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| The gates say "work will set you free." |
Auschwitz was a German Nazi concentration camp which existed in the years 1940–1945. Its first prisoners were Poles. Initially the inmates also included a small group of Jews and some Germans; the latter generally performed supervisory roles in the camp. In subsequent years prisoners of other nationalities were also sent there. From 1942 the vast majority of those sent to Auschwitz were Jews and they also accounted for the largest number of its victims. Other very large groups of inmates and victims included the Poles, the Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.
Throughout its existence the camp was systematically expanded, as a result of which it eventually consisted of three camps, that is the Main Camp (from 1943 called Auschwitz I), Birkenau (Auschwitz II) and Monowitz (Auschwitz III) with dozens of its sub-camps. Presented below can only be a limited outline of this vast subject, one that primarily refers to the Main Camp and Birkenau. However, the described situation of various groups of camp inmates, their living and working conditions as well as how they were treated by the SS guards and inmate functionaries was very similar in other parts of the concentration camp complex.
Konzentrationslager Auschwitz was set up in pre-war Polish Army barracks on the outskirts of the Polish town of Oświęcim. In 1939, as result of Nazi Germany’s invasion and Poland’s lost defensive war, Poland’s western territories, including Oświęcim, were incorporated into the Third Reich. The town of Oświęcim became Auschwitz and that was also the name given to the camp, which, like other Nazi concentration camps, was a state institution, run by the SS and funded by the German state budget. With time, Auschwitz became the largest concentration camp ever founded by the Third Reich authorities.
In 1941 the SS authorities began expanding the Main Camp and building a new camp on the site of a neighbouring village called Brzezinka. First they evicted the inhabitants of several nearby settlements and converted the evacuated area into a ‘zone of interests’, within which the camp had its own arable and animal husbandry farms. In 1942, on the site of the village of Monowice they founded a third camp, called Buna or Monowitz, near a chemical factory complex built by the German IG Farbenindustrie concern. In time, Auschwitz became the largest Third Reich concentration camp complex.
American aerial reconnaissance photograph of the Auschwitz/Oświęcim region. Auschwitz II-Birkenau can be seen in the far left and a little to the right of it, Auschwitz I. Visible in the centre of the photograph is the chemical factory complex including part of the factory street grid and near its bottom right corner is Auschwitz III-Monowitz.
On account of the difficulty in managing such a vast complex, in November 1943 Auschwitz was divided into three largely autonomous camps. The first of these, Auschwitz I, included the Main Camp and the SS garrison headquarters, whose commandant and SS garrison commander was ‘senior’ to the commandants of the other camps. Auschwitz I also included the central offices of the political department and prisoner employment department. The second camp, built on the site of the village of Brzezinka, was called Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Here the commandant was also in charge of several sub-camps located next to arable and livestock farms within the camp’s ‘zone of interests’. The commandant of the third camp, located in Monowice and called Auschwitz III, was also in charge of 30 sub-camps set up next to industrial plants and coal mines in Silesia, western Lesser Poland, Zagłębie Dąbrowskie as well as Bohemia and Moravia. The inmates of these sub-camps were forced to do slave labour for German companies.
It is accepted that the camp started operating on 14 June 1940, when the first transport of 728 Polish political prisoners was delivered from a prison in Tarnów. From then on Poles were sent to the camp from all parts of German occupied Poland until the autumn of 1944. Up until mid-1942 they constituted the majority of Auschwitz inmates.
A large group of prisoners were members of the Polish intelligentsia, who were considered dangerous by the German authorities on account of the authority they had among compatriots. The Germans considered these people the most likely to organise and direct a resistance movement. The camp also held other Poles involved in conspiratorial activities, people arrested during street roundups, peasants evicted from the Zamość region as well as Warsaw inhabitants sent to Auschwitz during that city’s uprising. Moreover, Poles were deported to Auschwitz for breaking work discipline. In the camp they were given a different category, that of correctional prisoners and, unlike other inmates, they served limited sentences of 6 to 8 weeks. The Auschwitz camp was also where Poles not registered as inmates were executed on the basis of security police court-martial death sentences. From February 1943 such a court-martial was also held within the camp. The prisoners in police custody were called police prisoners , and before their trial they were held in Block 11 (the concentration camp jail). It has been estimated that some 140–150,000 Poles were sent to Auschwitz and that at least half of them were killed.
In the first years of the camp’s existence SS and German prisoner functionaries treated Polish prisoners with extreme brutality, which combined with appalling sanitary conditions, hunger and widespread diseases, resulted in many deaths. Moreover, up to the spring of 1943 sick and exhausted Polish prisoners as well as those of other nations underwent selections in the hospitals and other parts of the camp. Those selected by SS physicians were killed in the gas chambers or with an injection of phenol into the heart.
Poles were also the victims of SS executions, most often shootings. Yet in subsequent years the situation of this national group somewhat improved. As a result of the camp being expanded, some of the Poles took up a number of the middle management posts in the prisoner hierarchy, thanks to which they were able to ensure slightly better conditions for themselves and their colleagues. Moreover, from the end of 1942 onwards they were allowed to receive food parcels, thanks to which they had a little more strength. Nevertheless, Polish prisoners continued to die or be killed, even if not to such a large extent as during initial phase of the camp’s existence.
Before the mass murder of Jews in Auschwitz began in 1942 the group of Jewish prisoners held at the camp was relatively small. For example, according to partially preserved camp documents, from 21 May to 22 December 1941 there were 9,415 registered prisoners excluding Soviet POWs, of whom 1,079 (11.5%) were Jews. Then from the spring of 1942 the Nazis started deporting Jews to Auschwitz in mass transports. Only a small number of these Jews were registered in the camp, while the rest were killed in the gas chambers immediately after arrival . Moreover, the German Nazis continued to send other Jews to the camp along with prisoners of other nationalities. In total approximately 1.1 million Jews were deported to Auschwitz, 1 million of whom died there. Of these some 100,000 were those registered as camp inmates while almost 900,000 were killed in the gas chambers immediately after arrival.
Throughout the camp’s existence its authorities treated the Jews with exceptional ruthlessness. Jews were at the very bottom of the prisoner hierarchy, constantly humiliated and maltreated by the SS and prisoner functionaries. They were usually given the hardest jobs and a large number of them were directed to the penal unit. They were the first to succumb to hunger as, unlike other prisoners, Jews were not allowed to receive food parcels. Moreover, Jews were chosen by SS doctors to be killed during selections throughout the period, i.e. up to the autumn of 1944, which were conducted in the hospitals and other parts of the camp.
In the years 1942–1944, as part of the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’, Auschwitz also performed the role of the main centre for the mass extermination of the Jews. They were deported to the camp in very large transports organised by the Reich Main Security Office from countries occupied by or allied to Nazi Germany
One of the objectives of the war started by the Third Reich on 22 June 1941 was to destroy Communism. For this reason the German Nazi authorities ordered captured political commissars and other representatives of the Communist intelligentsia to be eliminated. During the war such jobs were performed by police task forces. However, some of the commissars avoided identification and were dispersed among ordinary prisoners of war. In order to find them as well as members of the Soviet intelligentsia and Jews, security police units of several people became active in POW camps. The commissars they identified were to be killed in the nearest concentration camp. According to prisoner accounts, already in July/August 1941 groups comprising what, as much would suggest, were most probably commissars were brought to Auschwitz and without registration killed. Then in the first days of September a group of 600 prisoners of war were delivered. Together with 250 Polish prisoners who were sick, they were murdered in the basement of Block 11 with the use of Zyklon B. This was the first case of mass extermination by gassing in the camp.
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| The basement of Block 11, where in early September 1941 a group of 600 prisoners of war as well as 250 sick Polish prisoners were killed with the use of Zyklon B. This was the first case of mass extermination with the use of gas in the camp. |
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| Plaque commemorating about 600 prisoners of war as well as 250 sick Polish prisoners murdered with the use of Zyklon B in the basement of Block 11 in early September 1941. |
In October 1941, the SS authorities isolated part of the Main Camp for some 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war. The main task of these Soviet POWs was to build a camp in the fields of the village of Brzezinka, which, according to plans, was to hold over 100,000 prisoners. In the first months mortality among the POWs was high. Every day some 60 people died, chiefly as a result of executions, beatings, cruel tortures devised by SS guards and inmate functionaries as well as the physical exhaustion of hard labour, malnutrition and disease. In March 1942 the several hundred POWs who were still alive were moved to the newly built barracks in Birkenau. Smaller groups of Soviet POWs continued to be transported to the Auschwitz camps in subsequent years. By the end of 1942 their number was 150 and it rose to 900 in the summer of 1944. In the autumn of that year most of them were transferred to camps in the Reich’s interior. At the last Auschwitz roll call, on 17 January 1945, there were 96 Soviet prisoners of war.
It has been estimated that at least 15,000 POWs were deported to Auschwitz. Of these 12,000 were registered, whereas approximately 3,000 were not registered and soon murdered. In total over 14,000 POWs died in the camp, several hundred were transferred to other camps inside the German Reich and several dozen escaped.
