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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
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Thus Muller considered
Krematorium V to be out of service, while at the same time he
described himself as working there in the gas chambers, at the
cremation ditches and at the 8-muffle furnace! To say nothing of the
fact that he knew that Krematorium IV could not be working because
between 500 and 700 Sonderkommando men, including Müller himself,
were living there. Despite the fact that Filip Müller's account was
recorded too late and included involuntary errors and
embellishments, and perhaps even lies, it is clear from it that one
of the twin Krematorien IV and V was not operational in the summer
of 1944. |
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| 5.- |
Slama Dragon, another former
prisoner, heard by the Examining Judge Jan Sehn on 10th and 11th May
1945, states that he was detailed to Krematorium V in the autumn of
1943 and worked there until May 1944. He states that he was employed
on gardening, wood cutting and coke transport [for which
Krematorium?] as a member of the Sonderkommando of Kr V which was
out of service throughout this period and whose furnaces were
not reactivated until the arrival of the first transport of
Hungarian Jews. He subsequently confirms that in May 1944
Krematorium V was brought back into service, but that at the very
beginning of the Hungarian action the furnace of Krematorium IV was
used to cremate the victims because that of V was out of order. He
then reports that the Jews were burnt in five ditches dug behind
Krematorium V.
Dragon’s statements concerning Krematorium V
are now confirmed, but doubt remains about the use of the
Krematorium IV furnace. |
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| 6.- |
Henryk Tauber, another former
Sonderkommando man, testified before the Polish Judiciary on 25th
May 1945 and is the best witness we know as regards the descriptions
of the Krematorien. While he describes very precisely the layout and
installations of Krematorium IV. where he was sent in mid-April
1943, Tauber says nothing about its breakdowns, its withdrawal from
service and its occupation by 500 to 700 Sonderkommando men. When he
speaks of the gas chambers of Krematorium IV it is actually those of
Kr V that he describes, since he worked very little at IV and a
great deal at V . He was an excellent stoker on the three-muffle
furnaces [those of Kr II and III], knowing all their ins and outs
and all the tricks for extracting the most from them, but he is
unable to remember that the doors of the 8-muffle furnaces [of Kr IV
and V] opened and closed guillotine fashion. In one extraordinary
sentence, he reverses the causality having led to the digging of
cremation ditches: |
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“It was realized that the ditches incinerated the
corpses better [than the furnaces] which led to the successive
shutting down of the Krematorien once the ditches entered
service.” |
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Tauber, an exceptional witness.
never departs far from the truth, but knowingly hides certain
embarrassing facts through omission and causal metathesis, venial
sins which were perfectly normal in the context of the Liberation
when a single witness was scarcely able to say anything that could
call into doubt the figure of 4 million victims had been decided
upon too rapidly by the Soviet and Polish Commissions. |
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| A comparison of these six “recollections” leads to the
certainty that Krematorien IV and V cannot have worked continuously.
There are areas of silence in the testimonies of former
Sonderkommando members, caught between their honesty and the desire
to communicate the horror of their life in the Krematorien, an
experience that really cannot be transmitted. In 1945, faced by
interrogators who were more interested in knowing the number of
victims in the camp than in trying to understand the demential
universe of everyday extermination, they-gave up the straggle and
substituted a monstrous generality for their individual
incommunicable experience. The[y] said what the people facing them
wanted to hear; keeping silent about anything that conflicted with
their vision of the continuous functioning of the death factories.
We now have a number of German documents indicating that this was
far from the truth, though it still cannot be irrefutably proved. As
for the SS witnesses, having nothing more to lose they generally
told something close to the truth, except for such cases as the
gross error of dating committed by Pery Broad. |
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| The genesis of Krematorien IV and V
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The idea of constructing Krematorien IV and V came from a
civilian, Kurt Prüfer, chief engineer of Messrs Topf & Sons.
While the decision to switch the “projected crematorium” from the
main camp to Birkenau, to build two mirror-image versions of it [Kr
II and III] and to convert these installations for criminal purposes
can be understood in the context of the “Sonderbehandlung” [special
treatment) of the Jews, the building of two additional “forest
Krematorien” seems quite superfluous. They represent in fact
Prüfer’s “technical” response to the primitive experimentation of
Bunkers 1 and 2.
It was found that the bodies
“produced” by Bunkers I and 2 could not go on being buried in mass
graves for fear of polluting the groundwater with the toxic products
produced by their decomposition, so it was decided that they should
be cremated. This meant in the first place “emptying” the graves. In
preparation for the second phase Prüfer proposed on 19th August 1942
that a two-muffle furnace (carefully delivered “by error” to
Auschwitz) should he installed near bunkers 1 and 2 in order to
“treat” their production. The SS were not fooled by this “mistaken
delivery” and refused the furnace. which was subsequently sent on to
its original destination, Mauthausen. However. Prüfer was not one to
give up easily, and he managed to turn a refusal to spend 8 or 9,000
RM, the price of one double-muffle furnace, into an order worth
27,600 RM, the cost of two eight-muffle furnaces at 13,800 RM each.
For the price of about 6 or 7 cremation muffles produced by his
competitors, Prüfer was offering l6. While we know that Prüfer
directly influenced the Auschwitz Bauleitung in order to ensure that
his furnaces, and in particular the eight-muffle ones were
installed, we can but surmise about why the order was doubled. The
two eight-muffle furnaces ordered on 28th August 1942 to equip the
future Krematorien IV and V were not ordered for the sake of
symmetry but, and it is here that the SS had the last word over
Prüfer, because Himmler’s headquarters in Berlin had two
eight-muffle furnaces of the “Mogilew contract” immediately
available [out of a total of three and a half] and these were
switched to the Auschwitz camp. The history of this order was
recalled by Messrs Topf in a letter written to the Bauleitung on 7th
July 1943, probably at the time when final settlement for the
Krematorien IV and V furnaces was due, and the SS were trying to
obtain a maximum discount on one furnace that was completely out of
service after two months and another in very bad condition
[Documents 2, 3, and 4].
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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