Camp Guards
While the camp officers were German and Austrian SS members, the camp guards under their command were Volksdeutsche from Reichskommissariat Ukraine as well as Soviet POWs, primarily from Ukraine.
Before they were sent as guards to the concentration camps, most of the Soviet POWs underwent special training in Trawniki. This was originally a holding center for those refugees and Soviet POWs, whom the Sipo security police and the SD had designated either as potential collaborators or as dangerous persons. The Stroop Report listed a Trawniki Guard Battalion assisting in the suppression of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
John Demjanjuk, a former Soviet POW, allegedly worked as a watchguard at Sobibor. On May 12, 2011, Demjanjuk, then 91 years old, was convicted by a German court of complicity in the murder of over 28,000 Jews whilst serving at Sobibor, and was sentenced to 5 years in jail. He died on March 17, 2012, while in a German nursing home awaiting appeal. As a result of his death prior to the appeal trial, he was declared "presumed innocent," with his previous conviction invalidated.
Read more about this topic: Sobibor Extermination Camp
Famous quotes containing the words camp and/or guards:
“Among the interesting thing in camp are the boys. You recollect the boy in Captain McIlrath’s company; we have another like unto him in Captain Woodward’s. He ran away from Norwalk to Camp Dennison; went into the Fifth, then into the Guthries, and as we passed their camp, he was pleased with us, and now is “a boy of the Twenty-third.” He drills, plays officer, soldier, or errand boy, and is a curiosity in camp.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The intelligent have a right over the ignorant, namely, the right of instructing them. The right punishment of one out of tune, is to make him play in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a worse man; that his guards shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be instructed that there is gold and silver in their souls, which will make men willing to give them every thing which they need.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)