The corpses of the murdered prisoners were taken to the crematorium of the parent camp, or were thrown into nearby mass graves and scattered with lime. In September 1942 Sonderkommando 1005, an SS special squad led by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, began to dig up the corpses and, to erase the traces, have them burned by the prisoners in the open air on wooden grilles, and sometimes in ditches. Blobel had organized mass shootings as Sonderkommandoführer (‘special squad leader’) of Einsatzgruppe C at Kiev and Poltava. From June 1942 he led the burning of bodies, known as ‘exhumation operations’, throughout the whole of the conquered East, and also in Chelmno extermination camp, where Höss had inquired into the method used in mid-September 1942. Within about three months Blobel had about 100,000 corpses burned in Auschwitz–Birkenau, and the ashes tipped into the Vistula and Soła.
The murder operations in the two bunkers lasted until spring 1943. Then the houses were abandoned and the corpse-burning trenches levelled. While ‘bunker 1’ was demolished, ‘bunker 2’ was left standing – and in May it was used again in the wake of the mass murder of the Hungarian Jews. The SS now wanted new, larger complexes. From autumn 1941 onwards plans were made to build crematorium II in the parent camp. The plan failed initially, but from July 1942 the new crematorium in Birkenau came into operation. It was built by the firm Huta Hoch-und Tiefbau AG (Huta Structural and Foundation Engineering) in Kattowitz; the Silesian industrial construction company Lenz & Co. AG had turned the job down because of a shortage of labour. The company Topf und Söhne from Erfurt was given the job of installing the cremation ovens and other equipment, including electric hoists for the transportation of corpses from the gas chambers to the crematoria, and ‘gas-testing equipment’ to measure any remaining cyanide. But the second crematorium was not enough. In August 1942 the decision was made to build additional ‘crematoria’; by now the term had come to mean ‘sites of mass killing’.
Crematorium III was built along the layout of crematorium II; they lay symmetrically to the right and left of the main road through the camp. Crematoria IV and V were arranged in a similar way; because of the tall trees near by the SS referred to them as the ‘forest crematoria’. All four constructions were some distance away from the prisoners’ barracks; they were disguised by electrified barbed wire, trees and shrubs, and SS men armed with machine-guns sealed off the area.
Construction of the killing installations lasted far into 1943, partly because of bad weather, but also because Topf und Söhne had to develop special models – technical innovations that they had patented in October 1942. The criminal purpose of the equipment was not concealed from the engineers, in particular Kurt Prüfer, who developed the plans and supervised the work. But the task was eventually completed, and solutions for technical problems were energetically sought. Prüfer suggested, for example, the installation of a heating system in the gas chamber of crematorium II, to speed up the effect of Zyklon B in the winter. The SS later returned to this idea, and placed portable coal stoves in the gas chambers.
Crematorium IV was the first to be completed, and was handed over to the SS on 22 March 1943. Crematorium II followed on 31 March, crematorium V on 4 April, and on 24 June, last of all, crematorium III. Including the ‘old crematorium’ (crematorium I), in the parent camp, which was closed down in July 1943, the crematoria, according to the calculations of Topf und Söhne, reached a cremation capacity of 4,756 corpses a day.
With a capacity of 1,440 corpses a day each, crematoria II and III were the largest. The incineration rooms in both buildings were on the ground floor, while in the cellar there were a changing room, a gas chamber and a Leichenkeller (mortuary). On the steps leading to the changing room there hung a panel, in German, French, Greek and Hungarian, showing the arrivals the way to the ‘bathroom’ and the ‘disinfection room’. Benches and numbered clothes-hooks in the changing room suggested that the prisoners would be returning to their personal effects. Here there were also panels bearing such mottoes as ‘One louse – your death’ and ‘Through cleanliness to freedom’. On the door to the gas chamber it said ‘Bath and disinfection room’, and from the ceiling hung sieves mounted on pieces of wood, to look like shower heads. Sometimes the SS handed out soap and towels before they shut the gas chambers, each holding up to 2,000 people. The Zyklon B entered the room through four special installations: they looked like pillars surrounded by metal grilles and protruded from the roof. They were hollow inside, and from outside they looked like chimneys. The SS men poured in the poison from the roof, and sealed the openings with concrete plates.
