Archaeologists say the passageway, found 5 feet (1.5 meters) below the surface, spanned 32 feet (10 m) and reached beyond the barbed-wire border surrounding the extermination camp at Sobibor, The Telegraph reported. "We were excavating near where the sonderkommando barrack was and we came across two rows of buried barbed wire," Polish archaeologist Wojciech Mazurek was quoted as saying by The Telegraph. "Digging down we found the traces of the tunnel. "It was about as wide as a human, and we are 99 per cent certain that it was an escape tunnel." Estimates for the number of people killed there range from 167,000 to upwards of 250,000. Their function at Sobibor would have spared them the death on arrival that awaited so many of the camp's victims, and given them the time to excavate the tunnel. Some prisoners were spared immediate death and kept in the work units known as the sonderkommando, forced to help in the gas chamber operations and the disposal of bodies. There were no reports of successful escape attempts from Sobibor until 600 prisoners broke out during an armed uprising in October 1943. Excavations have been underway at Sobibor for more than a decade.
– Archaeologists think they've found the first evidence of prisoners trying to dig their way out of a Nazi death camp. The find comes after more than a decade of excavations at the Sobibor camp in Poland; Nazis leveled the place after its prisoners revolted in 1943, LiveScience explains. In the course of their work, the team last month "came across two rows of barbed wire," one archaeologist tells the Telegraph. "Digging down we found the traces of the tunnel. It was about as wide as a human, and we were 99% certain that it was an escape tunnel." The tunnel, found 5 feet below ground, runs an astonishing 32 feet, from under where one of the barracks once stood to the other side of the barbed wire. The Telegraph explains that the barracks in question would have housed the sonderkommando: prisoners tasked with bringing victims to—and bodies out of—the gas chambers. Having avoided an immediate death, archaeologists speculate they would have had time to work on the tunnel. There's no evidence of whether it was actually used.