Nazi death camp museum to reopen with funding from Polish ministry

A Nazi death camp museum in Sobibor, eastern Poland, will reopen its doors and become a state museum with government funding, the Culture Ministry said Friday after reports that the facility would close for lack of funds, DPA reported.

The museum will first be made into a branch of the nearby concentration camp museum in Majdanek, the Culture Ministry said. It will operate as an independent state museum from January 2012 and will be funded by the ministry.

Museum officials said Thursday that the facility closed on June 1 because it had not received enough funding from regional government.

Some 250,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed at the Nazi German extermination camp Sobibor, located in occupied Poland during World War II.

John Demjanjuk, sentenced last month to five years in prison as an accessory to more than 28,000 murders, was a guard at the camp. The Ukrainian-born 91-year-old was freed pending a possible appeal and was moved to a nursing home near Munich.

The museum gets some 20,000 visitors a year and requires some 1 million zloty (361,000 dollars) a year to keep running. This year it has only received some 420,000 zloty.