The gassing capacities in the two bunkers had soon become insufficient to cope with the massive numbers arriving in the deportation transports from all over Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. From spring 1942 onwards, Jews were deported from the territories that had come under Nazi influence, mainly Slovakia, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Norway. Thus four big installations were built (the decision to build them had been taken in the fall of the previous year) so as to concentrate the murders and the elimination of the corpses – gas chambers and crematorium ovens – into one and the same structure called, in German, a Krematorium. Crematoria II, III, IV, and V were put into action between March 14 and June 25, 1943. These buildings became the biggest complex structures of murder which humankind has ever constructed.
Crematoria II and III were built identically in red brick, equally innocuous in appearance and one opposite the other, at the end of sectors BI and BII of the camp. Electrified barbed wire surrounded the yard in which the buildings stood. In summer 1944, a barricade of tree trunks was set up to hide the structures, each of which had a chimney some sixty feet high. The buildings had two stories (a basement and a ground floor). The basement of each structure designed to eliminate the victims contained at its entrance a 150-foot-long room for undressing. It was provided with benches and numbered hooks for clothes. The basement also contained a 90-by 21-foot gas chamber, placed perpendicular to the visible structure of the building. The chamber could contain more than 1,500 people. Its only openings were the armored door (with a glass window protected by a grille) and the four openings in the roof, closed off by a heavy cement trap door. The chamber had plastered walls (which were whitewashed after each “gas treatment”). Through columns of metal wire descending from the roof openings, the cyanhydric acid (Zyklon B) was introduced: poison gas was given off and spread when the little crystals came into contact with the air. A mechanical ventilation system allowed the air to be cleaned relatively rapidly to enable the men in the Sonderkommando to empty the gas chamber after each “special treatment” (“Sonderbehandlung”). Shower heads camouflaged the real purpose of the room. A sort of atrium separated the undressing room from the gas chamber. This space was used to cut off the hair of the corpses and to take out the gold teeth and other prostheses.28 The recovered “harvest” was sent to the Reich. Once this operation had been completed, the corpses were sent via a hoist up to the oven room situated on the ground floor of the building. A series of five ovens containing three muffles each was used to cremate the bodies in this room, 90 feet long and 36 feet wide.29 Other rooms situated on ground level were used as a morgue or as service rooms for the guards who worked in the crematoria as well as for the men of the Sonderkommando.30 One level under the eaves served, from summer 1944 onwards, as living quarters for the men of the Sonderkommando, whose job it was to work in the gas chambers.
Crematoria IV and V were located in another part of the camp, at the north extremity of Lagerstrasse B, near Kanada II (see below). These two structures were also built symmetrically facing each other and walled off. Unlike the two other crematoria, the gas chambers of these buildings, like the crematorium ovens, were built on ground level and they did not have a loft space. Each of these contained three gas chambers in the lowest part of the building and had two chimneys some fifty-one feet high. The gas chambers, of different sizes and naturally aired, had a total capacity of 1,200 persons. The room between the gas chambers and the ovens was used alternatively as an undressing room and as a morgue in which to put the bodies when they were removed from the gas chambers.
As soon as the big structures began to operate, the Nazis dismantled Bunker 1 and provisionally deactivated Bunker 2. On March 20, 1943, a few days after the inauguration of Crematorium II, the first to be activated, the first convoy of Jews arrived from Greece. In October, Italian Jews followed.
In November of the same year, the camp commandant, Rudolf Höß, was recalled to Berlin and replaced by Arthur Liebehenschel. The Auschwitz complex, which had become too vast and unmanageable, was then divided into three distinct administrative structures: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz, including the administration of all the sub-camps). Between the end of 1943 and beginning of 1944, a second huge “Effektenlager” (Kanada II) was built in Birkenau, as was a big central structure for registering new arrivals and disinfecting clothes, the Zentralsauna. In May 1944, the new sector being built, BIII (which the prisoners called “Mexico”) received Jewish women deported from Hungary and placed there, as in sector BIIc, while waiting to be sent to external kommandos, to camps within the Reich, or directly to their deaths.
In late spring and early summer of the same year, as the end of the war was approaching, the Nazis attempted to deport to Birkenau a major part of one of the largest European communities: that of Hungary, people who heretofore had been relatively spared mass executions. In order successfully to eliminate in such a short time nearly 400,000 persons, it became necessary to modify the camp. Rudolf Höß was recalled to supervise this “Hungarian action,” and Liebehenschel was replaced in the middle of May by Richard Baer. The railway was extended right inside the camp (Bahnrampe) to expediate the selection process and shorten the path that led the victims to their death.
After the Hungarian Jews, and as the transports were continuing to arrive from all over Europe, the last Jews from the Łódź ghetto (the only ghetto that had not yet been destroyed) arrived in their turn at Birkenau at this time. It was then that Birkenau reached its maximum capacity for murder – to such an extent that the administration decided to reactivate Bunker 2 (without the barracks for undressing, which had been dismantled; the bunker was divided into just two rooms serving as gas chambers). In addition, five cremation ditches were dug in the open in the yard of Crematorium V.
