become free. So many orders from a solder at one point a man jumped onto the electric fence to take away his life instead letting the solder humiliate him. When it had started to know what was happening in the camps they stopped it immediately the US liberated the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945 . They sent some death trains, Dachau had 141 trains that held 3,000 dead

The doors were sealed shut so no jew would escape. “There are eighty of you in this wagon. If anyone is missing, you'll all be shot, like dogs”..(22) “ The heat, the thirst the pestilential stench, the suffocating lack of air.” (24) Jews were cramped up in small wagons headed off to Auschwitz the concentration camp. If one would escape all would be die. Many had no water and they didn't have a break to use the bathroom. Jews had it miserable for them. They no longer knew what freedom was. Many innocent jews died because of one man thinking it would be best to wipe off a whole complete race and have a pure white race which was not understandable at

The benefit of this camp was the area had transport connections, the camp was at a railway junction. It was easy to close off from the outside world. (Steinbacher 22). “The camp being easily closed off from the outside world made it easier for the people running the Holocaust to keep it hidden for so long from the outside world; other people in the world didn’t know what was going on along with security. This is why it went on for so long” (22). According to Robson “ In the camp’s first year of operation, only one escape was attempted.” (68). “Prisoners that tried to escape from the camps were usually shot” (Robson 68). “In 1941 seventeen other escape plans were hatched but did not succeed.” (Robson 68). “The security in these camps were very high and clearly made it hard for the prisoners to try to escape, so this is why there were very few prisoners that actually were successful at escaping” (Robson 68). The people in these camps were treated awful by the

It is surprising how the Nazi’s did not know about the Gas Chambers until after the war. The Nazi’s did not want the Jews to know about the Gas Chambers so they kept them secret. The Chambers affected everyone in the war and they are still in our hearts today. People did not know what the Nazi’s were doing because the Nazi’s kept things secret. The Gas Chambers were one of the main methods of Killing Jews in secret.

Inmates resembled skeletons and were so weak they were unable to move. The smell of burning bodies was ever present and piles of corpses were scattered around the camp. However, you could be “saved” from the crematoria to be used as test subjects to cruel experimentation and used as lab rats for any experiment the scientists wanted to conduct. Later in the war, extermination camps were built. These were specialized for the mass murder of Jews using Zyklon B to ensure a painful, long, and torturous death. The bodies would then be thrown into the fire and all clothes, teeth, and shoes would be sent to pursue the German war front. At max efficiency, 20,000 people would be killed in the gas chambers a day. As the red Army approached near to liberate the Jews in concentration and extermination camps, SS officers sent prisoners on a death march across hundreds of miles, where they ran with no food or water, no matter the weather, until they reached the closest camp. SS officers proceeded to blow up the camps to hide the genocide from the

Eighteen million Europeans went through the Nazi concentration camps. Eleven million of them died, almost half of them at Auschwitz alone.1 Concentration camps are a revolting and embarrassing part of the world’s history. There is no doubt that concentration camps are a dark and depressing topic. Despite this, it is a subject that needs to be brought out into the open. The world needs to be educated on the tragedies of the concentration camps to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust. Hitler’s camps imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of Jews for over five years. Life in the Nazi concentration camps was full of terror and death for its individual prisoners as well as the entire Jewish

Escape from Sobibor is a film based on the most successful escape from a concentration camp. It was made by a British company and released by CBS. I selected two excerpts from the movie. The first excerpt covers the time from when the prisoners arrive at Sobibor until one of our main characters is informed by another prisoner that Sobibor is a death camp. Women, men, and children are all being killed.

     These camps were set up along railroad lines so that the prisoners would be conveniently close to their destination. Unfortunately, many prisoners didn't even survive the train ride to the camps. Herded like cattle, exhaustion, disease, and starvation ended the long treacherous journey for many of the prisoners. On the trains, Jews were starved of food and water for days. Nearly 8% of the people did not even survive the ride to the camps. (Nyiszli, 37)