of gas chambers used at “euthanasia” installations and the mobile gassing vans used at various locations. Both used carbon monoxide as the poison, but neither, it was decided, would be suitable for the sort of mass extermination that was to be undertaken at Auschwitz. Instead, a preparation of hydrogen cyanide normally used as a disinfectant, fumigator, and delousing agent was chosen. The product, commercially marketed as “Zyklon-B,” was readily available at the Auschwitz complex. While Höss was away, his deputy Karl Fritzsch used Zyklon-B as a killing agent for humans on a group of Soviet prisoners. When the commandant returned, he supervised the first large-scale killing in the cellar of the base camp’s Block 11, where approximately six hundred Soviet prisoners of war and two hundred fifty other prisoners were gassed to death. After witnessing this second experiment, Höss became convinced that death by Zyklon-B gas would be the most efficient and appropriate means of killing Jews at Auschwitz in the future, and the mortuary of the “old crematorium” (later named Crematorium I) was converted to a gas chamber. It was first used on transports of Jewish deportees in February 1942.
The gas chamber attached to Crematorium I operated for another year, but with the advent of Nazi plans for the “final solution of the Jewish question” in late 1941, the bulk of gassing operations at Auschwitz was moved to Birkenau. Construction on the Birkenau camp had begun in October 1941, and in early 1942 the first gassings took place there in a provisional bunker known as the “little red house.” A second bunker, the “little white house,” began operation in June. Both of these installations were surrounded by trees. Mass graves, later to be replaced by incineration pits, were also in the near vicinity but hidden from the victims by hedges. The Jewish deportees were unloaded at a rail station two and a half kilometers from Birkenau and were then “selected” for registration and work or, in most cases, immediate death.28 Those deemed unfit to live were then marched to the killing facilities or brought there in trucks. They were forced to undress, told that they would bathe and be deloused, instructed to remember where they had left their belongings, and then forced into the gas chamber. Once the chamber was full, the doors were sealed and SS men wearing gas masks poured the Zyklon-B pellets into slots in the side wall. The victims were usually dead within minutes. When the chamber was opened a half hour later, members of the Sonderkommando began their work. The Sonderkommando was a special detail of Jewish prisoners who were charged with removal of the bodies, extraction of valuables from the corpses, cremation, and cleaning of the gas chambers of blood and excrement prior to the arrival of the next group of victims.29
Corpses of the victims of gassings at the base camp, as well as those who had been gassed at Birkenau, were buried in pits near the Birkenau bunkers. In the summer of 1942, however, SS Colonel Paul Blobel from Eichmann’s RSHA arrived at Auschwitz with orders that the corpses be removed. From September until late November 1942 a mass exhumation and incineration effort took place, as pyres of up to two thousand bodies each and, later, mass incineration pits were used to dispose of more than one hundred thousand corpses.
Work on four specially designed gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau had begun in July 1942, but the first of the new installations there was not completed until March 1943. By June of that year four new facilities (Crematoria II, III, IV, and V) were in operation. The killing process in the new gas chambers at Birkenau was similar to that in the temporary bunkers, but it took place on a larger and more streamlined scale. At Crematorium II the process was perhaps at its most efficient. After having been selected for death, the victims were led to the entrance of the crematorium or, in the case of invalids or the weak, they were brought there in trucks. Every effort was made to delude the victims, who were told that they would bathe and be deloused. They were then led into a subterranean undressing room where they could see signs in German and in their native languages bearing the instructions “To the Baths” and “To Disinfection.” Some were even given soap and towels.
As many as two thousand people could be forced into the gas chamber of Crematorium II. Once they were inside, the door was bolted and sealed, and, on the order of an SS doctor, the SS “disinfectors” opened cans of Zyklon-B and poured their contents into induction vents on the roof. In a matter of minutes—at most twenty—all inside were dead. Rudolf Höss, having witnessed the gassing process, described the effects of the sublimated poison: “It could be observed through the peephole in the door that those who were standing nearest to the induction vents were killed at once. It can be said that about one-third died straightaway. The remainder staggered about and began to scream and struggle for air. The screaming, however, soon changed to the death rattle and in a few minutes all lay still.”30
Half an hour after the poison had been introduced, the room was ventilated and Sonderkommando prisoners began hauling the corpses to an ante-room, where they removed women’s hair. They then loaded the corpses onto an elevator that brought them to the crematorium level. Prior to incineration, they removed from the bodies jewelry, gold, and other valuables. The ovens in Crematorium II could burn three corpses in each retort in about twenty minutes, depending on the size and percentage of body fat of each corpse. Ashes and partially incinerated bones were ground, dumped into nearby pits, and later deposited in nearby ponds and the Vistula River. At times ashes were also used as fertilizer at camp farms.
The total capacity of the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematoria was intended to be approximately 4,800 bodies per day. This figure was, according to a surviving member of a Birkenau Sonderkommando, at times raised to about 8,000 by increasing the number of corpses simultaneously burned in the oven retorts.31 In the summer of 1944, after an additional railroad spur was built directly into the Birkenau camp, the cremation installations at Auschwitz-Birkenau, including additional incineration pits, could dispose of some 20,000 victims daily. That summer of 1944 also saw the largest and most systematic instance of mass genocide in history: the murder of more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews.
Himmler ordered the cessation of killing operations in the fall of 1944, but by the time Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, it had claimed at least 1.1 million lives.32 A breakdown of these figures comparing registered and unregistered prisoners and roughly divided according to victim group reveals the following minimum estimates:
1. Between 1940 and 1945 approximately 1,305,000 deportees were sent to Auschwitz, of whom 905,000 were unregistered and 400,000 were registered. At least 1.1 million deportees died, resulting in a mortality rate for the entirety of the camp’s existence of approximately 84 percent.
2. Approximately 1,095,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, of whom 890,000 were unregistered and 205,000 were registered. Some 865,000 unregistered Jewish deportees and 95,000 registered Jewish deportees died there. In other words, approximately 88 percent of the Jews deported to Auschwitz did not survive, and 79 percent of them were killed shortly after their arrival, the overwhelming majority in gas chambers. Of the 202,000 registered prisoners who died at Auschwitz, slightly less than half were Jews.
3. Some 147,000 non-Jewish Poles were deported to Auschwitz, of whom an estimated 10,000 were unregistered and 137,000 were registered. About 64,000 of the registered prisoners and all of the unregistered prisoners died there, that is, approximately one-half of all Polish deportees.
4. Gypsies at Auschwitz had less than a one–in-ten chance of survival. Of the 23,000 Gypsies deported to Auschwitz (21,000 of whom were registered prisoners), 21,000, or 91 percent, perished.
5. There is, according to Piper’s estimates, no record of any survivors among the 15,000 (12,000 registered and 3,000 unregistered) Soviet prisoners of war deported to Auschwitz.
6. Some 25,000 prisoners of other nationalities (Czechs, Russians, Belorussians, Yugoslavians, French, Ukrainians, Germans, Austrians, and others) were registered as prisoners at Auschwitz, of whom approximately 13,000 survived.
These statistics are staggering and, at the same time, disturbingly anonymous. They are an essential part of Auschwitz history, and a tremendous debt is owed to those scholars who have devoted years of research to the problem of assessing
