Grave robbers loot Nazi death camp graves of Jewish victims searching for gold

THE MASS graves of Jewish victims at a Nazi death camp have been plundered by looters searching for gold, it has been revealed.

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Sobibor death campGETTY

Up to 300,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor death camp in Poland during WWII

The horrific desecration was discovered by archaeologists at Sobibor in south-east Poland.

The museum at the camp, where up to 300,000 Jews perished, found the sites have been disturbed within the last two years by plunderers seeking treasure overlooked by Nazi executioners.

A museum source said: "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.

A stone with a plaque in the woods next to SobiborGETTY

Sobibor is the site of one of the biggest Jewish uprisings in WWII

"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."

Rutger Hauer In 'Escape From Sobibor'GETTY

The Sobibor uprising was the subject of a British-made film, Escape from Sobibor, in the 80s

Museum excavations have recovered a number of personal items belonging to victims including silver-plated dentures.

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

American-Polish historian Jan Gross claimed in his book that Poles dug for valuables at the end of World War II.

The '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.

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

It has also emerged that Jewish tombstones have been stolen. Some are being used as paving slabs, a cowshed and even an outside toilet.

The Nazis built four extermination camps in Poland - Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno.

Yesterday it emerged that Thomas Toivi Blatt, who was among a small number of Jews to survive a mass escape from Sobibor in 1943 and who decades later served as a prominent witness at the trial of the alleged camp guard John Demjanjuk, has died. He was 88.

Polish-born Blatt, who lost both parents and a younger brother in the gas chambers of Sobibor, passed away at his home in Santa Barbara, California.

Sobibor death campGETTY

Many thousands of Jews were killed at Sobibor, one of four Nazi death camps built in Poland

Blatt lectured about the Holocaust, wrote two books and campaigned to preserve the site of the death camp as the site of one of the few uprisings by Jewish inmates against Nazi guards during World War II.

Six months after his arrival at Sobibor, Blatt took part in the camp's successful uprising, in which most of the Nazis were killed and 300 prisoners escaped. Most who escaped ended up being hunted down and killed, but Blatt was among about 60 who survived the war

In the 1980s, Blatt returned often to the camp to check on its condition, regularly finding human bones among tall grass and weeds.

"I've practically cleaned up one quarter of the place myself, picking up the bones, burying them," he said in 1987.