FREE ESSAY ON AUSHWITZ

AUSHWITZ

The Extermination Factory - Auschwitz
The extermination plant with the most advanced design anywhere in the world consisted of
two large crematoria/gas chambers and two smaller ones. Crematoria Four and Five were
built on the surface of the ground. Crematoria Two and Three had subterranean gas
chambers and reception areas. They were about 102 meters long by 51 meters across. The
basement consisted of two main rooms - the undressing area, which also served as a
mortuary, and a gas chamber. Victims climbed down the steps into the basement. Those who
could not walk were pushed down a concrete slide. The gas chamber, about 225 square
meters, looked like a large communal bathroom with shower heads:
The Zyklon B gas crystals were inserted through openings into the hollow pillars made of
sheet metal. They were perforated at regular intervals and inside them a spiral ran from
top to bottom in order to ensure as even a distribution of the granular crystals as
possible. Mounted on the ceiling was a large number of dummy showers made of metal. 
The largest room in the factory, the changing chambers, accommodated 1,000 people.
Notices throughout the room contributed to a cunning . . . and clumsy deception - telling
victims they were in disinfection rooms, urging cleanliness, reminding them to remember
their clothing hook number.[39] 
The extermination plant contained a hair-drying loft run by fifteen Orthodox Jews. Spread
over the floor, noticed Muller from the extermination staff, was women's hair of every
color: 
Washing lines were strung across the room. Pegged on these lines like wet washing were
further batches of hair which had first been washed in a solution of ammonium chloride.
When the hair was nearly dry, it was spread on the warm floor to finish off. Finally it
was combed out by prisoners and put into paper bags.[40]
The SS set up a gold-melting room in the plant. There two dental technicians soaked the
teeth for hours in acid to remove bone and flesh, and used a blowtorch to melt the gold
into molds. They produced as much as 5 to 10 kilos a day. 
As in Treblinka, the stoking gangs sorted out the bodies into combustibility categories:
strong men, women, children, and Musselmans. The SS staff had performed earlier
experiments to find ways to economize on fuel - with the help of Topf and Sons, civilian
experts: 
In the course of these experiments corpses were selected according to different criteria
and the cremated. Thus the corpses of two Musselmans were cremated together with those of
two children or the bodies of two well-nourished men together with that of an emaciated
woman, each load consisting of three, or sometimes, four bodies. Members of these groups
were especially interested in the amount of coke required to burn corpses of any
particular category, and in the time it took to cremate them. During these macabre
experiments different kinds of coke were used and the results carefully recorded.
Afterwards, all corpses were divided into the above-mentioned categories, the criterion
being the amount of coke required to reduce them to ashes. Thus it was decreed that the
most economical and fuel-saving procedure would be to burn the bodies of a well-nourished
man and an emaciated woman, or vice versa, together with that of a child, because, as the
experiments had established, in this combination, once they had caught fire, the dead
would continue to burn without any further coke being required.[41] 
As early as June 13, 1943, all was not well with the new installation. The Central SS
Construction Management of Auschwitz sent a letter to a German equipment firm urging the
completion of carpentry work in the new crematoria. The chief requested the delivery
without delay of the doors for the crematoria, which [are] urgently needed for the
execution of the special measures; otherwise, the progress of the construction will be
jeopardized. In addition, he demanded the completion of the windows for the reception
building. If the carpentry work could not be done, building operations would have to be
suspended for the winter. Eventually the ovens seemed to fall apart. Crematorium Four
failed completely after a short time and Crematoria Five had to be shut down
repeatedly.[42] 
The plans for the crematoria have been preserved by an architect who stole them from the
Birkenau plant. The one-story buildings looked like large bakeries with steep roofs and
dormer windows. The underground gas chambers rose 51 centimeters above the ground to form
a grassy terrace. No one would know at first glance what they were. Crematoria Two and
Three were close to the camp and visible. Pine trees and birches hid crematoria Four and
Five. Around the crematoria lay large piles of wood for burning the corpses in the nearby
pits. All chambers had doors with thick observation windows. In 1942 and 1943 alone those
chambers used 27 tons of Cyclone B. The gas chambers and the crematoria of Auschwitz were
called special installations, bath houses, and corpse cellars.[43] 
Each day the trains rolled into the camp through the passageway constructed in the far
gate, down one of three tracks to the selection platform. As they fell out of the trains,
the victims were sent one way or another, with tearful parting scenes. The procession
moved to the crematoria yard where the SS told the Jews they were going to take
disinfection baths. An orchestra of attractive women played gay tunes from operas and
light marches. Then to the dressing room or reception center with numbered clothing pegs
driven into the walls. The SS ordered the victims to undress and to remember their
numbers. Sometimes they gave them towels. Then the SS drove the victims through the
corridor to the heated gas chamber. The heating was provided not for the comfort of the
prisoners but to create a better setting for the evaporation of gas. The gas squads
packed the 2,000 victims into the room. From the ceiling hung imitation shower heads. The
doors were closed, the air was pumped out, and the gas poured in. Cyclone B, or hydrogen
cyanide, is a very poisonous gas that causes death by internal suffocation. In sufficient
concentrations, it causes death almost immediately. But the SS did not bother to
calculate the proper quantities, so death took anywhere from three to twenty minutes.
