The Holocaust Historiography Project

Razgonayev, Mikhail

Mikhail Razgonayev was a Ukrainian auxiliary who served at the Sobibór Camp as a guard from beginning to end. After the war, he was arrested for this by the Soviets. During his interrogation on 20-21 September 1948, Razgonayev described the gas-chamber facility as a stone/concrete building with a corridor on one side and four gas chambers along the other. Each chamber had two hermetically closing doors, one from the corridor, the other to the outside to extract the bodies. An engine just outside the building supplied exhaust gas, which was piped into the chambers through showerheads. Before people entered the chambers, everyone would be given a piece of soap. The latter would have happened only if those rooms really were shower rooms.

Of all early witness statements, Razgonayev’s description is the only one that comes very close to what the orthodoxy would later ordain to be the truth (except for the shower heads). However, they posit that, until late 1942, the Sobibór Camp had only a building with three gas chambers in a row, which was then enlarged with another set of three chambers, making it six. Razgonayev mentioned nothing about an enlargement of the gassing facility. Furthermore, the building ruins found at the camp, which the orthodoxy claims to have been the gas-chamber facility, had eight rooms, not three, four or six.

(See the entry on Sobibór for more details, as well as Graf/Kues/Mattogno 2020, pp. 101f., 283.)