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From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Mass Graves Found at Nazi Polish Death Camp

Date: November 23, 2001

"Mass Graves Found at Nazi Polish Death Camp

WARSAW (Reuters) - Polish archaeologists excavating the Nazi death camp in Sobibor said on Friday they had found mass graves at the site, which was evacuated by German occupying forces in October 1943 after a prisoner uprising.

The excavations were the first since World War Two at the former camp, which was subsequently forested over. They could provide valuable new evidence on the number of victims, mainly Jews, who died in the Sobibor gas chambers.

According to official Polish accounts, 250,000 people were killed in Sobibor, which was opened in May 1942 and lies close to the eastern border with Ukraine.

``We uncovered seven mass graves with an average depth of five yards. In them there were charred human remains and under them remains in a state of decay. That means that in the final stage the victims were burned,'' archaeologist Andrzej Kola was quoted by the Polish PAP news agency telling a news conference.

He said the largest grave measured 70 by 25 yards, the others 20 by 25 yards.

``We also found a hospital barracks. The people there were probably shot, as we found over 1,800 machine gun cartridges,'' Kola said. ``In the woods we found remnants of barbed wire, which enabled us to reconstruct the boundary of the camp.''

Few prisoners survived Sobibor -- among them some of the 300 who broke out of the camp on October 14, 1943. Eighty were caught soon after escaping, but some survived the war.

REFUTING HOLOCAUST DENIERS

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, head of the Council for Remembrance of Struggle and Martyrdom and a former Polish foreign minister, said it was vital to gather evidence to refute the claims of revisionists seeking to deny the Holocaust.

``Only 52 prisoners from the Sobibor concentration camp survived World War Two. Now there are even fewer left -- maybe none at all. In Sobibor around 250,000 people were murdered, most of them Jewish,'' he said.

``...The work will continue. We have to confirm scientifically that this camp existed. There are crazy voices trying to deny the events of those years,'' added Bartoszewski, who as a young man helped protect Jews in occupied Poland.

Franz Stangl, who later commanded the notorious Treblinka death camp and was found guilty of helping slaughter 900,000 people there, mentioned the Sobibor camp in Gitta Sereny's seminal 1974 biography ``Into That Darkness.''

Sereny, who interviewed Stangl extensively for the book, wrote that 100,000 people died there during the two months after the camp opened, when Stangl was posted there. The gas chamber equipment then broke down and did not resume work until October.

Camps like Sobibor were set up after Nazi Einsatzcommando units active behind the eastern front faced logistical problems in their bid to round up and wipe out local Jewish populations in the field.

But Sobibor's gas chambers were primitive: They used motor exhaust fumes and could take between 15 and 20 minutes to kill. The SS introduced Zyklon B gas, which speeded the killing process, later on in the war.

Most of the Nazi death camp machine was on Polish soil. Six million Jews are estimated to have died in the Holocaust.

A 1965 memorial at Sobibor reads: ``In this place from May 1942 until October 1943 there existed a Hitler extermination camp. At this camp 250,000 Russian, Polish, Jewish and Gypsy prisoners were murdered.''

It appears likely, however, that Jews were the largest group of victims. That could trigger a renewed debate in Poland over whether the memorial wording is accurate -- soon after a similar controversy over a July 1941 pogrom in the village of Jedwabne.

Earlier this year, after new evidence that many Jews in the eastern Polish village were killed by fellow villagers that July, the text of a memorial there was changed. "