In March 1942 German Nazis also started sending women to Auschwitz. In total they accounted for some 30 per cent of registered camp inmates 130,000 out of the c. 400,000 registered and presumably half the Jewish victims murdered in the gas chambers directly after arrival. Initially women inmates were held in an isolated part of the Main Camp, then from August 1942 onwards in Birkenau. Also in 1942 the Nazis started sending to the camp whole families with children, first Jewish and Polish and later also Roma and Belarusian. In total over 230,000 children and youths were deported, the decided majority Jewish. And most of the Jewish children and youths were murdered in the gas chambers. Those children and youths who became inmates were chiefly held in Birkenau, whereas smaller groups were held in the Main Camp and some of the sub-camps. Initially they performed odd jobs, but with time most of them worked together with the adults. Very young children, chiefly Poles and Belarusians were sent away from the camp to be Germanized. Moreover, some of the Jewish and Roma children became the victims of pseudo-medical experiments conducted by SS physicians, chiefly Dr Josef Mengele.
When the women’s camp was first set up, pregnant women were deemed unfit to work and therefore, regardless of nationality, put to death. In the first half of 1943, the camp authorities stopped killing women who were pregnant or in labour, but they continued murdering the new-born babies. Then presumably in May 1943 new-born, non-Jewish children stopped being killed, too. However, on account of the camp’s extremely inhospitable conditions, most of these children soon died, anyway. The few infants that managed to live long enough were registered as ‘newly arrived’. With certain exceptions they, too, received prisoner numbers, which were tattooed on a thigh or a buttock and only very rarely on their arm. Children born to Jewish women had no right to live and were murdered immediately. This practice ceased only in October 1944. Lack of sufficient documentation prohibits us from establishing exactly how many children were born in Auschwitz and how many died or were killed after birth.
The system of marking prisoners with triangles so-called ‘Winkels’ originated from the German concentration camps that had already existed before the war. It was introduced in Auschwitz in 1940, with certain modifications and in the case of some groups of prisoners it was not applied at all.
Auschwitz from the very start functioned as an extermination camp in which the terrible living conditions created by the SS authorities contributed to the physical exhaustion and death of prisoners. The camp adapted 20 brick built blocks; 6 two-storey and 14 single-storey from a former Polish Army compound. After adding extra storeys to the single-storey blocks and building eight new blocks from scratch, a camp complex of 28 brick built blocks was formed. Most of these were used to house prisoners, while the remainder were used as the camp hospital, warehouses, offices and a jail.
There were usually two large rooms on the first floor and several smaller chambers on the ground floor. The two-storey blocks were officially intended for approximately 700 prisoners. However, there were situations when the number rose to even 1,200.
In the first year or so of the camp’s existence most of the prisoners’ rooms had no beds or any other furniture. The inmates slept on paillasses laid out on the floor, which at reveille they had to stack up in the corner, and lay them out again in the evening. The overcrowding meant that inmates could only sleep on one side, arranged in three rows. Three-tier bunks started being gradually introduced in February 1941. Theoretically the three-tier bunks were for three prisoners but more often than not two shared every bed. Wooden cupboards, tables and stools also started being introduced. The rooms were heated with coal stoves. When the camp was expanded, toilets and washrooms were installed on the ground floors of every block. However, the very small number of sanitary facilities (22 toilets and 42 taps with gutters) in proportion to the vast number of prisoners living on the two floors meant that the possibilities of using them were extremely limited. This problem was further compounded by the block functionaries, who issued various orders and prohibitions, for instance allowing prisoners only a short space of time to attend to their physiological needs.
At Birkenau prisoners lived in brick barracks and wooden barracks. The former were built in sector BI, the oldest part of the camp. They had only one entrance and 17 barred windows. Inside there were 60 brick partitions, each with three levels of bunks, creating in total 180 bunks, on each of which four people were to sleep. According to SS plans, each of these barracks were to house over 700 prisoners. Initially these blocks had dirt floors, but with time these were covered with a layer of bricks or concrete. They were practically unheated in the winter, apart from two iron stoves that were quite inadequate for such a large interior. The barracks lacked sanitary facilities, which only started being installed in 1944.
Wooden stable barracks were also built in sector BI but above all in sectors BII and BIII. Instead of windows, these barracks had a row of skylights in the upper part of the roof. The entrance into these barracks was through double doors in the gable walls. For almost the entire length of the interior there was chimney duct that was supposed to provide heat in the winter. However, this failed to work on account the sheer size of the room and inadequate insulation. Each interior intended to hold over 400 prisoners was divided into 18 partitions, originally intended for 52 horses. Two partitions nearest to the entrance were reserved for the prisoner functionaries, whereas two partitions at the very end of the barrack had containers for human waste. Installed in the remaining 14 partitions were three- level wooden beds or three-tier berths on which up to 15 prisoners could sleep. Prisoners in the brick barracks slept on straw strewn on the wooden bunk planks, whereas in the wooden barracks the wooden beds or berths were covered with paper mattresses stuffed with so-called wood wool. The prisoners were issued with blankets that were usually dirty and badly worn.
The prisoners received three meals a day. In the mornings all they were given was half a litre of ‘coffee’ (a watery ersatz grain beverage) or ‘tea’ (a herbal beverage). The noon meal was about a litre of ‘soup’, usually comprising some potato, rutabaga as well as small quantities of kasha (groats), rye flour and Avo food extract. For supper the prisoners received about 300 grams of black bread and either 25 grams of sausage, black pudding or margarine, or a tablespoon of marmalade or some cheese. One must stress that the nutritional value of these meals with inadequate animal protein, fat, vitamins and minerals was very low.
Inadequate quantities of food and its low calorific value, combined with hard labour, inevitably contributed to the destruction of the body, which used up available reserves of fat, muscle protein and internal organ tissues. This led to progressive emaciation and starvation disease, the direct or indirect cause of a significant number of concentration camp deaths. Prisoners suffering from this disease were called ‘Muselmänner’ and fell victim to the selections carried out by SS physicians. As unfit to work, they were sent to the gas chamber. The situation somewhat improved in the second half of 1942, when the camp authorities allowed prisoners to receive food parcels. However, as stated earlier, this privilege did not include the Jews or Soviet prisoners of war.
Clothing quite inadequate to concentration camp conditions also had a negative influence on prisoners’ health. When they were received in the camp, both men and women had to leave in deposit their clothes and underwear. Next the prisoners were sent to be washed, after which they were issued with concentration camp clothing, made of denim in grey-blue stripes (and popularly called ‘stripes’). The men received: shirts, long johns, tunics, trousers, caps and clogs completely out of wood or wood with a leather top. The women received: blouses, skirts, used underwear, tunics, headscarves and clogs. Coats were issued in winter, sewn out of a thicker material which nevertheless failed to protect prisoners form the cold. That is why, despite the danger of being punished, prisoners would frequently put pieces of newspaper or various types of material under their tunics. The lack of appropriate clothing, especially in winter, malnourishment and work in difficult conditions led to infections that resulted in the deaths of many prisoners.
It was only in September 1941 that prisoners were first allowed to wear sweaters and warm underwear sent in parcels from their families. Next, starting in February 1943, on account of increasing difficulties with supplies, prisoners were allowed to wear civilian clothes taken from the inmates’ deposit. These clothes were marked, e.g. by having pieces of striped material sewn onto the back or stripes painted on with oil paint.
Slave labour was another means of destroying prisoners. With time, however, as the war dragged on and the Germans increasingly encountered setbacks on the front, the significance of work as a method of extermination decreased. Instead the slave labour of Auschwitz prisoners became more important to the German economy. In the camp the workday began very early in the morning. At the sound of a gong the prisoners got up and, constantly harried by inmate functionaries, tidied their dormitories. Next they tried to wash, attend to their physiological needs and finally drink some ‘coffee’ or ‘tea’. At the sound of the second gong they ran to the square to be counted during roll call. If there were any discrepancies in numbers, roll call dragged on, which, especially in times of bad weather, was exceptionally tiring for the prisoners. After it was over, the order was given to form Kommandos (work squads). These work squads of prisoners marched out accompanied by the music of the camp orchestra. Prisoners who worked far beyond the camp (and marched out earlier) or within the camp did not attend roll call. Morning roll call was abolished in February 1944 in order to make full use of the working day.
Both within and outside the camp the prisoners were often made to work beyond their strength. They usually had only their bare hands or primitive tools and no means of transportation. They worked demolishing the houses of evicted inhabitants, on various building projects (including the expansion of the camp and construction of the vast Buna Werke chemical factory complex), loading and unloading all sorts of materials, in the camp workshops, kitchens, warehouses, bathhouses and prisoner hospitals as well as sorting the property of Jewish victims. Starting in 1942, they were gradually employed in mines and industrial plants, chiefly in Silesia and western Lesser Poland. Some of them performed various ancillary tasks in the camp administration, in the construction division offices, surveying, draining fields as well as on arable, livestock and fish farms. Much of this work was also performed by women prisoners.
Female prisoners of the penal unit clearing one of the ponds.
Painting entitled ‘Penal unit at work’ by former prisoner Janina Tollik (1946).
Photo: Collections Department A-BSM.
Painting entitled ‘Penal unit at work’ by former prisoner Janina Tollik (1946).
Photo: Collections Department A-BSM.
