Sobibor

Sobibór (, or Sobibor) was a Nazi German extermination camp located on the outskirts of the village of Sobibór, in occupied Poland, within the semi-colonial territory of General Government, during World War II. The camp was part of the secretive Operation Reinhard, which marked the deadliest phase of the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland. The camp was situated near the rural county's major town of Wlodawa (called Wolzek by the Germans), 85 km south of the provincial capital, Brest-on-the-Bug (Brzesc nad Bugiem in Polish). Its official German name was SS-Sonderkommando Sobibór. Jews from Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, as well as Soviet POWs, were transported to Sobibór by rail. Most were suffocated in gas chambers fed by the exhaust of a large petrol engine. Up to 200,000 people were murdered at Sobibór and possibly more. At the postwar trial against the former SS personnel of Sobibór, held in Hagen two decades into the Cold War, Professor Wolfgang Scheffler estimated the number of murdered Jews totalled a minimum of 250,000.