The Death Camp Where the Prisoners Hunted Down Their Guards
EpicWar
7,936 views
EpicWar UPDATE: YouTube recently removed the channel from the Partner Program, and our appeal was unfortunately rejected.
I've opened an EpicWar Patreon for anyone who would like to help keep the documentaries going. Members get ad-free documentaries, early access to selected new releases, audio versions of the documentaries, behind-the-scenes updates and votes on future topics.
❤️ If you enjoy my documentaries take a look here: Patreon: EpicWar
The documentaries will continue to remain free on YouTube. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for watching and supporting EpicWar.
Now, back to today´s video! How do you escape a Nazi death camp ringed by armed guards, machine-gun towers, barbed wire, and a minefield? That was the challenge facing hundreds of Jewish prisoners at Sobibór on October 14, 1943, when they set out to do exactly that. The plan was bold almost beyond belief: lure the SS officers into the workshops one at a time, kill each of them silently, take their weapons, cut the camp's communications, and get out before the guards understood what was happening.
This documentary tells the true story of the Sobibór uprising, one of the most daring acts of organized resistance during the Holocaust. Built in occupied Poland as part of Operation Reinhard, Sobibór was never a conventional concentration camp, because the Nazis designed it as an extermination camp with a single purpose, which was mass murder. At least 167,000 people died there. Among the victims were Jews deported from Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and the occupied Soviet territories.
Two men stood at the center of the escape. Leon Feldhendler, a Polish Jewish prisoner, had quietly built an underground resistance network inside the camp, while Alexander Pechersky, a captured Jewish officer of the Red Army, arrived at Sobibór in September 1943. Feldhendler knew the camp from the inside, and Pechersky knew how to plan a military operation. Working together, they designed an operation meant to wipe out the German command structure and give hundreds of prisoners a real chance to break out.
On the afternoon of October 14, acting commandant Johann Niemann was lured into the tailor's workshop to try on a new uniform. Once he had taken off his gun belt, he was killed with an axe. Over the next forty minutes, prisoners killed members of the camp's SS and auxiliary staff, cut communications, sabotaged equipment, and gathered up weapons, and that's when the alarm went up and hundreds of people ran for the fences under machine-gun fire.
Roughly 300 prisoners made it beyond the camp perimeter. The enormous German manhunt that followed caught or killed many of them, and of all the escapees, only around 50 to 60 lived to see the end of the war. What the SS could never undo was the blow to the camp itself, since Sobibór never again operated as a functioning killing center. Heinrich Himmler ordered it dismantled, which meant the buildings were torn down, the ground was levelled, and trees were planted across the site in an attempt to erase the evidence.
This documentary is made for educational purposes, examining the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, Operation Reinhard, Sobibór, and Jewish resistance through historical evidence and survivor testimony. Nothing here glorifies Nazism, violence, hatred, or political extremism. Its purpose is to preserve the history of the victims and survivors while explaining one of the most extraordinary acts of resistance in the Second World War.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Survivor accounts and memoirs
Alexander Pechersky, Uprising in the Sobibor Camp (Rostov-on-Don, 1945), the earliest published account by the uprising's military leader
Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival (Northwestern University Press, 1997)
Dov Freiberg, To Survive Sobibor (Gefen Publishing, 2007)
Stanisław Szmajzner, Inferno em Sobibor (Rio de Janeiro, 1968)
Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp (Berg, 2007), written by a survivor deported from the Netherlands
Recorded testimony
Claude Lanzmann, Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001), filmed interview with uprising participant Yehuda Lerner
Survivor oral history collections held by the United States Holocaust - Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem
Subscribe and like for more!
#worldwar2 #ww2 #Sobibor #SobiborUprising #Holocaust #NaziGermany #OperationReinhard #AlexanderPechersky #JewishResistance #ConcentrationCamps #DeathCamps #WWIIHistory #HolocaustHistory #HistoryDocumentary #MilitaryHistory #EpicWar
5 Comments
When the numbers differ by millions,you have to ask which number is accurate & how the numbers can be millions different.