At work and outside work prisoners were pitilessly forced to be absolutely disciplined. They were terrorised by SS guards and inmate functionaries, who shouted at them, beat them and applied various cruel forms of harassment to instil a constant feeling of fear and at the same time make them perform their work faster. Most prisoners succumbed to the pressure and quickly lost strength, which generally led to physical exhaustion and hastened their demise.
In the summertime work lasted for 10 to 11 hours, while in winter it was reduced to 9. At midday the prisoners had a break, during which they could consume a meal. The break usually lasted an hour, but could be lengthened or shortened depending on the time of year. Initially, after the break, there was a roll call, but later this was abandoned. The exhausted prisoners returned to the camp before dusk, escorted by SS guards and, as in the morning, to the music of the camp orchestra. They would frequently carry the corpses of their colleagues who had died or been killed during work. After their return, there was the evening roll call, which like the morning roll call, could be extended if not all the prisoners were accounted for. Once roll call was finished, the prisoners received a portion of bread with some addition. From then on they had free time to try and wash, go to the toilet or meet friends in other blocks before the first gong, which gave the signal for all prisoners to return to their own blocks. At 21.00 the second gong sounded to signal night silence.
On Sundays and holidays prisoners did not generally go to work. The exceptions were prisoners employed in the mines or industrial plants, who only had one or two free Sundays a month. During off-work days prisoners mainly tidied their blocks, mended and cleaned their clothes, had their hair cut and shaved. They could also listen to concerts by the camp orchestra and once every fortnight send letters to their families.
The system of punishments was another means of exterminating prisoners. In Auschwitz punishments were executed according to regulations on the basis of orders issued by the commandant or Lagerführer as well as reports submitted by SS guards or inmate functionaries. The most commonly punished offences included: any attempt to acquire additional food, evading work or failure to perform work properly, failure to perform any activity within regulation time or in the right place, wearing clothing items contrary to regulations or attempting to commit suicide [!]. The most frequent forms of punishment included: floggings, incarceration in Auschwitz I Block 11 cells, being suspended on a post or put into the penal unit.
The punishment of flogging was generally performed in public, usually during evening roll call and most often on a specially devised table. The prisoner’s legs were held immobilised in a wooden box, his trunk rested on the table and his hands were stretched out before him. The flogging was performed by SS personnel or inmate functionaries with thick sticks or whips. The punished prisoner himself had to count the number of strokes in German. If he made a mistake in counting, the punishment was repeated. Officially, the maximum number of strokes was 25, but in practice it all depended on the SS or inmate functionary performing the punishment. As a result the prisoners often had phlegmonous abscesses on their buttocks, injured kidneys as well as torn muscles and skin.
Auschwitz was also a place where the SS carried out executions. Officially, the decision to execute prisoners suspected of committing serious crimes was made by the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). In practice, however, some of the executions were carried out on the orders of the Auschwitz Political Department. At first, sentenced prisoners were shot dead in gravel pits (from which gravel was also extracted) around the camp, but later these shootings were conducted in the closed courtyard of Block 11. Those sentenced to death were led out of cells in the basement of this block and on the ground floor they had to strip naked. Next they were led out into the courtyard and made stand before a specially constructed wall. There they were killed with a shot in the back of the head from a small calibre pistol. It has been estimated that almost 1,000 prisoners previously held in Block 11 cells were killed in this way as well as the previously mentioned 4,500 ‘police prisoners’ sentenced to death by the court martial. The number of executed inmates who had been summoned straight from the camp as well as the numbers of Soviet prisoners of war and Poles delivered from outside the camp to be executed are not known.
Every so often there were executions by hanging. These were usually the hangings of one or several prisoners who had been caught trying to escape. They were conducted in public, most often during roll call to terrorise the inmates. One of the most infamous executions was the hanging of 12 prisoners from the surveyors’ Kommando. This was carried out on 19 July 1943 as punishment for the escape of three of their colleagues. Equally well known in the camp was the execution of Edward Galiński and the attempt to execute Mala Zimetbaum, who had together escaped on 24 June 1944, but were a dozen or so days later captured. The very last hangings were carried out on 6 January 1945. On that day four Jewish women were hanged because they had provided the Sonderkommando with the explosives next used in their revolt. In 1941 the camp authorities retaliated against prisoner escapes by sentencing other prisoners to death through starvation. The victims were hostages selected during roll call from the same block or Kommando as that of the prisoner who had escaped. They were taken to the dark cells of Block 11 and left there without any food until the escaped prisoner was found. However, in all known cases the hostages died of starvation before this happened. During the selection of hostages on 29 July 1941 the Franciscan monk Fr. Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to take the place of one of the selected prisoners. After two weeks in the starvation cell, he was ultimately killed with an injection of phenol straight into his heart. In the years 1942 and 1943 the camp authorities used execution through starvation only sporadically and later they abandoned this practice altogether.
Living conditions in the camp meant that a considerable number of prisoners relatively quickly succumbed to various diseases. The lack of sanitary facilities, being forced to wear dirty clothes and overcrowded living quarters led to the spreading of skin diseases, especially scabies. In the winter as well as late autumn and early spring there were numerous cases of colds, pneumonia and frostbite, often leading to necrosis of the extremities. As a result of vitamin deficiency and infections many prisoners had boils, abscesses and ulcers. The brutal treatment the prisoners received from the SS and inmate functionaries led to numerous cases of broken limbs, muscle and joint injuries as well as phlegmons on the buttocks. In the years 1942–1943 there were epidemics of various diseases, above all typhus, which claimed the greatest number of victims. Many inmates suffered from tuberculosis, meningitis, pemphigus and dysentery. Another common problem was starvation, leading to extreme physical exhaustion. These diseases were usually terribly severe and in camp conditions very difficult to cure.
The SS authorities did set up hospitals for the prisoners (so-called Revier – sickbay), but, on account of the terrible conditions and hopelessly inadequate medical care, in many cases becoming a patient resulted in death. Especially in the initial period of the camp’s existence prisoner patients had to lie in overcrowded hospital rooms, in dirty shirts or naked on paillasses saturated with faeces, urine and purulent secretions. In addition, the hospitals were infested with fleas and lice, whereas the barracks in Birkenau were also plagued by rats. In such circumstances the provision of medical treatment was extremely difficult, all the more so because these hospitals lacked medical equipment and medicines. And yet despite this, many a time the treatment provided by prisoner physicians had positive effects, while a stay in hospital also allowed some prisoners to rest and recover their strength. On the other hand, prisoner hospital patients were subjected to selections conducted by SS physicians until November 1944. The selected patients faced death in the gas chamber or by means of an injection into the heart, most usually of phenol. As mentioned earlier, these selections initially concerned all prisoner patients, but from the spring of 1943 only the Jews.
Some of the physicians at Auschwitz conducted diverse pseudo-medical experiments on male and female prisoners. Among them was Prof. Carl Clauberg, who worked on a method for the mass sterilisation of female prisoners. Under the pretence of carrying out a gynaecological test, he introduced a chemical into their genital tracts. This chemical caused inflammation and after a few weeks the fusion and effective obstruction of the women’s fallopian tubes. Other effects of these experiments carried out on his victims, Jewish female prisoners, included fever, peritonitis and profuse bleeding of the genital tracts. As a result some of them died, while others were deliberately killed in order to conduct post-mortem examinations.
Carl Clauberg.
Born in Wupperhoff on 18 September 1898. Doctor of Medicine, professor of the University of Königsberg. During the Second World War was in charge of the St. Hedwig Gynaecological Clinic in Chorzów (Königshütte). At the request of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, conducted sterilisation experiments on Auschwitz Jewish female prisoners from the end of 1942 to January 1945. After the war, held in Soviet captivity until October 1955 and after released settled in the Federal Republic of Germany. Arrested on 21 November that same year and stripped of all his medical titles. Moreover, the German Federal Chamber of Physicians revoked his licence to practice medicine. On 9 August 1957 died awaiting trial in prison in Kiel.
Extant gynaecological chair from Block 10.
Photo: A-BSM.
Photo: A-BSM.
Auschwitz I. Block No. 10, where from April 1943 to May 1944 Carl Clauberg conducted experiments on female prisoners. Photo: A-BSM.
Sterilisation experiments on groups of Jewish male and female prisoners were also conducted by the medical doctor Horst Schumann. Using two Roentgen cameras he beamed X-rays onto men’s testicles and women’s ovaries to try and determine the optimum dosage of radiation required to cause total infertility. Consequences of this irradiation included severe burns, radiation dermatitis and hard to heal purulent lesions. After a few weeks some of the male and female prisoners were surgically castrated for the purpose of subjecting their organs to laboratory tests and obtaining comparative histological material. Other prisoners, however, as a result of selections in the camp, were sent to the gas chamber.
SCHUMANN
Horst Schumann. Photo: A-BSMA.