The airtight door to the gas chamber was locked with an iron bolt that could be screwed tight. At eye level there was a peephole consisting of a double pane of glass, about a centimetre thick, protected against the blows of the suffocating prisoners by a metal grid. Through this opening SS men watched them dying, which could last twenty minutes and more. When the victims were dead, ventilators sucked out the poison gas; in crematoria IV and V, in which there was no ventilation system, the doors leading outside were opened.
The mortuary, which was adjacent to the gas chamber in crematoria II and III, was used for collecting the clothes, spectacles, prostheses and hair of the murdered people. The corpses were hoisted on an elevator from the cellar up into the incineration room, which was equipped with five ovens for every three mortuaries. On the same floor in crematorium II there was a dissection room, and in crematorium III a room where gold teeth were melted down. A washroom next to the incineration room was used in both of these buildings (unlike crematoria IV and V) for shootings, which regularly occurred when transports with fewer than 200 people arrived; the victims were murdered in groups of five with shots fired at close range to the nape of the neck.
In crematoria IV and V the changing room and the gas chamber, which consisted of three or four smaller rooms and also held about 2,000 people, were not in the cellar but, like the incineration system, on the ground floor. Here too there were benches and numbered clothes-hooks in the changing room. Only the shower-head fittings in the gas chamber were missing. In the outside walls, as in the ‘red house’ and the ‘white house’, there were window-sized openings, closable with metal flaps, through which the Zyklon B was thrown into the gas chambers. The process was the same as in the other extermination camps, and here too SS doctors observed the mass murder. The ashes of the incinerated corpses from all four crematoria were poured into nearby trenches, loaded on to trucks from there, and scattered around the surrounding rivers and ponds or spread as fertilizer on the fields.
As the SS burned far more corpses than they had technically planned for – rather than two, as many as five in half an hour – the incineration ovens and chimneys soon suffered massive damage. The crematoria repeatedly failed through overheating, for example in summer 1944, when the corpses were burned in the open air again, and the specialists had to be called in from Erfurt to repair the equipment.
The removal of the corpses was carried out by prisoners from the Sonderkommando (‘special squad’). It consisted predominantly of Jewish camp inmates of various nationalities, as well as some non-Jews and Soviet prisoners of war. There were about eight of them in April 1942, soon rising to 200; at the beginning of 1944 about 400; and finally, in July 1944, and during the last high phase of mass murder, when the squad had to work in both day and night shifts, almost 900. They loaded the luggage of the new arrivals off the trains at the ramp, accompanied them to the crematorium building to undress and pulled their corpses out of the gas chamber; they had to break the gold teeth out of the jaws of the dead, pull their rings from their fingers and cut off the women’s long hair. Then they carted the corpses on hoists or in tubs to the incineration room, burned them, and dug mass graves and incineration trenches. If the corpses were burned in trenches, which took hours, supervised and spurred on by the SS, they had to check the fire and, to air it, stir the burning bodies with steel hooks; unburned bones were smashed to dust.
The German Reich itself p
rofited from the corpses: gold from teeth was melted down and handed to the Reichsbank in ingots. Human hair was spun into thread and turned into felt for the war industry, and presumably it was also used in the manufacture of mattresses and ropes; among the clients, who paid 50 pfennigs per kilo, were the Bremer Wollkämmerei (Bremen Wool Carding Company) and the Alex Zink felt factory near Nuremberg. Ash was used not only as fertilizer, but also as a filling material in the building of roads and paths and insulation for camp buildings. The SS sold human bonemeal to a fertilizer company in Strzemieszyce.
