Holocaust victims’ graves have been dug up by looters searching for treasure at the former site of the Sobibor death camp in Poland.
Sobibor museum staff taking part in an official archaeological dig found that graves had been disturbed by suspected gold and metal hunters.
A museum source told MailOnline: “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.
“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.”
The Sobibor camp in south-east Poland was set up in 1942 and 250,000 Jews and non-Jews were murdered there.
This is not the first time the graves of Nazi death camps have been pillaged for treasure. At the end of the Second World War, peasants dug up remains of Nazi victims on the site of the Treblinka extermination camp, hoping to find precious metals in what became known as the “Treblinka Gold Rush”.