Doctor of medicine, member of NSDAP, Luftwaffe lieutenant, SS-Sturmbannführer. Born in Halle on 1 May 1906. From August 1939 head of the Grafeneck euthanasia centre in the Wurttemberg region, next (from December 1940) worked in the Sonnenstein euthanasia centre near Pirna. First arrived at Auschwitz in July 1941 to select chronically ill and infirm prisoners as part of Action 14 f 13 (which was a continuation of Action T4, which also involved the killing of sick and disabled people). During this selection sentenced to death (under the pretext of sending them to a sanatorium in Dresden) were 575 prisoners. They were killed with carbon monoxide in the bathhouse of the Sonnenstein euthanasia centre. Came to Auschwitz a second time towards the end of 1942 to work on a cheap and speedy method of sterilisation. Conducted sterilisation experiments using X-rays on several hundred male and female Jewish prisoners. After the war lived in West Germany until 1951, when, threatened with arrest, fled to Japan. In 1955 settled in Sudan, then in 1959 fled to Nigeria. In 1960 settled in in Ghana, where under the pressure of world opinion arrested and extradited to West Germany. Trial proceedings against him were begun in Frankfurt am Main on 23 September 1970. However, these were discontinued in April 1971 due to his ill health.
Another physician, Dr Josef Mengele, conducted anthropological research into various racial groups, especially the Roma, as well as the phenomenon of twins and the physiology and pathology of dwarfism (hereditary traits in twins and dwarfs). The Jewish and Roma twins as well as people with other congenital anomalies at his disposal were subjected to medical scrutiny, including anthropometric, morphological, dental and surgical examinations. Next they were photographed, plaster casts were made of their jaws and prints were also taken of their fingertips and toes. Once these tests were completed, those examined were killed with an injection of phenol into the heart, so that autopsies and comparative examinations of the internal organs could also be carried out. Mengele was also interested in people who had different coloured irises (heterochromia). He put various types of chemicals on their eyes, which caused numerous complications, including blindness. Moreover, Mengele studied the causes and possible treatment of noma faciei (gangrenous stomatitis or water cancer), a disease that affected the Roma in the so-called Gypsy camp. The sufferers, a large proportion of whom were children, for a while received pharmacological treatment and were given a special diet. Then on Mengele’s instructions selected children were killed and their bodies (or body parts) were next sent to the SS Institute of Hygiene in Rajsko for histopathological tests
MENGELE
Dr Josef Mengele in 1943.
Photo: A-BSMA.
Photo: A-BSMA.
Born in Günzburg on 16 March 1911, doctor of philosophy and medicine. Member of NSDAP. In the years 1938–1940 served in the Wehrmacht, later drafted into the Waffen-SS. From February to May 1943 served on the front and was wounded in action. At own request transferred to Auschwitz to conduct medical and anthropological research. Given the post of physician in the ‘Gypsy camp’ of Birkenau BIIe. From August to December 1944 was chief physician of Auschwitz II-Birkenau in charge of all the camp’s male and female inmate sectors. In November 1944 also took up the post of physician at the SS hospital in Birkenau. At Auschwitz carried out experiments concerning multiple pregnancies and the reasons for their occurrence, the hereditary characteristics of twins and dwarfs as well as water cancer (noma). Never punished for the committed crimes. In 1949 emigrated to Argentina. Frequently changed places of residence to avoid being tracked down. Died in Brazil in 1979.
Research into changes in the human body resulting from starvation as well as brown urine liver failure was conducted by the University of Münster professor of anatomy Dr Johann Paul Kremer. For this purpose extremely emaciated prisoners in the camp hospital, personally selected by Kremer, were killed with injections straight into the heart and their bodies were used as research ‘material’. Shortly after their death, samples were taken from the liver, pancreas and spleen and secured as specimens. Dr Eduard Wirths, in turn, undertook research into cervical cancer. Especially selected for him was a group of female Jewish prisoners whose vaginal part of the uterus was examined for precancerous conditions. If the disease was suspected or identified, the cervix was amputated and sent to a histological laboratory in Hamburg.
KREMER
Johann Paul Kremer, photograph taken in a Polish prison in 1946 or 1947. A-BSMA.
Born on 26 December 1883. Doctor of medicine and philosophy. Professor of the University of Münster. Member of the NSDAP from 30 July 1932, of the Allgemeine SS from 1935 and of the Waffen SS from 1941. Before arriving at Auschwitz, employed in the SS Chief Sanitary Office in Berlin as well as frontline Waffen SS detachment hospitals in Dachau and Prague. On 30 August 1942 transferred to Auschwitz to replace a camp physician who had fallen ill. Served in this camp until 18 November 1942. There, pursuing his own interests, carried out experiments into brown urine liver failure as well as the effects of exhaustion and starvation on the human body. In the camp wrote a diary of the most important events of the day, including participation in selections. After leaving Auschwitz continued medical service in Waffen SS units stationed in Prague. On 30 January 1943 promoted to the rank of Obersturmführer. After the war extradited to Poland and on 22 December 1947 sentenced by the Supreme National Tribunal to death. This sentence was next commuted to life imprisonment. In 1958 released and re-extradited to West Germany. There again put on trial and found guilty of committing the accused crimes. However, on account of the time spent in a Polish prison, received only a ten-year sentence.
In 1944 Emil Kaschub, a Wehrmacht physician, was directed to Auschwitz to study methods of scrimshanking (pretending to be ill) practiced by German soldiers. This was especially a problem on the Eastern Front, where there were cases of self-inflicted wounds, sores or induced fevers. In his research Kaschub injected or rubbed into the skin of prisoners all sorts of toxic substances. He also gave them oral medications to induce the same symptoms as were reported by German soldiers. His victims were dozens of Jews, in whom he induced inflammations, purulent lesions and hard to heal ulcers, leading to tissue necrosis. As a result of selections in the camp, some of these prisoners were later sent to the gas chamber.
In the years 1941–1944 SS physicians Friedrich Entress, Helmuth Vetter, Eduard Wirths, and to a lesser extent Fritz Klein, Werner Rhode, Hans Wilhelm König, Bruno Weber as well as Victor Capesius (pharmacist and head of camp’s pharmacy) tested the effectiveness of new drugs and medicines given in various forms and in various doses to prisoners suffering from infectious diseases. In many cases the prisoners were deliberately infected for the purpose of these experiments. Consequences of these experiments frequently included vomiting blood, bloody diarrhoea and circulatory disorders. When some of these prisoners died, autopsies were carried out to determine whether the applied drugs caused any changes in the internal organs.
In the first years of its existence (June 1940 to February 1942) Auschwitz functioned similarly to the concentration camps founded in Germany before the war. The high mortality rate among inmates, primarily Poles, resulted from malnutrition, atrocious sanitary conditions, diseases, physically exhausting hard labour and executions. At the time Jews accounted for only a small percentage of the inmate population. They usually died soon after registration and for this reason their presence did not imprint itself in the memories of other prisoners who survived to be liberated. The SS destroyed most of the Auschwitz official documents and that is why there is now not enough data to establish how many Jews were registered in 1940. However, we do know that in the subsequent year approximately 80% of newly arrived Jews died (i.e. a considerably higher percentage than among the Poles, who then still accounted for the majority of inmates). This high mortality rate was due to the fact that the SS authorities directed Jewish prisoners straight to the penal unit. There they died very quickly, usually murdered by Kapos with shovels or poles, or shot by the SS guards. Only later, once the inhuman living conditions, hunger and work beyond physical means began to affect other prisoners, and in large numbers they began falling victim to epidemics, did mortality among the Poles approach the level of mortality among Jews. In the second half of 1941 some of the sick and exhausted prisoners, Poles and Jews, started being killed with phenol injections straight into the heart; then in 1942 they also started being killed in the gas chambers.
Contrary to popular belief, the first gas chamber victims at Auschwitz were not Jews but Poles. Towards the end of July 1941 SS physicians in the hospital blocks selected 575 sick and emaciated prisoners who were next sent to the Sonnenstein euthanasia centre and there killed with carbon monoxide. Also during subsequent mass murders with the use of gas, now within the Auschwitz camp itself, the victims were not Jews but Soviet POWs as well as again sick inmates, chiefly Poles. These crimes, however, may be described as executions in the case of the Soviet POWs or euthanasia in the case of the sick or unfit for work Poles, and they most probably had little to do with the mass extermination of Jews that was being planned by the Nazis at more or less the same time.
The Soviet POWs and camp hospital patients were murdered with a gas called Zyklon B. This was an insecticide fairly widely used in places such as sealed off warehouses and laundries. From 1940 it was also used for this purpose at Auschwitz. From camp commandant Rudolf Höss’ court testimonies we know that the initiator of using this pesticide to kill prisoners was his camp deputy (Lagerführer) SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch. On his instructions, in early September 1943 some 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick inmates were crammed into the basement cells of Block 11, after which the gas was released and the cellar windows were covered with a layer of earth. The applied amount of Zyklon B turned out to be insufficient when after a few hours some of the prisoners still showed signs of life. Therefore the basement windows were reopened and a second, this time more lethal dose of Zyklon B pellets was thrown in.
It soon became apparent that using the cellars of Block 11 was in many ways inconvenient. It meant that each time the entire block had to be evacuated, the jailed inmates had to be moved to other cells and the corpses had next to be transported to a crematorium located on the other side of the camp. That is why the SS set about converting the crematorium mortuary, which was adjacent to the room with furnaces, into a gas chamber. For this purpose four openings were made in the chamber’s beam, on top of which short chimneys were constructed and sealed with felt lined, metal lids.
