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Evidence of Mass Graves in Sobibor. The archeologists discover large mass graves

The archeologists who worked at the site of the camp presented the results of their work at the headquarters of the Council for the Preservation of Monuments of Combat and Martyrdom. They discovered large mass graves at the site of the Sobibor Nazi death camp. Nearby, they also encountered the remains of a structure that may have been a gas chamber.

Sobibor is one of the most mysterious of the mass-extermination sites. Approximately 250,000 Jews from Poland, Germany, France, and Holland were probably exterminated there.

The Germans demolished the camp and carefully removed all evidence of it, removing corpses from the graves and burning them before planting a forest at the site. "We know far more about Auschwitz, because some people survived there," said former Polish foreign minister Władysław Bartoszewski at the conference. "Sobibor was a place of instantaneous extermination. People were gassed there in thirty minutes, with the use of exhaust fumes from diesel engines. No documents on the subject are extant."

At present, it is not even known how large an area the camp covered, or what the extermination site looked like, because no one survived sub-camp III, where the gas chambers were located.

Andrzej Przewoźnik, secretary of the Council for the Preservation of Monuments of Combat and Martyrdom, announced that the work would continue next year.

(Despite the revelations published by Le Monde, there are no similar doubts in the case of Auschwitz. See "Bunker No. 1 Will Be Commemorated" in the December News-jarmen).