As the extermination was to remain secret, the Sonderkommando was housed in strict isolation from the other prisoners in special barracks, initially in the punishment block of the parent camp, and later in Birkenau men’s camp. In mid-1944the prisoners were transferred to the crematoria grounds, where they were housed in the attic. Work in the Sonderkommando extended life expectancy by only a few weeks, eight months being the longest known. After that the prisoners were generally shot. When new transports arrived, a new Sonderkommando was formed as well, and assigned in groups to the crematoria. No one volunteered for this task, and many committed suicide shortly afterwards. Only a few of the 2,000 or so prisoners who had to serve in the Sonderkommando survived, and later bore witness to the crimes; some secret notes and diaries by various chroniclers have also survived.
Early in 1943 and again in 1944 there were plans to build another, even bigger extermination and incineration plant in Auschwitz, crematorium VI, but it was never made. By the time the mass transports arrived from Hungary in May 1944, after a construction period of barely a year the long-planned siding into Birkenau camp was ready, just next to crematoria II and III, the one that the SS dubbed the ‘Jewish ramp’.
Deportees from all over Europe were allowed to bring between 30 and 50 kilos of luggage to the camp, which was taken from them immediately after their arrival. Up to 2,000 prisoners worked in two shifts as a clearing squad to collect and sort the bundles of food, household goods, clothes and medicine; furniture and carpets also ended up in the camp, along with currency, clocks and jewellery. The personal effects were stored in thirty barracks surrounded with barbed wire, which were built following the construction of camp section BIIg at the end of 1943. In camp jargon the storage grounds were called ‘Canada’–after the country which, in the eyes of the Polish prisoners who had coined the term, was immeasurably wealthy. Working in ‘Canada’ was seen as a privilege, and objects from the stores, which were purloined despite extremely severe punishments, became a valuable currency in the camp.
This plunder was state property: the Reichsbank received money and precious metals, and textiles, shoes and household goods went to ethnic German settlers; IG Farben, the Todt Organisation, the Reichsjugendführung (‘Reich Youth Leadership’) and various concentration camps also benefited. Luftwaffe pilots, U-boat crews and bombed-out residents of Berlin received (the less valuable) wristwatches. Several hundred fully laden railway trucks left the camp in 1943. Every month gold, jewellery and currency ended up in at least two lead-lined boxes, each of which is supposed to have weighed over a ton, in trucks headed for Berlin.
Vast amounts of money and valuables vanished into the pockets of the SS men of Auschwitz, who helped themselves unscrupulously despite the threat of the death penalty. If suspicions were aroused, the men covered for one another, which is why discoveries like that of the commission led by SS-Sturmbannführer Konrad Morgen in July 1943 were quietly forgotten.
The civilian population could not help but see that the warehouses of the camp were full of desirable treasures. It speaks volumes about the perception of events in Auschwitz that families from the SS settlement, and also civilians from outside, applied to the camp administration to find out whether the goods might be for sale, or perhaps even to be had for free.
The murder of the Jews
At the end of March 1942 the first mass transports organized by the RSHA arrived in Auschwitz–Birkenau. On the night of 25 March 1,000 arrived; two days later about 800 Jewish women from Slovakia; on 30 March there followed more than 1,100 Jewish men and women of various nationalities from French internment camps. The Jews, whose labour force had been expressly requested by the RSHA, were not murdered immediately, but registered and received into the camp. Systematic extermination operations began in May 1942– the victims were Jews from Upper Silesia, Slovakia, France, Belgium and the Netherlands – and from July 1942 they became the rule.
There were presumably pragmatic reasons why mass transports from western Europe to Auschwitz–Birkenau were introduced from summer 1942, because after the Wehrmacht’s spring offensive transport was blocked both to Majdanek and to the Operation Reinhard camps. To all appearances, Auschwitz–Birkenau served as a place of last resort. The technology of murder was now expanded, and the killing capacity increased.
