Unarmed Jews defeat mass murder: Revolts at the extermination camps

“Violence never solves anything” is a platitude which American schoolchildren are taught. Sobibor and Treblinka show the platitude is a deadly falsehood. Violence solved Sobibor and Treblinka. The solution to Hitler’s Final Solution was violence — the violent destruction of the Nazi regime.
(This article is from October 15, 2015, exactly eight years ago. The message remains relevant.)

Sometimes the only way to stop mass killers is to fight. That was the strategy attempted by the Jewish prisoners on October 14, 1943, at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland.

Despite pleas from Jewish organizations, the Allies never bombed the train tracks leading to the extermination camps. In retrospect, some historians argue that the missions were too dangerous, that the bombers were needed elsewhere, or that the tracks could have been quickly repaired. Whatever the merits of the Allied refusal, every extermination camp in Nazi Europe continued operating until Allied ground forces advanced to the general area. There was never any offensive aimed specifically at an extermination camp. The one extermination camp that was put out of business early was Sobibor.

As detailed in the book and movie “Escape from Sobibor,” and in memoirs of the survivors, the Sobibor camp was horribly efficient, gassing thousands of people per day. The camp was run by Germans, with the assistance of several dozen Ukrainian guards. Much of the day-to-day operations, such as carpentry, sewing uniforms, and processing the dead bodies, were performed by a crew of specially-selected Jews, who worked in exchange for temporarily being allowed to live.

By David Kopel

Unarmed Jews defeat mass murder: Revolts at the extermination camps

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