Looters dig up Holocaust victims' graves at Nazi death camp Sobibor in hunt for gold

The museum at the Sobibór Nazi death camp in south-east Poland, where up to 300,000 Jews were executed, found the sites have been disturbed by suspected gold hunters within the last two years.

A museum source told MailOnline: 'There has been a big archaeological project going on, but when we started excavating we discovered that people had already been digging near to where the gas chamber had been in Camp Three.'

'We found lots of pits which were nothing to do with us and clearly weren't professionally dug by scientists.

'We don't know who did it, but we suspect they were looking for gold or metal.'

'The idea that thieves have been here looking for such disturbing mementos is truly shocking.'

Official museum excavations have recovered a number of personal items belonging to the victims including a set of silver-plated dentures.

Sobibor was set up in March and April 1942 as soon as the Final Solution was agreed upon.

By the time it closed in October 1943 between 160,000 and 300,000 men, women and children had been murdered there. 

It is not the first time Holocaust victims' graves have been plundered in Poland.

American-Polish historian Jan Gross, author of controversial book 'Golden Harvest', claims Poles dug for valuables on the sites of Nazi death camps at the end of WWII. 

The now infamous Treblinka gold rush saw hundreds of Poles and Russian soldiers raid mass graves in search for gold teeth in the skulls of those murdered by the Nazis.

Jews took money and valuables on their final journey hoping they would survive, which fuelled an economic boom around the camp as locals lined up to sell water to the desperate death camp inmates water as they arrived off the train.

Girls came from as far as Warsaw to prostitute themselves to the Nazi guards in exchange for gold, diamonds and other valuables stolen from the Jews before they were sent to the gas chamber.

The photo that inspired the tome is of a group of peasants and soldiers casually taking a break from digging, at their feet a pile of skulls and bones. 

While the origins of the undated photo, which was first published by a Polish newspaper in 2008, are unclear, the gold rush phenomenon revealed by Gross and his wife Irena Grudzinska Gross is well documented.

In an essay for Tablet Magazine, Gross cites writer Rachela Auerbach who visited Treblinka in November 1945, as part of an official delegation organized by the Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes and described how how plunderers with shovels were everywhere. She wrote, 'They dig, they search, pulling out bones and body parts. Maybe something could still be found...maybe a golden tooth?'

Gross cites the testimony of Warsaw native and engineer Jerzy Królikowski, who lived in the village of Treblinka while supervising construction of a railroad bridge nearby, who recalled how 'wrist watches were sold by the dozens, for pennies, and local peasants carried them in egg baskets offering them to whomever was interested.'

Poland suffered more than any other nation during World War Two after being invaded by both the Nazis and Soviets and heroic Polish deeds — like the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 against Nazi rule — are a foundation of the national identity, while the state has regularly bestowed honours on Christian Poles who risked their lives to hide Jews from the Nazis.

The Nazis erected four single purpose extermination camps in the country - Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno.

Mr Gross said: 'Plundering Jewish property was an important element of the circulation of goods, an element of economic life, and thus a social fact, not an incidental behaviour of demoralised individuals.' 

Opened in July 1942, before it was closed down just over a year later in October 1943 it is estimated that between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers, and around 2,000 Romani people.

Of all the Nazi death camps set up in German occupied Poland, only Auschwitz killed more Jews than Treblinka.

According to Mr Gross, the Poles in the photograph were searching for gold or other treasures that Nazi executioners might have overlooked.

(dailymail.co.uk)