On 17 and 18 July 1942, Himmler came on a two-day inspection of the camp. He visited the agricultural estate, and granted permission for some building projects, but at the centre of his visit was the demonstration of a mass killing. He had the different stages presented to him, using a transport from the Netherlands: from prisoner selection to killing in the gas chamber of ‘bunker 2’, and the deployment of the Sonderkommando. At the evening reception in the house of the Gauleiter (‘district leader’) of Upper Silesia, Fritz Bracht, the Reichsführer-SS is said to have expressed great satisfaction. Before he visited the building site in Monowitz with senior IG Farben managers the following day, he promoted camp commandant Höss to SS-Obersturmbannführer. Shortly afterwards Himmler determined that the General Government, with the exception of a few collection camps, was to be ‘Jew-free’ by the end of the year.
In Auschwitz, the number of mass transports of Jews from the whole of Europe rose month by month. If Jews had formed only a small proportion of the prisoners at the start of the extermination operations, from now on they formed the largest group. Arriving transports were no longer registered and numbered, but murdered directly after the selection process. The transports from western Europe were followed by Jews from countries that were German allies, and whose governments had consented to the deportation: Romania, Croatia, Finland and Norway, and later Bulgaria, Italy and Hungary. Other countries and regions later joined in, including Yugoslavia, Denmark, Greece and the southern part of France at the end of 1942 and the start of 1943.
The first German Jews on a transport organized by the RSHA arrived from Vienna in mid-July 1942. German Jews from Beuthen had already been transported to Auschwitz in February 1942, probably in connection with regional anti-Jewish measures in Upper Silesia. In November and December 1942 the first mass transports from the Old Reich followed from Berlin. After the order was given in 1942 that the concentration camps in the Old Reich were to be made judenrein (‘Jew-clean’), the 2,000 Jews imprisoned there were brought to Auschwitz– Birkenau. Because of a drastic labour shortage, the regime revised this measure in March 1944; Jewish prisoners then returned to the camps to work for the munitions industry, chiefly underground (especially in Mittelbau-Dora, which belonged to Buchenwald, and Kaufering, a sub-camp complex outside Dachau).
A transit camp to mass extermination in Auschwitz– Birkenau was the ghetto of Theresienstadt (Terezin). Here, old Jews from inside the Reich, Jewish soldiers from the First World War and their families, as well as Mischlinge (‘half-castes’), who were considered to be Jews after the Nuremberg laws, as well as Jewish spouses from dissolved ‘mixed marriages’ and Jews from the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were imprisoned. The deportations from Theresienstadt began on 8 September 1943. About 18,000 men and women were brought to the so-called ‘family camp’, the separated-off BIIb section of Birkenau. What was unusual – at least temporarily – was their treatment: the Jews of Theresienstadt were neither separated according to sex nor subjected to the selection process, and they did not have to give up their luggage; they were allowed to keep their civilian clothes, and the children were allowed to stay with the
adults. They received all kinds of privileges, and only some of them were assigned to the work units. There were a school and a kindergarten, housed in a barracks that they were allowed to paint with fairy-tale scenes.
Like the Theresienstadt ghetto, the family camp in Birkenau served the propaganda purposes of the regime. Its goal was to rebut the information that was spreading around the world of the murder of the Jews. The privileges granted the Jews from Theresienstadt lasted for about six months, and then the SS disbanded the family camp in two stages; almost all the inmates were murdered in March and July 1944, and about 3,000 were transferred to another camp.
In the summer of 1944 the mass extermination reached a final peak. Up to 10,000 Hungarian Jews arrived each day for selection at the newly built ‘Jews’ ramp’. Between 15 May and 9 July about 438,000 people appeared there; about 15 per cent were taken into the camp, and all the others were killed immediately. Their murder was one of the biggest extermination operations of all. Hungary had refused deportations for a long time, despite massive pressure from the Germans. But after the country was militarily occupied, and a satrap government had been formed, the exterminations began there too – led by Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of the Jewish transports in the RSHA. Coordination of the mass murder was also performed at a high level within the camp itself: Rudolf Höss returned to Auschwitz for this special task. Within a few weeks Höss had fulfilled his mission; awarded the War Merit Cross first and second class, he left the camp on 29 July 1944 to go back to Berlin.
Auschwitz: A History Page 8