Consider Sobibor from a Crowell perspective: As a delousing camp, where nudity was involved there might have been some tree branch fences for privacy. (That makes sense for privacy but not much sense as death camp security.) Jewish workers who worked there, couldn't have interacted with the "clean side" because lice could pass with that interaction. A tree branch fence could have been enough to separate the clean and dirty side. One could see how easy it would be for a rumour to spread. Here's how: Because you can't interact with the "clean" people, it would be easy to believe they were being killed. Thus the death camp (totenlager) is just the clean side after delousing.
Two major things that support this:
- 1: The Sobibor maps and models have a ridiculously small "death camp" (Totenlager.) It's not much bigger than a suburban back yard in the USA. Here 80,000 bodies were apparently buried, then later disinterred, bones crushed, and reburied. That would take some space. And how many workers? The workers supposedly lived in this area also. But this small space makes perfect sense for a delousing operation. The Jews get their deloused clothes back, put them on, and leave at the train station which is a 2 minute walk away.
2: The Sobibor revolt. No one from the "death part of the camp" escaped. That's odd considering all the shooting and tumult going on. Also, the death camp was so separate from the rest of the camp that no one like Pechersky, Blatt or others even had contact with a single Jewish inmate in the "death part" of the camp. But again this situation makes perfect sense for a delousing operation: There never was anyone there in the first place. That's why none of them escaped and why no one knew who they were.
The dirty side might have been run by Jews were were more immune to typhus. It's said that Warsaw Jews were more immune. One can see how believable a holocaust story might be if these Jews were told that the people entering the tube were being killed.
The Crowell perspective, if I can call it that, is an interesting angle with which to view Sobibor, but it must be mentioned that the featured Sobibor survivors such as Blatt, Pechersky, Biskowitz, and Dov Frieberg were later shown to be obvious liars. At the Eichmann trial for the latter two. Nevertheless, looking at Sobibor from a Crowell perspective shines light on what must be a big part of how the story came about.