In this gas chamber were murdered several successive groups of Soviet prisoners of war and – for the first time – sick and emaciated Jews brought over to Auschwitz from forced labour camps in Upper Silesia. These transports, however, did not appear in official registration and were most probably sent to their deaths on verbal orders. This is why we do not know how many Jews were then killed. On the basis of a very limited number of prisoner witness accounts and SS personnel testimonies, we know that the Jews were led in columns straight from the railway station to the square next to the crematorium, which was surrounded by a high wall of concrete slabs. Next an SS officer standing on top of the crematorium building ordered them to undress and leave any luggage they had; he assured them that after being washed and disinfected they would be put into a labour camp where jobs appropriate to their qualifications would be given. Once the Jews, unaware of the dangers, had all entered the chamber, the doors were closed. An SS man in a gas mask would next take off the chimney lids, open the Zyklon B cans and pour the contents straight onto the heads of the victims. The engine of a nearby lorry would be started to drown out the cries of the dying people. Death usually followed after several minutes, depending on air temperature and the amount of Zyklon B used. Once the gas chamber was ventilated, prisoners employed in the crematorium went in and pulled the corpses to the adjacent furnace room. Sometimes, however, the low output of the furnaces and the need to also burn the bodies of prisoners who had died in the camp of ‘natural causes’ meant that the crematorium was unable to cremate the corpses of all the victims. That is why already in the late autumn of 1941 corpses started being transported to Birkenau and buried in mass graves.
In the late summer of 1941, on the instructions of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, preparations started being made to build a very large camp for 100,000 prisoners of war on the site of a Polish village that was razed to the ground after a few months earlier its inhabitants had been evicted. The village was called Brzezinka (Birkenau). It seems that initially this project had nothing to do with the later centre of the mass extermination of Jews. The Soviet prisoners of war were to be used as a labour force in the expansion of local industry and on nearby farms. However, it soon became apparent that the POWs – emaciated, hungry and extremely brutally treated – were dying in droves, while their usefulness as workers was lower than that of the concentration camp prisoners. Out of approximately 10,000 POWs brought to Auschwitz in October 1941, after five months, only several hundred were still alive. Moreover, after the Wehrmacht’s defeat in the battle of Moscow, hopes of capturing subsequent hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers proved illusionary. That is why in January 1942 Himmler decided to replace dying Soviet POWs with strong Jews who were able to work and therefore temporarily excluded from the ‘Final Solution’ plan.
The two twin retort furnaces of the old crematorium, even when later a third furnace was added, proved insufficient in incinerating all the bodies of prisoners who had died or been murdered in the camp. The additional corpses of hundreds of Jews murdered in the gas chamber meant that some of them had to be transported to Birkenau and buried in mass graves. This presumably posed a considerable problem for Commandant Höss. Moreover, crimes committed in the old crematorium could not have escaped the notice of concentration camp inmates (some of whom were at that time released) as well as civilians passing on the nearby Oświęcim to Brzeszcze road. For the above reasons, most probably at the turn of 1942, Höss started searching for a place where one could kill hundreds of people, keep it secret and at the same time solve the problem of disposing of large numbers of corpses.
He finally selected an area on the edge of a forest, not far from the Birkenau camp then under construction and an Oświęcim freight station railway siding where transports could be received. This was the site of a farm belonging before the war to the Harmata family; the farmhouse (of unplastered bricks, thus the ‘red cottage’ name) was easily converted into a makeshift gas chamber. For this purpose the windows were walled up, strong doors were installed and holes made in the walls to throw in the Zyklon B. The interior was divided into two separate rooms – chambers. The corpses could be buried in a nearby meadow to which, in order to facilitate transportation, narrow-gauge tracks were laid. The lack of extant German documentation does not at present allow us to establish which reasons prevailed in this decision. Was it primarily for killing the camp’s Jewish inmates who were no longer fit for work and needed to be ‘replaced’ by others, or was it for other ‘unproductive’ Jews from ghettos and labour camps in Silesia? Perhaps the Nazis came to both these conclusions almost simultaneously. Initially the most important factor for using the ‘little red cottage’ gas chamber was the weather. Winter frosts inhibiting or even prohibiting the digging of graves continued until mid-March, but by the end of the month they gave way. That was when the first transport of Jews was killed in the ‘little red cottage’. As this was before the creation of the first Sonderkommando, the task of burying the victims was assigned to a group selected from among the deported Jews. These Jews were later taken to the Main Camp and, as undesirable witnesses, killed with phenol injections into the heart. After three months, in late June or early August 1942 it was decided that the ‘little red cottage’ lacked the capacity to cope with all the prisoners and deportees intended to be killed. Therefore another building was adapted, one located in a forest clearing in Birkenau. It had belonged to the evicted Wichaj family and its walls were covered with plaster, hence the ‘little white cottage’ name. The conversion was similar to that of the ‘little red cottage’ and the bodies were buried in a nearby glade.
Heinrich Himmler during a visit
to Auschwitz on 17 July 1942.
Camp Commandant
Rudolf Höss on the right.
to Auschwitz on 17 July 1942.
Camp Commandant
Rudolf Höss on the right.
Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz on 17–18 July 1942. The visit, as one may presume, was not exclusively a matter of courtesy on account of Höss’ promotion. The Reichsführer SS wanted to make sure the commandant would be able to cope with the massive influx of transports. He therefore observed the process of exterminating a transport that had arrived from Holland, including the gassing of selected Jews in the gas chamber. On this occasion he ordered that henceforth the bodies of the murdered victims were to be burned on pyres and that the corpses that had been buried were to be burned, too.
Realising these instructions required time, hence it was only towards the end of August that a numerically increased Sonderkommando started burning corpses. For this purpose pits were dug, large enough to contain several hundred bodies arranged alternatingly with layers of branches and logs. Once the pit was full, methanol or petrol was poured on the pyre and ignited. Höss testified after the war that by the end of the year approximately 107,000 corpses were dug up and burned. The burning of corpses on pyres lasted as long as the improvised gas chambers. The ‘little red cottage’ was used until no later than May 1943, after which the building was dismantled and the site levelled. The pyres near the ‘little white cottage’ were probably levelled at more or less the same time. This was when the new Birkenau crematoria and gas chambers started being activated. Soon also the last ‘forest’ sub-camp in Kobiór near Pszczyna (producing logs and firewood for the burning of corpses) was gradually closed.
The first mass transports of Jews from France and Slovakia started arriving at Auschwitz already in the spring of 1942. These were young and fit people, so they automatically became camp inmates without going through any selections. It was only towards the end of April that the transports of Jews from Slovakia started including people who were clearly unfit for work. Among them were mothers with children under the age of 13, who were separated from the others and murdered in a gas chamber. For some reason, however, elderly people were at this stage not selected to be killed.
In early May the first mass selection was carried out on sick prisoners in Birkenau BIb hospital Block 4. Almost all of the emaciated and sick prisoners were killed, there were very few exceptions. Then in mid-May the deportation of Jews from Silesia and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie began and this time those deemed ‘unproductive’ had already been selected in the ghettos. That is why in the subsequent weeks Jews deported to Auschwitz from Będzin, Sosnowiec, Czeladź and Dąbrowa Górnicza were immediately killed in the gas chambers.
Regular selections on the so-called railway ramp (part of the Oświęcim freight station) began in mid-1942.
Selections were conducted as follows: when the train arrived, the SS guards would take up positions on either side of the tracks, next the carriage doors were opened, the newly arrived were ordered out and to leave their suitcases as well as other heavier belongings in the carriages. Initially, many elderly people hesitated from jumping out of the high carriages onto the low ramp, which is why, in order to make the procedure more efficient, the SS had long and narrow wooden platform constructed alongside the tracks. As the columns were being formed, the SS would assure the deportees that they would be taken to a labour camp, where ‘hot soup awaited them’. All those who were sick or old as well as women with children would be transported in trucks, whereas the rest would have to go on foot. The sensible tone of these speeches as well as the expression of concern for the elderly usually had a calming effect. The SS personnel only rarely resorted to force, usually when farewells between family members lasted too long. The decision of whether individual deportees were to be exterminated immediately or work in the camp was made by SS physicians in a matter of a few to a dozen or so seconds on the mere impression they had of a person’s physical condition and age. The entire selection process usually lasted about an hour, or sometimes more if the transport was particularly large.
Next the lorries arrived with those who were destined to be killed in the nearby ‘cottages’. There they had to leave their hand luggage and clothes and next run naked to the ‘bathhouses’ (i.e. gas chambers). The Zyklon B was supplied from a warehouse in the Main Camp in ambulances with large Red Cross signs painted on their sides. This may have been in part a matter of coincidence (the storing and distribution of Zyklon B was the responsibility of department V – the SS garrison’s medical service), but it also served to assuage the fears of the deportees, who frequently interpreted it as another sign of SS concern for those who might faint in the bathhouse. When the number of those sent to be killed was too high or when people started baulking, the SS guards would shout at them and eventually start hitting those who resisted entering the gas chamber with sticks and rifle butts. If despite the use of force no more Jews could be squeezed in, any children and infants left behind in the commotion would be simply pushed in on top of the heads of those crammed inside, while stray adults would be taken aside and shot. Once the door was closed, SS orderlies wearing gas masks would bring the Zyklon B cans and open the lids by striking the openers (sharp edged metal cylinders) with hammers. The apertures were quite high up, so they had to stand on a stool or ladder to tip the Zyklon B pellets in and quickly close the flap. SS physicians were on standby throughout this procedure in case any of the SS orderlies showed symptoms of poisoning and required first aid. There was never any shortage of SS men willing to receive transports as for participating in this ‘special action’ they were given additional rations of sausage, vodka and cigarettes.