It was also at this time that the camp commandant gave the order to start to burn the most “compromising” documents, in particular the lists of transports (Transportlisten) with details of the arrivals at Birkenau. The systematic dismantling of the murder structures began in November, after the arrival of the last mass transports. Several teams, formed essentially of women, were set to work dismantling the crematoria in order to obliterate traces of the mass murder. The last general roll call, held on January 17, 1945, produced a count of just over 67,000 prisoners, practically all Jews, still living in the camps (31,894 at Auschwitz-Birkenau and 35,118 at Monowitz and sub-camps). Most of the Polish political prisoners had been previously transferred to other camps inside the Reich. Following the burning of incriminating documents, the general evacuation of the camp began. About 58,000 prisoners were forced to carry out this tragic journey on foot or in train cars to other camps located inside the Reich. Many deportees were killed on the way; a few managed to escape. In the following months, many died in the camps where they had been transferred, namely Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and Dachau for the men, and Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen for the women.
Nine thousand persons, mainly the sick, remained in the Auschwitz complex. The guards posted in the camp nonetheless still had time to kill another 700 people on the eve of what would have been their liberation.
THE SONDERKOMMANDO OF BIRKENAU
Generally speaking,all the NaziKL were provided with a crematorium oven to burn the corpses of dead or murdered prisoners, i.e., for “sanitary” reasons. The Stammlager (Auschwitz I) was not in this sense an exception: in September 1940, a former munitions dump was adapted to this end and three prisoners were assigned there to work as “Heizer” (“stokers”), men whose job it was to burn the corpses.
Initially, the crematorium capacity of this oven with two muffles reached 100 corpses per day. In February 1941, a second oven was added, doubling the capacity. With the activation of a third oven in May 1942, the capacity for cremation reached 340 corpses per day.
When the first experiments in extermination were carried out in the autumn of the following year, it seemed necessary to form a new kommando w
ith more numerous staffing. This group of twenty prisoners was called the “Fischl-Kommando,” after the name of its kapo.31
The start of the systematic extermination of the Jews in Birkenau, in spring 1942, made it necessary to create a new group of Jews, chosen generally from the ranks of young and still healthy deportees on their arrival in the camp. These men were forced to perform the terrible task of extracting the corpses of people who had just been murdered – sometimes members of their own families – dragging them to the ditches dug nearby and finally cleaning the gas chambers so they would be ready for the next “special treatments.” This group, employed on the murder operations in Bunker 1, was originally composed of nearly seventy persons, including a number entrusted with the handling of the corpses (the Sonderkommando)32 and another group who had to dig the ditches (the “Begrabungskommando”). From September 1942 onwards, the two teams were amalgamated under the single name of Sonderkommando. In the first months, most members of the Sonderkommando were eliminated after a few “actions,” by an injection of phenol into the heart, administered at Auschwitz I.
At the end of April 1942, a new team was formed, comprising fifty persons assigned to work in Bunker 1 and 150 persons whose task it was to dig the ditches, under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Franz Hößler. With the activation of Bunker 2 in June 1942, the structure of the Sonderkommando was reinforced and eventually rose to 400 persons at the end of summer. These men were accommodated in Block 2 of sector BIb (still the men’s camp at that period) in a barrack separated from the others by a wall surmounted by barbed wire.
On Himmler’s orders, the reopening of the bunker ditches started in September. This operation consisted of unearthing the bodies so as to burn them on special grilles.33 Three hundred men of the Sonderkommando were forced to participate in this operation. From this time onwards, the bodies of victims gassed in the bunker were no longer buried but immediately and systematically burned in the open ditches.
Almost all members of the Sonderkommando were eliminated in the gas chamber of the Stammlager34 as soon as they had finished eliminating the traces of the massacres (nearly 107,000 bodies burned). A new Sonderkommando was created and set to work on December 9, under the supervision of SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll. This man was, according to the account of the few survivors of the Sonderkommando, one of the worst criminals in the history of the camp.
In February 1943, in anticipation of the imminent establishment of the new murder installations combining in one building a gas chamber and cremation facilities, a new group of prisoners was trained to operate the ovens while working in Crematorium I at Auschwitz I. They started working in Birkenau on March 13, when they had to burn the bodies of the first group of 1,492 Jews from Kraków, killed in Crematorium II.
Around mid-July, all the men of the camp were transferred from sector BIb to sector BIId. The members of the Sonderkommando were also re-accommodated in the new men’s camp, more precisely in Block 13, isolated from the other barracks by a wall topped with barbed wire.
With the use of the four big new structures, the number of men assigned to the Sonderkommando increased until it included 400 persons under the command of SS-Oberscharführer Peter Voss.35 The total number did not vary much until July of the following year. Divided into four groups, the men worked in night teams and day teams. One individual kommando, the “Abbruchkommando,” was added to the usual teams to level the ditches and dismantle Bunker 1.