The Death Camp Where the Prisoners Hunted Down Their Guards
EpicWar
7,936 views
EpicWar UPDATE: YouTube recently removed the channel from the Partner Program, and our appeal was unfortunately rejected.
I've opened an EpicWar Patreon for anyone who would like to help keep the documentaries going. Members get ad-free documentaries, early access to selected new releases, audio versions of the documentaries, behind-the-scenes updates and votes on future topics.
❤️ If you enjoy my documentaries take a look here: Patreon: EpicWar
The documentaries will continue to remain free on YouTube. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for watching and supporting EpicWar.
Now, back to today´s video! How do you escape a Nazi death camp ringed by armed guards, machine-gun towers, barbed wire, and a minefield? That was the challenge facing hundreds of Jewish prisoners at Sobibór on October 14, 1943, when they set out to do exactly that. The plan was bold almost beyond belief: lure the SS officers into the workshops one at a time, kill each of them silently, take their weapons, cut the camp's communications, and get out before the guards understood what was happening.
This documentary tells the true story of the Sobibór uprising, one of the most daring acts of organized resistance during the Holocaust. Built in occupied Poland as part of Operation Reinhard, Sobibór was never a conventional concentration camp, because the Nazis designed it as an extermination camp with a single purpose, which was mass murder. At least 167,000 people died there. Among the victims were Jews deported from Poland, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, France, Czechoslovakia, and the occupied Soviet territories.
Two men stood at the center of the escape. Leon Feldhendler, a Polish Jewish prisoner, had quietly built an underground resistance network inside the camp, while Alexander Pechersky, a captured Jewish officer of the Red Army, arrived at Sobibór in September 1943. Feldhendler knew the camp from the inside, and Pechersky knew how to plan a military operation. Working together, they designed an operation meant to wipe out the German command structure and give hundreds of prisoners a real chance to break out.
On the afternoon of October 14, acting commandant Johann Niemann was lured into the tailor's workshop to try on a new uniform. Once he had taken off his gun belt, he was killed with an axe. Over the next forty minutes, prisoners killed members of the camp's SS and auxiliary staff, cut communications, sabotaged equipment, and gathered up weapons, and that's when the alarm went up and hundreds of people ran for the fences under machine-gun fire.
Roughly 300 prisoners made it beyond the camp perimeter. The enormous German manhunt that followed caught or killed many of them, and of all the escapees, only around 50 to 60 lived to see the end of the war. What the SS could never undo was the blow to the camp itself, since Sobibór never again operated as a functioning killing center. Heinrich Himmler ordered it dismantled, which meant the buildings were torn down, the ground was levelled, and trees were planted across the site in an attempt to erase the evidence.
This documentary is made for educational purposes, examining the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, Operation Reinhard, Sobibór, and Jewish resistance through historical evidence and survivor testimony. Nothing here glorifies Nazism, violence, hatred, or political extremism. Its purpose is to preserve the history of the victims and survivors while explaining one of the most extraordinary acts of resistance in the Second World War.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Survivor accounts and memoirs
Alexander Pechersky, Uprising in the Sobibor Camp (Rostov-on-Don, 1945), the earliest published account by the uprising's military leader
Thomas Toivi Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor: A Story of Survival (Northwestern University Press, 1997)
Dov Freiberg, To Survive Sobibor (Gefen Publishing, 2007)
Stanisław Szmajzner, Inferno em Sobibor (Rio de Janeiro, 1968)
Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp (Berg, 2007), written by a survivor deported from the Netherlands
Recorded testimony
Claude Lanzmann, Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (2001), filmed interview with uprising participant Yehuda Lerner
Survivor oral history collections held by the United States Holocaust - Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem
Subscribe and like for more!
#worldwar2 #ww2 #Sobibor #SobiborUprising #Holocaust #NaziGermany #OperationReinhard #AlexanderPechersky #JewishResistance #ConcentrationCamps #DeathCamps #WWIIHistory #HolocaustHistory #HistoryDocumentary #MilitaryHistory #EpicWar