While the victims were dying, the SS witched through the peepholes. 
When they opened the doors, they found the victims in half-sitting positions in a
towerlike pile. Most were pink, others were covered with green spots. Some had foam on
their lips, while others bleeding from the nose. Many had their eyes open. The majority
were packed near the doors. The squads in special clothing moved in with hooks to pull
the bodies off of each other. 
The SS physicians and scientists monitored the selection and the gassing, watching the
procedure through the special airtight door. The doors could not be opened until the
doctor gave the sign that all victims were dead. The doctors assumed their monitoring of
the killings on a rotating basis.[44] 
Two German firms, Tesch/Stabenow and Degesch, produced Cyclone B gas after they acquired
the patent from Farben. Tesch supplied two tons a month, and Degesch three quarters of a
ton. The firms that produced the gas already had extensive experience in fumigation. In
short, this industry used very powerful gases to exterminate rodents and insects in
enclosed spaces; that it should now have become involved in an operation to kill off Jews
by the hundreds of thousands is not mere accident.[45] After the war the directors of the
firms insisted that they had sold their products for fumigation purposes and did not know
they were being used on humans. But the prosecutors found letters from Tesch not only
offering to supply the gas crystals but also advising how to use the ventilating and
heating equipment. Hoess testified that the Tesch directors could not help but know of
the use for their product because they sold him enough to annihilate two million people.
Two Tesch partners were sentenced to death in 1946 and hanged. The director of Degesch
received five years in prison. 
The scientifically planned crematoria should have been able to handle the total project,
but they could not. The whole complex had forty-six retorts, each with the capacity for
three to five persons. The burning in a retort lasted about half an hour. It took an hour
a day to clean them out. Thus it was theoretically possible to cremate about 12,000
corpses in twenty four hours or 4,380,000 a year. But the well-constructed crematoria
fell far behind at a number of camps, and especially at Auschwitz in 1944. In August the
total cremation reached a peak one day of 24,000, but still a bottleneck occurred. Camp
authorities needed an economic and fast method of corpse disposal, so they again dug six
huge pits beside Crematorium Five and reopened old pits in the wood. 
Thus, late in 1944, pit burning became the chief method of corpse disposal. The pits had
indentations at one end from which human fat drained off. To keep the pits burning, the
stokers poured oil, alcohol, and large quantities of boiling human fat over the bodies: 
The sizzling fat was scooped out with buckets on a long curved rod and poured all over
the pit causing flames to leap up amid much crackling and hissing. . .. The air reeked of
oil, fat, benzole and burnt flesh. 
The Ovens at Auschwitz
Auschwitz lay thirty miles west of Cracow, Poland's fifth largest city, and was on the
direct railroad line to German Upper Silesia. Before the German attack in September 1939,
Auschwitz had been a Polish army camp. In May 1940, Rudolf Franz Hoess the adjutant at
the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was detailed with thirty men to establish a new
compound at Auschwitz. 
Until the early spring of 1941, Auschwitz, containing nine thousand inmates, was an
installation approximately the same size as earlier German concentration camps, such as
Dachau and Buchenwald. Then, as Hitler prepared the assault on Russia, Heinrich Himmler,
the head of the SS and German police, came to Auschwitz and told Hoss that the camp would
have to be expanded to accommodate a large population of 130,000 - 100,000 of them Soviet
prisoners of war. The inhabitants of seven villages standing on the swampy, malarial
ground between the Sury and the Vistula rivers west of Auschwitz were to be dispossessed
and removed as farm laborers to Germany. Since this area was thickly covered with birch
trees, the Germans called the new part of the concentration camp Birkenau (`in the
birches'). 
Weczler's transport arrived in Auschwitz after midnight on April 15 - arrivals were
usually timed so that the twelve thousand residents of the adjoining town would not be
witness to their coming. Stumbling stiff and bewildered out of the cars into the glare of
spotlights, the men were lined up in a column of five. Carrying their heavy luggage - for
they had been told to come well equipped - they were marched a mile to a building, where
they were ordered to strip. Their heads and bodies were shaved roughly, they were given
showers, and then were disinfected with Lysol. Each man had a number tattooed onto his
left breast, a procedure so painful that many passed out. (Later, to simplify processing,
the Germans changed the location of the tattoos to inmates' left arms.) It was ten
o'clock in the morning before the operation was completed. 
