Genetic and phylogeographic evidence for Jewish Holocaust victims at the Sobibór death camp

Abstract

Six million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Archaeological excavations in the area of the death camp in Sobibór, Poland, revealed ten sets of human skeletal remains presumptively assigned to Polish victims of the totalitarian regimes. However, their genetic analyses indicate that the remains are of Ashkenazi Jews murdered as part of the mass extermination of European Jews by the Nazi regime and not of otherwise hypothesised non-Jewish partisan combatants. In accordance with traditional Jewish rite, the remains were reburied in the presence of a Rabbi at the place of their discovery.

Fig. 1

Mitochondrial DNA haplogroups of the ten studied skeletal remains (S1-10) and their frequencies amongst Ashkenazi Jews (AJ) and other Europeans. A Representation of the estimated haplogroups (https://empop.online; 13, 14) on a Maximum Likelihood tree created in MEGA X [–52]. B Relative frequencies of the estimated control region haplogroups amongst AJ of different European origin [–8]. C Relative frequencies of the estimated control region haplogroups amongst corresponding European populations without AJ samples [13, 14]

Fig. 2

Mitochondrial DNA haplogroup distribution in Poles (black), modern AJ (blue) and the studied remains (red). Each branch corresponds to one single individual. The dataset included 136 Polish and 24 Jewish mitogenomes acquired from GenBank (Additional File 1: Table S6). The evolutionary history was inferred by using the Maximum Likelihood method and Tamura 3-parameter model. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA X [–52]