Among the items discovered was a wedding ring, bearing the inscription: “Behold, you are consecrated unto me,” in Hebrew.
Nazi forces tried to erase all traces of the camp’s existence. An asphalt road was laid over the top of the site after SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered its destruction.
Archeologists have now unearthed these hidden Nazi gas chambers at the site of the Sobibor Nazi concentration camp in eastern Poland. An estimated 250,000 people were killed at the camp.
This may very well become a new tourism sight in Poland.
The orders to destroy came following an uprising against the camp’s staffers on October 14, 1943. Some 12 SS officers were killed in the plot, which involved prisoners telling camp guards they had salvaged well-made or expensive items in order to lure them to a place where they could be slaughtered.
In the subsequent chaos, some 300 of the 600 Jewish inmates broke free. However, many were shot while attempting to escape. By the end of WWII, there were approximately 50 survivors.
The archaeologists explored the site beneath the road and found rows of bricks, four pieces deep. They have determined that this is where the walls of the gas chambers once stood.
Experts were amazed at the size of the building and the well-preserved condition of the chamber walls.
The discoveries may also help establish a more precise estimate on the number of people killed at the camp, as the wall identifications have helped with calculating how big the camp was.
Unlike other camps that attempted to masquerade as either prison or labor camps, Sobibor and its neighbors – Belzec and Treblinka – were specifically death camps. Inmates were gassed to death very shortly after entering.
However, there is less information about Sobibor’s operations, due to its destruction by the Germans.
Another archeologist – Wojciech Mazurek – said that there had been eight gas chambers.