On February 24, 1944, after five men belonging to the Sonderkommando had attempted to escape, and as the spate of arrivals at Birkenau was starting to slow down, the Sonderkommando was reduced by half. Two hundred men were sent to KL Majdanek to be eliminated. But very quickly the Sonderkommando swelled again to cope with the massive numbers of Hungarian Jews arriving in May 1944. In August, the number of men assigned to the Sonderkommando reached 874. Faced with the extent of the gassings, Bunker 2 was reactivated to increase the number of murders that could be carried out. Near Crematorium V, large ditches were dug in which a large number of corpses were burned, supplementing the capacities of the ovens.
As well as the Polish Jews already working in the Sonderkommando, a significant number of Hungarian Jews (250) and Greek Jews (nearly 100, including Shlomo Venezia, his brother, and their cousins Dario and Yakob Gabbai) were incorporated into the labor force of the crematoria.
Höß appealed to Otto Moll to come back and supervise the “Hungarian Action.” Two weeks after the first arrivals of Hungarian Jews, Moll gave orders to transfer the living quarters of the Sonderkommando men so that they would sleep directly in the crematoria (under the eaves of II and III and in the undressing room of Crematorium IV). The murder structures of the camp reached their full capacity in this period. The “dirty job,” necessarily performed non-stop in two shifts of twelve hours each, consisted of the following: accompanying the victims into the undressing room; taking care that they did not have any inkling of the tragic fate awaiting them; helping them to get undressed as quickly as possible; gathering up their clothes while the SS killed the poor victims; extracting their bodies from the gas chamber; removing prostheses and gold teeth and cutting off the women’s hair; burning the bodies in the crematorium ovens or the common graves out in the open; grinding down the bones; throwing the ashes into the Vistula river; cleaning the gas chamber; and whitewashing the walls so it would be ready for the “treatment” of a new transport. In no case did the members of the Sonderkommando themselves take part in the act of murder.
On September 23, 1944, after the elimination of the last major group of Jews still alive in the annexed territories, namely the Jews from the Łódź ghetto, the systematic reduction of the Sonderkommando began. Two hundred men, mainly Hungarian Jews who had been made to work in the bunker and at the burning-ditches of the crematoria, were gassed in the Effektenlager Kanada I.36
The members of the Sonderkommando tried on several occasions to organize a collective revolt to put an end to the mass extermination. They regularly appealed to the “political” resistance activists who had structured a network in the Stammlager, without ever obtaining any concrete results. Resistance actions had to limit themselves to attempts at escape, which generally failed, or to compiling information and hiding it in the yard of a crematorium, so as to inform future generations about the extermination that was taking place.37
In spite of everything, a revolt was indeed organized. It broke out on October 7, 1944 in desperate conditions – and led to the disabling of Crematorium IV. The revolt ended with the elimination of almost all those who had taken part in it. In two days, 452 persons were killed. Only the men of Crematorium III, whose participation in the revolt was immediately blocked by Kapo Lemke and the German guards, were left alive. Shlomo Venezia was one of these men.
On October 10, only 198 prisoners were left in the Sonderkommando (104 from Crematorium III and forty-four from Crematorium V). Of these, 170 were moved to living quarters in Block 13 of the men’s camp.
The transports gradually ceased arriving in Birkenau, and on November 26 the last reduction of the Sonderkommando took place: thirty men were assigned to the last cremations in Crematorium V and seventy “Abbruchkommando” members were designated to participate in the operations of dismantling the structures of the crematoria. The others disappeared.
On January 18, when the general evacuation of the Auschwitz complex took place, most of the Sonderkommando men who were still alive (including twenty-five Greeks) managed to slip into the columns of deportees being led away to the other camps within the Reich. By so doing, they managed to avoid certain death. Some of them, generally Polish Jews, succeeded in escaping when what was later called “the death march” set off.
In May 1945, at the end of the war, slightly more than ninety men of the Sonderkommando of Birkenau were still alive. Fewer than twenty other persons had been, like them, “eye-witnesses” of the extermination: these were prisoners who had worked, sometimes for long periods, near the common
graves of the bunkers (as diggers or electricians, etc.), and who managed to slip into other labor kommandos, a tactic that saved them.
Certain survivors of the Sonderkommando of Birkenau and of the extermination camps of the Aktion Reinhard gave testimony to the Investigation Commission and at the various trials of Nazi criminals: they included Alter Feinsilber, Henryk Tauber, and Szlama Dragon, who testified at Warsaw and Oświęcim; and Milton Buki, Dow Paisikovic, and Filip Müller, who testified at the Frankfurt trials. But their stories have remained largely unknown to the public at large. The testimony of Shlomo Venezia is a crucial piece of evidence for our understanding of the mechanisms of extermination.
Marcello Pezzetti, historian of the CDEC Foundation (Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center), specialist in Auschwitz, Director of the Museum of the Shoah in Rome
1 For a detailed analysis of the period, see Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Die Juden in Deutschland 1933–1945: Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft (Munich: Beck, 1966), Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I, The Years of Persecution 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), and Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Third Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
2 The Evian Conference, in which thirty-two countries took part, was held between July 6 and 15, 1938. On July 13 the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, ran a triumphant headline saying (of the Jews) “Nobody Wants Them.”
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