Outfitted with wooden clogs and Russian uniforms daubed with red paint, Weczler and his
compatriots were taken to Birkenau. There he learned that only 150 of the twelve thousand
Russian prisoners of war detailed in December 1941 to work on the camp's construction had
survived the winter. Quartered in half-finished, unheated buildings, they had died of
exposure, starvation, and disease. The Birkenau camp, a mile long and half-mile wide, was
encompassed, like Auschwitz, by two rings of electrified barbed wire. Along these,
watchtowers were placed every 150 yards. Only a few buildings had so far been completed,
though the ultimate goal was to expand the camp to an area covering some two hundred
square miles. 
The men were awakened at three o'clock every morning and marched off at four to clear
land and work on the construction of factories of Siemens, Germany's largest electrical
manufacturer; I.G. Farben, the nation's leading chemical company; and the Deutsche
Aurustungswerke (German Defense Works), an SS enterprise. Jews not capable of labor were
executed. 
Except for a half-hour break at noon, when the prisoners each received a bowl of filthy
carrot, cabbage, or turnip soup, the work continued uninterrupted until 6 PM. For supper,
the men received one ounce - a little over one slice - of moldy bread made from ersatz
flour and sawdust. They slept in almost windowless barracks with steeply pitched roofs
resembling stables. Tiers of balconies, honeycombed with cells two and one-half feet
high, each shared by three men, ran along the walls, giving the building the appearance
of a giant beehive. 
Lice and fleas tortured the men. Rats were so bold they gnawed at the toes and fingers of
sleepers and stole carefully preserved crumbs of bread out of their pockets. A third of
the prisoners died every week - the sick and injured were taken to the infirmary, where
they were granted two to three days to recover or expire. If they did neither, they were
spritzed - given a fatal injection of phenol directly into the heart. At the end of two
weeks, only 150 of the 640 men Weczler had arrived with were still alive. By August 15,
all but 159 of the 2,722 on the first four transports from Slovakia were dead. (Conot,
3-5) 
* Not to be confused with Rudolf Hess, the Nazi Party secretary until May 1941. 
Work Cited: 
Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers. 
Auschwitz-Birkenau (in the formerly polish, in 1939 adjoined to the Reich upper eastern
Silesian area, south eastern of Kattowitz): The extermination camp in Birkenau,
established in the second half of 1941, was joined to the concentration camp Auschwitz,
existing since May 1940. From January 1942 on in five gas chambers and from the end of
June 1943 in four additional large gassing-rooms gassings with Zyklon B have been
undertaken. Up until November 1944 more than one million Jews and at least 4000 gypsies
have been murdered by gas. 
6. Cattle Car Train to Auschwitz 
In April 1943, all the camp's prisoners are deported. Abe and the other prisoners once
again board cattle cars. They are packed so tightly into the railroad cars that they
can't even squat to sit, much less lie down to sleep. They ride for two days with no
food, no water, no toilet facilities--with only dirty straw on the floor. They finally
arrive at their destination, glad to finally be breathing fresh air when the cattle car
doors are pulled open. Instead they are greeted with shouts of anger, with guns and
bayonets pointed at them, and with guards holding back police dogs ready to tear them
apart. A stench fills the air. They are at Birkenau, part of the Auschwitz complex,
called by some the mother of all concentration camps.  
Auschwitz 
In this illustration, you can see the coming together of many tracks that span all of
Europe. Auschwitz was the end of the line for millions of Jews, gypsies, Jehovah's
Witnesses, and other innocents. Abe spends almost two years in this most infamous of
concentration camps. The average prisoner only survived eight weeks in Auschwitz. Abe
learns the ins and outs of survival in Auschwitz. He steals from the Nazis and trades
these organized goods with Polish citizens when he works outside the gates of the camp. 
Abe tells his own version of the now famous story of the Polish dancer named Horowitz,
who bravely attacks an SS guard named Schillinger while he is trying to force her to
undress in the gas chamber, disguised as a shower. She kills Schillinger with his own gun
and wounds another guard before she is machine-gunned to her own death. 
Abe also describes how the underground resistance movement operated in Auschwitz,
including his own involvement. He tells of his one-sided love for another now famous
heroine, Roza Robota, who is hanged with three other women for her role in the Birkenau
Sonderkommando Uprising, just weeks before all three Auschwitz camps are evacuated.