According to the Polish census of 1931, Jews constituted nearly 29 percent of the town's inhabitants,[2] most of whom were murdered during the Holocaust.

[5] On 8–11 September 1939, Sambor was overrun by the 1st Mountain Division of the Wehrmacht during the Polish Battle of Lwów.

[7] The economy was nationalized; hundreds of citizens were executed out of sight by the secret police as "enemies of the people".

In July 1941, a Judenrat was formed in Sambor on German orders, with Dr. Shimshon (Samson) Schneidscher as its chairman.

[17] In the following months, Jews were deported to the open-type ghetto in Sambor from the entire county.

[18] By 7 August 1941, in most areas conquered by the Wehrmacht,[13] units of the Ukrainian People's Militia had already participated in a series of so-called "self-purification" actions, followed closely by killings carried out by Einsatzgruppe C.[15] The OUN-B militia spearheaded a day-long pogrom in Stary Sambor.

[17] Among the people trapped in the Sambor Ghetto were thousands of refugees who arrived there in an attempt to escape the German occupation of western Poland, and possibly cross the border to Romania[5] and Hungary.

[17][20] Jews from different parts of the city, along with inhabitants of neighbouring communities,[10] including Stary Sambor, were transferred to the ghetto until March 1942.

[20] The 'resettlement' rail transports to Belzec left Sambor on 4–6 August 1942 under heavy guard, with 6,000 men, women, and children crammed into Holocaust trains without food or water.

In June, Dr. Zausner, deputy to the Judenrat chairman, gave a speech full of hope because the Gestapo office in Drohobicz agreed to save a group of labourers in exchange for a huge ransom.

In the morning, all Jewish slave labourers were escorted to prison, loaded onto lorries and trucked to the killing fields at Radłowicze.

The Soviet Red Army liberated Sambor a year later amid heavy fighting with the retreating Germans, around 7 August 1944.

[3][27] Some Jews had managed to dig a tunnel leading to a sewer out of the ghetto and escaped to the partisans in the forest.

[34] After the war, several members of the town's German civilian administration and security apparatus received prison sentences; others did not.