The Sobibór Museum or the Museum of the Former Sobibór Nazi Death Camp ( pl, Muzeum Byłego Hitlerowskiego Obozu Zagłady w Sobiborze), is a Polish state-owned

museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make thes ...

devoted to remembering the atrocities committed at the former

Sobibor extermination camp Sobibor (, Polish: ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland. As an ...

located on the outskirts of Sobibór near Lublin. The Nazi German

death camp Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...

was set up in

occupied Poland ' ( Norwegian: ') is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that premiered on TV2 on 5 October 2015. Based on an original idea by Jo Nesbø, the series is co-created with Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjærg. Season 2 premiered on 10 Octobe ...

during World War II, as part of the Jewish extermination program known as the Operation Reinhard, which marked the most deadly phase of

the Holocaust in Poland The Holocaust in Poland was part of the European-wide Holocaust organized by Nazi Germany and took place in German-occupied Poland. During the genocide, three million Polish Jews were murdered, half of all Jews murdered during the Holocaust. ...

. The camp was run by the '' SS Sonderkommando Sobibor'' headed by

Franz Stangl Franz Paul Stangl (; 26 March 1908 – 28 June 1971) was an Austrian-born police officer and commandant of the Nazi extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka. Stangl, an employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program and an SS commander in Nazi German ...

. The number of Jews from Poland and elsewhere who were gassed and cremated there between April 1942 and October 14, 1943 is estimated at 250,000; possibly more, including those who came from other Reich-occupied countries. Since May 1, 2012 the Sobibór Museum has been a branch of the

Majdanek State Museum The Majdanek State Museum ( pl, Państwowe Muzeum na Majdanku) is a memorial museum and education centre founded in the fall of 1944 on the grounds of the Nazi Germany Majdanek death camp located in Lublin, Poland. It was the first museum of its ...

, dedicated to the history and commemoration of

the Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...

camps and subcamps of ''

KL Lublin Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...

''. Originally, the museum served as an out-of-town division of the district museum in

Włodawa Włodawa (; yi, וולאָדאַווע, Vlodave; ua, Володава, Volodava) is a town in eastern Poland on the Bug River, close to the borders with Belarus and Ukraine. It is the seat of Włodawa County, situated in the Lublin Voivodeship ...

nearby founded in 1981. It has been temporarily closed to the public from April 2011 due to lack of financial means. The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage reopened the Museum with additional funding after its administrative reorganisation.

Museum history

Little was known about the camp before the Sobibor trial in Hagen, Germany, and the parallel '' Hiwi'' trials in

Krasnodar Krasnodar (; rus, Краснода́р, p=krəsnɐˈdar; ady, Краснодар), formerly Yekaterinodar (until 1920), is the largest city and the administrative centre of Krasnodar Krai, Russia. The city stands on the Kuban River in southe ...

in the former

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

, inspired by the investigative work of

Simon Wiesenthal Simon Wiesenthal (31 December 190820 September 2005) was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration ...

and the highly publicized snatching of

Eichmann Otto Adolf Eichmann ( ,"Eichmann"
''

Mossad. Most

Holocaust survivors Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally accep ...

had left Poland long before these events, and the camp was largely forgotten.Richard C. Lukas
''Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust''
University Press of Kentucky 1989 - 201 pages. Page 13; also in Richard C. Lukas, ''The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939-1944'', University Press of Kentucky 1986 - 300 pages. Michael C. Steinlauf.
Poland
. In: David S. Wyman, Charles H. Rosenzveig. ''The World Reacts to the Holocaust''. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. The first monument to Sobibór victims was erected on the historic site in 1965. The Włodawa Museum, which was responsible for the monument, established a separate Sobibór branch on October 14, 1993, on the 50th anniversary of the armed uprising of Jewish prisoners there, some of whom successfully escaped in 1943 (see ''

Escape from Sobibor ''Escape from Sobibor'' is a 1987 British television film which aired on ITV and CBS. It is the story of the mass escape from the Nazi extermination camp at Sobibor, the most successful uprising by Jewish prisoners of German extermination ...

