Sobibor 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.
Sobibor extermination camp, summer 1943
SS-Hauptsturmführer Richard Thomalla, who oversaw the initial construction of Sobibor
The Vorlager's quaint buildings such as the Merry Flea (pictured in summer 1943) helped conceal the purpose of the camp from new arrivals.
The entrance to the Erbhof in Lager II
The Holocaust 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, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out primarily through mass shootings and poison gas in extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chełmno in occupied Poland. Separate Nazi persecutions killed a similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and POWs; the term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of these other groups.
Jews arriving at Auschwitz II in German-occupied Poland, May 1944. Most were selected to go to the gas chambers.
View of the Pegnitz River (c. 1900) with the Grand Synagogue of Nuremberg, destroyed in 1938 during the November pogroms
1919 Austrian postcard showing a Jew stabbing a German Army soldier in the back
Territorial expansion of Germany from 1933 to 1941