A few minutes after the last cries of those being murdered in the gas chambers had ceased, members of the Sonderkommando opened the doors first to ventilate the interior and only some time later to pull out the bodies. Next cursorily trained dentists used pliers to extract gold teeth from the victims’ mouths, while other prisoners cut off their hair. Then the corpses were loaded into the narrow gauge rail trucks and transported directly to the pits, their mass graves.
Auschwitz was the only death camp to cremate the bodies of murdered Jews on an industrial scale. Their bodies were burned not on pyres but in modern and efficient assemblies of crematorium furnaces. It is not entirely clear why the SS authorities decided to invest in the construction of such an extensive crematorium complex. No doubt, in part it resulted from an effective marketing campaign by the company producing the incineration furnaces, Topf und Söhne of Erfurt, the personal ambitions of the commandant Höss and his chief of the construction office Karl Bischoff as well as a combination of quite independent events, though all stemming from the need to increase in the efficiency of already existing Auschwitz crematorium. As the camp expanded in the years 1940–1941 the number of corpses that every day needed to be burned also increased. Therefore the SS successively had to order new furnaces (three in all) for the crematorium in the Main Camp.
As the addition of three furnaces soon proved insufficient, in mid-1941 there emerged a plan to build a new crematorium with four furnaces, located between the concentration camp and the railway station. In October, however, this plan was rejected when engineer Kurt Prüfer of the Topf company put forward a project to build a very large crematorium with five three-retort furnaces. It was to stand next to the ‘old crematorium’, near the SS hospital and commandant’s head office.
Independently of these plans the SS construction office came to the conclusion that on account of the high mortality among Soviet prisoners of war at Auschwitz II-Birkenau (who were the first inmates of that camp), two additional crematorium furnaces would be required.
A revised draft of the Birkenau camp from the start of January 1942 where one can see in the corners of the sections under construction (sectors BII and BIII) next to groups of mortuary barracks small buildings called ‘incineration chambers’. Source: A-BSMA.
During a visit to Auschwitz on 27 February 1942 Bischoff’s superior SS-Oberführer Hans Kammler decided that instead of two new furnaces, Birkenau should have the crematorium with five three-retort furnaces originally planned for Auschwitz I.
The next phase in planning the constructing of another two new crematoria was associated with decisions made by Himmler in July 1942. Informed of the intention to intensify extermination in the makeshift gas chambers (‘cottages’) Engineer Prüfer proposed to build in their vicinity two more assemblies of crematorium furnaces. This idea was accepted, but soon afterwards the SS authorities came to the conclusion that even the addition of three large crematoria (later numbered II, IV and V) would not be sufficient. It was therefore decided that as well as the crematorium with five three-retort furnaces originally designed for the Main Camp (crematorium II) Birkenau should have another identical crematorium with the same number of furnaces and retorts (crematorium III).
The construction of all four crematoria was completed in the spring of 1943. At the time their incinerating capacity was estimated as follows:
| Completion date | No. of retorts | Maximum number of corpses to be incinerated per day | |
| Crematorium I | May 1942 | 6 | 340 |
| Crematorium II | March 1943 | 15 | 1440 |
| Crematorium III | June 1943 | 15 | 1440 |
| Crematorium IV | March 1943 | 8 | 768 |
| Crematorium V | April 1943 | 8 | 768 |
| Total | 52 | 4756 | |
For reasons that are not entirely clear a decision was made in mid-July 1943 for Crematorium I to be closed, the furnaces put out and the staff moved to Birkenau.
An important element in the efficient running of the mass extermination process were the gas chambers. The history of their development indicates that they were planned separately and somewhat later than the crematorium buildings. The gas chamber in Crematorium I of the Main Camp was an ad hoc adaptation of the mortuary. The undressing station was the forecourt surrounded by a concrete wall. The plans of the next crematorium, No. II, show two underground mortuaries, the larger of which was later converted into the undressing room and the smaller one into the gas chamber.
ZOOMER
Plan of Crematorium II. The furnace room is on the right, the undressing room (the basement where the deported Jews undressed) is on the left and marked as the mortuary, and the gas chamber is near the centre, perpendicular to the other two compartments. Source: A-BSMA.
There is much to suggest that the initial designs of crematoria IV and V did not include gas chambers as it was assumed deported Jews would be killed in the ‘red’ and ‘white cottages’. The later addition of gas chambers in many ways seems improvised. Among other things, in practice it proved to be inconvenient. The gassed corpses had to be dragged to the furnaces via the undressing room (for which reason the deportees frequently had to undress outside the gas chamber entrance).
ZOOMER
Plan of Crematorium IV/V with gas chambers marked (K), the undressing room/mortuary (R) and crematorium furnace (P). Source: A-BSMA.
The location of openings through which the Zyklon B gas was let in depended on the construction of the gas chamber building. In crematoria II and III the apertures (four in each case) were situated in the gas chamber ceiling beam. On the outside they appeared as metal lid covered chimneys, like in the Main Camp gas chamber. In crematoria IV and V the apertures were in the side walls as in the aforementioned ‘cottages’.
After the construction of the new crematoria, the process of mass extermination did not significantly change. For some time the newly arrived transports continued to go through selections on the ‘old Jewish ramp’. The construction of the new siding and ramp within the Birkenau camp was not completed until the spring of 1944. It was only then that the mass murder victims no longer had to be transported by truck to the gas chambers but instead went there on foot. Towards the end of 1943 there was also built in Birkenau a complex of barracks where the belongings of those murdered were deposited (called Canada II because a much smaller Canada I had already existed near the Main Camp since 1942). Some of the gas chambers were fitted with fake shower heads, while in the undressing rooms there were wooden benches as well as hooks with numbers on the walls to convince the deportees that after ‘returning from washing’ they could collect their clothes and head for ‘clean and practically furnished’ barracks.
Deportees descending the steps to the underground part of the crematorium.
Fragment of a model of a crematorium by Mieczysław Stobierski. .
Fragment of a model of a crematorium by Mieczysław Stobierski. .
The undressing room.
Fragment of a model of a crematorium by Mieczysław Stobierski. .
Fragment of a model of a crematorium by Mieczysław Stobierski. .
Gas chamber (lower level) and furnace room (upper level).
Fragment of a model of a crematorium by Mieczysław Stobierski.
Fragment of a model of a crematorium by Mieczysław Stobierski.
The elevator serving to lift the corpses from the gas chamber to the furnace room.
Fragment of a model of a crematorium by Mieczysław Stobierski.
Fragment of a model of a crematorium by Mieczysław Stobierski.
Crematory furnaces.
Fragment of a model of a crematorium by Mieczysław Stobierski. .
Fragment of a model of a crematorium by Mieczysław Stobierski. .
Long before the formation of transports, the Jews were systematically deprived of their property, robbed of their valuables, money and anything else of worth. Particularly Polish Jews, before their deportation from the ghettos to Auschwitz, had virtually nothing apart from a few items of clothing. Jews from Western Europe, on the other hand, had usually been in transit camps for a much shorter period and therefore still had some local currency, American dollars, jewellery, warm clothes, sometimes even tools and other items from their workshops. They were allowed to take these things most probably only to confirm their conviction that, after being ‘resettled in the East’, they would be able to work and lead a reasonable life. But then when they arrived at the ramp, they had to leave all their baggage, and in the undressing room even left their shoes and clothes. All items of any possible value were confiscated by the SS and made use of in various ways.
Clothes of the best quality were handed over to offices dealing with the distribution of material aid for Germans resettled from the East. Worse quality clothes were given to the inmates of forced labour camps and, on account of the lack of striped uniforms, also partly to concentration camp prisoners, having first marked every item with oil paint. The most worn or damaged items of clothing were sent to concentration camp workshops, where women prisoners tore and wove them into rope or string. Similarly, the best footwear was sold in shops (under an additional ration card system), while worse items were given to workers or eventually prisoners.
Gathered in the ‘Canada’ warehouses were also vast amounts of suitcases, baskets, brushes, toothbrushes, umbrellas, shoe polish tins and all sorts of other useful objects. The procedure with soap taken from the luggage of murdered victims was somewhat different. It was thrown into a vat of hot water where all the pieces dissolved into a uniform mass. This mass was then cut up into regular blocks, which, after drying, were used to wash clothes.
No doubt, the SS had the greatest profits from the plunder of victims’ gold, both from jewellery (wedding rings, signets etc.) and dental gold. The gold teeth extracted by Sonderkommando ‘dentists’ were gathered in boxes and next melted down in a special furnace to make ingots. The hair of the murdered victims was stored in the crematorium attics. Then it was later unravelled and combed to remove the hairpins and ribbons and packed into sacks to be sent off to German textile factories.
The SS also tried to utilise the ashes of the murdered victims. They had it added (in layers) to compost piles, which would later be used as a fertilizer on farms. However, the quantity of human ash was far vaster than could be possibly made use of. Therefore it was more usually deposited in ditches and pits or most frequently of all dumped from trucks into the nearby river Vistula.
