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Nazi Extermination Camp in Sobibor - SS - Sonderkommando Sobibor - operated from May 1942 to October 1943. The first transports with Jewish population arrived at Sobibor at the end of April 1942. The vast majority of the incoming prisoners was doomed for immediate extermination. Only a few were designated to work in various working "commandos".
The total number of Sobibor victims is estimated at approximately 250,000 people - Jews from Poland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Holland, Hungary, Belgium and from occupied territories of USSR - mostly Belarus. There were also around one thousand Poles.
It was probably in February 1942, after the conference on the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" organized by Reinhard Heydrich and Adol Eichmann in Wannsee near Berlin on 20th January 1942, that the decision about the creation of the extermination camp in Sobibor was taken. The construction of the camp, known in the official terminology as the "SS - Sonderkommando Sobibor", began in March 1942. The construction works were supervised by SS - Hauptsturmfûhrer Richard Thomalla from SS Central Construction Office and Police in Zamosc -SS who became the first camp commandant.
58 hectares of the forested terrain on the western side of the railway line Chelm - Wlodawa were designated for the camp. By the end of April 1942 the whole territory was fenced with three rows of barbed wire, over 2,5 m high, thickly entwined with fir branches from the inside. The guards' watchtowers were built along the fence, and additionally in 1943 the fields around the camp were mined. The camp buildings in Sobibor comprised several separate building complexes (camp pre-field, camp I, II, III, IV).
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