'', which aired on CBS in 1987), thus prompting the camp's premature closure. The small-size museum is scheduled to be replaced with a modern visitor centre based on the results of an international design competition closed at the end of 2013 and sponsored by the Polish-German Foundation ''Pojednanie''. On 24 June 2014 the State Secretary from the Polish

Ministry of Culture and National Heritage Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland ( pl, Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego) is a governmental administration office concerned with various aspects of Polish culture. It was formed on 31 October 20 ...

presented the winning design at a ceremony in Warsaw, in the presence of the King of the Netherlands Willem Alexander and his wife

Queen Máxima Queen or QUEEN may refer to: Monarchy * Queen regnant, a female monarch of a Kingdom ** List of queens regnant * Queen consort, the wife of a reigning king * Queen dowager, the widow of a king * Queen mother, a queen dowager who is the mothe ...

, the partners in the project along with Israel, Poland and Slovakia.

Research and conservation programs

The Museum complex comprises the museum building located near the former railway station, which are connected by a paved Trail of Memory; a cast-iron statue of a woman with child on the "Road to Heaven" (''Himmelfahrtstrasse'') sculpted by Mieczysław Welter, as well as a large circular enclosure with a mound of ashes and crushed bones of the victims, collected at the site and formed into a broad

pyramid A pyramid (from el, πυραμίς ') is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single step at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilat ...

next to the original open-air cremation pits; and local archive of the facsimiles of testimonies and pertinent documents. Sobibor aerial photo (1942-1943)

The camp is scheduled to undergo more advanced geophysical studies and further archaeological excavations. In the camp perimeter, there are practically no fixed objects of any kind since the SS meticulously removed as much evidence as possible.''Lest we forget'' (14 March 2004)
"Extermination camp Sobibor"
''The Holocaust''. Retrieved on May 17, 2013. Any research work around and near the graves is conducted under the strict supervision of the Chief Rabbi of Poland,

Michael Schudrich Michael Joseph Schudrich (born June 15, 1955) is an American rabbi and the current Chief Rabbi of Poland. He is the oldest of four children of Rabbi David Schudrich and Doris Goldfarb Schudrich. Biography Born in New York City, Schudrich lived i ...

. The first excavation project was completed in October 2007. Over one thousand items belonging to the victims were unearthed. In October 2009, the second excavation phase was conducted, which determined the exact placement of double-row barbed-wire fencing posts around the camp. The work revealed numerous new artifacts as well, including false teeth, keepsakes from Marienbad, and many suitcase keys. In the autumn of 2012 the north-western section around mass graves 1 and 2 was analyzed, including geophysical evidence of the barbed-wire enclosure that separated mass graves and cremation pits from the living area of Camp III, and the perimeter of the killing zone as well. In May 2013 the Israeli and Polish archaeologists conducting excavations near Camp III, unearthed an escape tunnel long and 1.6–2 m deep in some places, beginning under the barracks of the Jewish ''Sonderkommando'' and leading toward a double-row barbed-wire fence. The tunnel may have collapsed with people inside; the camp perimeter is known to have been mined. Notably, the camp records do not mention any incident of this kind. Other new findings included children identification tags from the Netherlands, and seven human skeletal remains possibly those of the Jewish work-detail shot upon the completion of the removal of genocide evidence.

Notes

External sources

*
"Sobibor. Ministerstwo zbuduje muzeum", at the ''RP.pl'' webpage.
Retrieved June 8, 2013.

Retrieved June 8, 2013.
"The Museum of the Former Nazi Death Camp in Sobibór has been closed," at ''Sztetl.org'' webpage.
Retrieved June 8, 2013.
The museum faced with closure on April 30, 2011, at the ''Fight Hatred.com'' webpage.
Retrieved June 8, 2013.
"How to get there", at ''Polish Forums.com'' webpage.
Retrieved June 8, 2013. {{DEFAULTSORT:Majdanek State Museum 1943 in Poland World War II sites in Poland World War II sites of Nazi Germany Museums in Lublin Voivodeship World War II museums in Poland Monuments and memorials in Poland