In truth it is difficult to understand on what basis the SS could expect that the mass extermination of Jews at Auschwitz could remain a secret. All the efforts they undertook in this matter were to a large extent little more than half measures doomed to fail from the start. Above all they systematically destroyed documents regarding selections to the gas chamber (only a few such reports have been found since the war).
Auschwitz headquarters report of 20 February 1943 regarding the arrival of a transport of Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto (Czech Protectorate); of the 5,022 deportees some 20% were chosen for work (ausgesucht zum Arbeitseinsatz), whereas the majority were chosen for ‘special accommodation’ (Sonderunterbringung), i.e. sent to the gas chambers. The selections were survived by healthy and fit for work men aged 19 to 40 and women aged 18 to 33. Source: A-BSMA.
Murdered Jews were referred to as ‘specially accommodated’ (G.U. – Gesonderte Unterbringung) or ‘specially treated’ (S.B. – Sonderbehandlung). However, there is no extant report stating that an entire transport was sent to be exterminated (only one of these documents stipulates that in a given transport of Jews there was little chance of finding any prisoners fit for work). Out of the 323 extant orders issued by the commandants of the Auschwitz concentration camps and SS garrison, which include plenty of references to the everyday matters of the SS personnel, there is only one reference to the existence of a Sonderkommando and three references to the crematoria, and not a single reference to the existence of gas chambers.
More information can be found in the SS Construction Office documents, which describe in detail the process of designing and constructing crematoria in Auschwitz and Birkenau. There is also mention of planning ‘bathhouses for special actions’ (Badeanstalten für Sonderaktionen), of ordering for the crematorium buildings ‘gastight doors’ and ‘gas detectors’ as well as the construction of a ‘gas chamber’ (Gaskammer) floor. One of the cost estimates generally explains that the prisoner of war camp in Birkenau was to be adapted for the ‘implementation of special treatment’ (Durchführung der Sonderbehandlung).
There are also quite frequent references to the mass extermination in the camp’s administration department documents. They concern, for example, sending to the Sonderkommando very large quantities of lime (used to disinfect the gas chambers and particularly to cover corpses in mass graves) or dispatching trucks to the Pszczyna forest to collect timber for the Sonderkommando. The most telling orders concern dispatching trucks to Dessau to deliver Zyklon B. Initially the stated reason for these trips was to deliver ‘gas urgently needed for the disinfection of the camp’ (zur Abholung von Gas, das zur Desinfizierung des Lagers dringendes erforderlich ist), but later documents also speak of ‘collecting material for special treatment’ (zur Abholung von Material für Sonderbeh.[andlung]) and ‘material for the resettlement of Jews’ (zwecks Abholung von Materialen für die Judenumsiedlung). Equally telling are orders for thousands of tonnes of coke for the crematoria and, above all, the official SS estimates of the corpse incinerating effectiveness of particular furnace assemblies. If we accept that the four large crematoria in Birkenau were capable of burning four and a half thousand bodies a day, it seems quite preposterous to assume that they were necessary to cremate the bodies of inmates who had ‘died of natural causes’ even in the very largest Nazi concentration camp (currently, the number of natural deaths in the whole of Poland per day is under one thousand).
Another attempt to maintain mass extermination in secrecy was the announcement of Blocksperre (a ban on leaving blocks) during the arrival of transports. This was practically impossible to impose, since for instance some of ‘Canada’ Kommando prisoners would at that time be on the ramp. The SS also tried to conceal the gas chamber compounds by erecting makeshift wicker fences around them.
Photographs taken illegally by members of the Sonderkommando in 1944, presenting naked women being chased by the SS to the crematoria as well as the burning of the bodies of those murdered in the gas chambers. Source: A-BSMA.
In the first years of the camp’s existence the burning of corpses in the Main Camp crematorium was carried out by prisoners of the Heizerkommando (stokers Kommando). Their job was to receive the bodies of prisoners who had died or been killed from the ‘pallbearers’ Kommando’ (Leichenträgerkommando), take them to the crematorium and burn them.
The first Sonderkommando was immediately formed when the mass extermination of Jews at Birkenau began. It exclusively comprised Jewish prisoners. Some of them worked in the undressing barracks, initially sorting the clothes and other belongings of the murdered victims into piles which were transported to the ‘Canada’ warehouses. Others had to deal directly with the gas chamber, pulling out the corpses, extracting the gold teeth, cutting off the hair, washing off the traces of blood and excrement on the floor and occasionally also whitewashing the walls and floor with lime. Yet another group of prisoners was employed digging and later covering the mass graves.
By mid-1942 there were two Sonderkommandos, one employed at the ‘little red cottage’ and the other at the ‘little white cottage’. Soon a third Sonderkommando was probably formed to dig up the mass graves, pull out the corpses and burn them on pyres. After this work was finished, at the start of December 1942, these prisoners were murdered in a gas chamber. The exact chronology of events is not entirely clear: we know that at least two groups of prisoners from the Sonderkommando had tried to escape. Most probably worried by this fact, the SS decided to kill the entire Kommando, which they did on 9 December. Next a new Sonderkommando was formed by selecting several hundred prisoners from subsequent transports arriving at Auschwitz.
When the new crematoria in Birkenau became operational (in the spring of 1943), the SS employed there prisoners who had previously worked in the old Auschwitz crematorium as well as members of the ‘red’ and ‘white cottage’ Sonderkommandos. The appointed Kapos were professional stokers (one German, five Poles and several Jews). The rest of the Kommando were exclusively Jews. They were quartered in a separate barrack (first in Block 2 of Birkenau BIb and later in Block 13 of Birkenau BIId) and forbidden to have any contact with other prisoners. In 1944 the Sonderkommando was moved to the attics of the crematoria buildings and to Crematorium IV, which was then out of order. The number of Sonderkommando prisoners fluctuated in relation to current needs. When in February 1944 the number of transports fell, the number of Sonderkommando members was reduced to only 200 prisoners (after approximately 200 of their colleagues were transferred to Majdanek and murdered). On the other hand, when the extermination of the Hungarian Jews began, the number of Sonderkommando members rose to some 900 prisoners. Some of these were again employed at the ‘little white cottage’, unloading wood and burning corpses on pyres. The Sonderkommando worked in to two 12-hour shifts, daytime and night time. When despite this problems arose with disposing of all the corpses in time, the victims of the Crematorium V gas chamber were burned not only in the furnaces but also in massive pits, specially dug nearby.
In September 1944 the Sonderkommando was again reduced by 200 prisoners, who were treacherously murdered in one of the disinfection chambers. Fearing that the same fate also awaited them, on 7 October 1944 the remaining Sonderkommando members rebelled. First they attacked SS guards with axes and poles, next they set fire to one of the crematoria and then, having cut through the barbed wire fencing, tried to escape. Unfortunately, all of the escapees were surrounded by the SS near the village of Pławy-Rajsko and shot. The Sonderkommando, reduced to some 200 and later to barely 100 prisoners, continued to exist in the camp until the evacuation in January 1945.
The tragic state of mind of Sonderkommando prisoners is evidenced in the notes they buried near the crematoria, to bear testimony to the truth, and in the accounts (several dozen) some of the survivors submitted after the war.
At the start of 1944 the largest remaining concentration of Jews in Europe (some 700,000) was in Hungary. Although the Hungarian government had passed anti-Semitic legislation, it consistently turned down German requests to deport the Jews. It was only in March 1944 that Hitler made the decision to send in the Wehrmacht in support of legalising the extremist fascist Cross Arrow (Nyilaskeresztes) organisation. The invasion, moreover, led to the creation of a new pro-German government. At almost the same time a group of SS officers, including the chief of the Jewish affairs department (Referat) at the Reich Main Security Office, SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, arrived in Budapest to prepare the deportations. According to Eichmann’s instructions, the country was divided into several evacuation districts. Next the Hungarian gendarmerie rounded up the Jews into provisional transit camps on the outskirts of towns in disused industrial plants, brickworks, etc.
The first two transports were sent out for Auschwitz at the end of April. Then, after a two-week break, two to six started being sent out on a regular, daily basis. Thanks to an extant register of traffic passing through the border station of Košice we know how many Jews there were on every train. Thus, for example, on 16 May there were five transports bound for Auschwitz with approximately 17,000 deportees, whereas on 25 May there were another five transports with almost 16,000 deportees. We also know that in previous and later days the number of deportees was equally very large.
Consequently, for most of the duration of the ‘Hungarian Action’ the crematoria furnaces, even when aided by the open air pyres, were unable to cremate all the Jews who would normally be selected on the ramp as unfit for work. For this reason the SS physicians decided to ‘simplify’ the criteria, as it would seem, by directing anyone who appeared remotely useful as a worker to ‘deposit camps’ in Birkenau (sections BIIc, BIII and to a lesser extent BIIb and BIIe). There the deportees remained for many days in exceptionally hard and primitive conditions, awaiting the final selection, the decision of whether they would go to work or die in the gas chamber.
The last large transports from Hungary arrived in July. Then in August transports of Jews started arriving from Łódź as well as a number of transports from other camps in occupied Poland and Western Europe. Thus during a period of four months over half a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz, most of whom were murdered in the gas chambers immediately after their arrival. The ‘deposit camps’ were gradually emptied (through selections) up to October 1944.
The extent to which Allied intelligence was initially aware of the scale of the crimes committed at Auschwitz is not entirely clear. We know that reports of numerous executions and very high mortality rates did reach Polish ZWZ/AK resistance headquarters in Warsaw and were subsequently passed on by radio to London. Another important source of information were the accounts of the very few Polish prisoners actually released from the camp. One would think that in mid-1942 an even greater impression was made by news of mass murder being committed in other death camps, especially in Treblinka, where hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were killed. And yet even then none of the Allied states decided to intervene or at least issue a statement firmly and unequivocally condemning such crimes. Presumably, the information coming in from occupied Poland was considered exaggerated, even if it could be at least partly confirmed on the basis of the German radiograms that were then being intercepted by British intelligence.
By 1943 most of the Polish Jews had been murdered and the death camps in the General Government were gradually closed. Therefore the gas chambers of Auschwitz now became an even more important element in the mass extermination of Jews. However, the British and American commanders were more interested in the extensive rubber and synthetic fuel factory complex that was at the time being built near Auschwitz by the German IG Farben concern. Already on the night of 4/5 May 1944 first Allied planes attacked the factory, strafing the guard towers and dropping several small bombs. Therefore, at least from that moment on there existed a practical possibility of bombing the Birkenau gas chambers, which regardless of the actual scale of inflicted damage, would have considerable moral and propaganda significance.
American B-17 Flying Fortress over Auschwitz on 20 August 1944.
Source: National Archives and Records Administration.
Source: National Archives and Records Administration.
There can be no doubt that in the spring of 1944 Auschwitz was already within the range of American bombers flying from a complex of airstrips in Foggia, Italy. From 4 April reconnaissance planes were systematically sent out to photograph the nearby chemical factory complex. The limitations of contemporary aerial photography meant that pilots also took photographs sometime before and after flying past the target area. That is why some of the photographs also reveal the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, including the crematoria, particular barracks, trains next to the ramp and even a group of people standing on the ramp (deported Jews?). However, again nothing was done to destroy the clearly visible buildings. No efforts were even made to obtain additional intelligence.
It was not until mid-1944, once Allied governments had received the reports of Auschwitz escapees (Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, as well as later those of two other Jews and a Pole), that due to the appeals of Jewish organisations, preliminary considerations started being made with regard the viability of bombing the Birkenau crematoria. However, it soon turned out that Allied air force commanders were less than conducive to the realisation of this idea. They stressed that the priority was to destroy military targets (which crematoria were not) and continue the intensive bombing of cities and industry in the Reich in order to eventually break the German will to resist. Another argument stated that it was impossible to bomb targets as small as a crematorium with precision, and as they were situated in the vicinity of densely populated barracks, this could result in the deaths of thousands of prisoners. As a result, after several weeks of discussion, the project was effectively dropped. Moreover, no consideration was given to another proposition: the destruction of bridges and railway tracks along which transports of Jewish deportees travelled from Hungary to Auschwitz. In August and September 1944 American Liberators and Flying Fortresses did drop bombs on Auschwitz, but their intended target was actually the nearby IG Farben chemical factory.
After the war, the feasibility of bombing Birkenau crematoria and gas chambers was extensively analysed. The current view is that such an operation was possible if the Allies had used a light fighter-bomber (e.g. the British DH-98 Mosquito), as by then these planes could fly that far with a sufficient payload.
In the years 1940–1945 approximately 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz. The largest group, c. 1.1 million, were the Jews, next were the Poles (140–150,000), the Roma (23,000) and Soviet prisoners of war (15,000). Other nationalities were represented by c. 25,000 people, ranging from several thousand (Czechs, Belarusians, the French, Germans and Russians) to several hundred (Yugoslavs and Ukrainians) or just dozens. At least 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz, the vast majority of whom were Jews (c. 1 million), next the Poles (70–75,000), the Roma (21,000) and Soviet prisoners of war (14,000). Some 10–15,000 of the victims had other nationalities.
In the years 1940–1945 approximately 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz. The largest group, c. 1.1 million, were the Jews, next were the Poles (140–150,000), the Roma (23,000) and Soviet prisoners of war (15,000). Other nationalities were represented by c. 25,000 people, ranging from several thousand (Czechs, Belarusians, the French, Germans and Russians) to several hundred (Yugoslavs and Ukrainians) or just dozens. At least 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz, the vast majority of whom were Jews (c. 1 million), next the Poles (70–75,000), the Roma (21,000) and Soviet prisoners of war (14,000). Some 10–15,000 of the victims had other nationalities.
For many years after the war it was thought that the number of Auschwitz victims had been conclusively established by Soviet experts and confirmed by the investigative agencies of the Allied states. The figure of 4 million people who had died or been killed in this camp, popularised by the press and repeated in memoirs, rose to the status of indisputable dogma. Somewhat later, with the progress of research and organisation of archives, the opinion began to emerge that the figure of 4 million may be exaggerated. However, on account of the large gaps in extant documentation, it was assumed that every other estimate would be equally inaccurate. Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s a number of scholarly monographs were published which summed up all the research done up to that point and provided more reliable estimates of the number of victims. One of the most extensive and exhaustive works was presented by Franciszek Piper, whose conclusions (c. 900,000 Jews were murdered in the gas chambers immediately after their arrival at Auschwitz) are today still considered to be the most accurate.
Least doubtful is the data concerning the transports of Jews from: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Norway and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Theresienstadt ghetto). This is because we have almost complete name lists of those deported as well as the lists of numbers issued to particular prisoner transports. Therefore, if we know how many Jews were deported and how many of them were registered in the camp, the numerical difference between the two would be the number of people murdered immediately after the selection on the ramp. In the case of transports from Greece and to some extent from Slovakia and Hungary we have German documents that provide the general number of deportees. By comparing the figures from these countries with the sum of prisoner numbers issued to people from the same countries we may (with certain reservations) obtain a moderately accurate estimate of the number of victims. From the works of local historians concerning the deportations of Jews from Italy and former Yugoslavia we may also estimate how many of the Jews deported from these countries were the victims of selections. The most difficult to estimate is the number of victims deported from occupied Poland. We are able to say how many Jews were deported from Zagłębie Dąbrowskie, Łódź and some other ghettos partly on the basis of German documentation, but with regard to other places we can only rely on personal accounts and memoirs, which for objective reasons cannot be considered reliable. Figures provided by various historians – ranging from 300,000 to 600,000 – may be considered too low when we compare them to the general losses of the Jewish population in occupied Poland. It should be added that a similar number of deportees (and therefore also the number of Auschwitz victims) was stated in the post-war autobiography of the camp’s former commandant Rudolf Höss.
As well as Jews, in the initial period of their existence, gas chamber victims also included Soviet prisoners of war (in 1941) and Polish prisoners (up to the spring of 1943), above all the hospital patients who were unfit for work, some several thousand people in total. Killed in the gas chamber were also 320 Polish prisoners sentenced to death in revenge for the revolt and attempted escape of the penal unit (10 June 1942). From the accounts of prisoners we know that, along with Jewish transports, occasionally small groups of Poles dressed in civilian clothes and called ‘partisans’ were killed in the gas chambers as well. In the spring of 1943 the gas chambers claimed the Roma (Gypsies) suspected of suffering from infectious diseases (typhus). The largest number of Roma, over 3,000, were murdered in this way during the liquidation of the ‘Gypsy Family Camp’ (BIIe) on 2 August 1944.
In the second half of 1944, in face of the approaching Soviet armies, the German authorities began evacuating prisoners from Auschwitz. In total, 65,000 people were evacuated to other concentration camps. The camp authorities also set about erasing the evidence of their crimes. Documents, looted Jewish property and materials from the construction warehouses were transported to the Third Reich’s interior. The number of transports arriving at Auschwitz fell in the late autumn of 1944, and in early November the killing of deportees in the gas chambers stopped altogether. It seems doubtful that the intention was to gradually ease repressive policies in face of Germany’s imminent defeat. A more likely explanation is that by then all the major concentrations of Jews in German occupied Europe had been wiped out.
In mid-November the Sonderkommando was engaged in the dismantling of Crematoria II and III, while Crematorium V remained operational to continue disposing of the bodies of prisoners who were still dying in the camp. Before this, the SS had separated the Sonderkommando Kapos, and sent them, as possessors of the most sensitive secrets, to Mauthausen, where they were later murdered. In the chaos of the final evacuation of Auschwitz the SS perhaps simply forgot about the remaining Sonderkommando prisoners. That is probably why these people were able to blend into the marching evacuation columns and, having escaped identification, end up in various camps within the Reich. Before the arrival of the Red Army, the SS did, however, manage to blow up all the crematoria and gas chambers in Birkenau and set fire to the ‘Canada’ warehouses with the looted property that had not yet been shipped out. They also destroyed the camp’s remaining documents.
The last Auschwitz prisoners’ roll call took place on the night of 17/18 January 1945. The evacuation of 56,000 prisoners from all the Auschwitz camps and sub-camps lasted from 17 to 21 January. Many died or were killed during the march.
When on 27 January 1945 Red Army troops entered the camp, they found some 7,000 prisoners, chiefly sick and physically exhausted people who were in no state to join the evacuation march. At more or less the same time Soviet soldiers also liberated some 500 prisoners from several sub-camps.
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