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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
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Page 389 |
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| The Hungarian extermination |
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In preparation for the Hungarian extermination, the SS had
Krematorien II and III overhauled at the end of April 1944.
Overwhelmed by the influx of transports, they tried at the beginning
of June to bring Krematorien IV and V back into service. They failed
with Krematorium IV, but were partly successful with Krematorium V.
Even though its furnace worked as it had done earlier, it was not
able to rapidly cremate the batches of victims turned out by its gas
chambers. It was SS Master Sergeant Otto Moll who took the
initiative of digging five small open-air cremation ditches behind
Krematorium V. between its north wall and drainage ditch L1. The
unconsumed bones had to be smashed to powder, crushed with
sledgehammers on a steel plate, another of Moll’s inventions [David
Olère portrayed this practice in a sketch. See Document 12a].
Homicidal gassings at Krematorium V, its furnace
extinguished, now proceeded as follows (fourth phase): the “unfit
for work” entered via the vestibule and undressed in the central
room; they were then pushed into the block of (three, later four)
gas chambers and killed there; their bodies were dragged by the
Sonderkommando to the cremation ditches and burnt in the open air.
In good weather, in the summer of 1944, the central undressing room
was not used and the victims were made to undress in the open air
before being introduced directly into the gas chambers.
Sometimes there was only a small number of victims and
Zyklon-B was less plentiful than usual. To deal with this kind of
situation, the corridor serving the two westernmost rooms was
divided in two, in the proportion 1:2, thus forming a fourth small
gas chamber of 13 m2 (26 m³), in which small groups could be
“treated” with a minimum of Zyklon-B (one 200 gram can).
At
the end of May 1944, most of the Sonderkommando men were transferred
from block 11 of the “Men’s Camp” (B.IId) to Krematorium IV, which
was converted into a dormitory for them. According to Dragon, there
were 700 of them, which would mean that ALL of Krematorium IV except
for the furnace room and its annexes was occupied by the prisoners’
bunks and no homicidal gassings would have been possible there as
from this date. |
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| The Polish Resistance
photographs |
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| Four photographs were taken in the summer of 1944 during the
gassing and cremation of a group of Jews at Krematorium V. The
camera was introduced clandestinely by a member of the camp
resistance movement, David Szmulewski. The pictures were taken by an
unknown member of the Sonderkommando, who had to work under
extremely difficult conditions in places where he could not be seen
by or was not clearly visible to the SS guards in the three
watchtowers near the north wall of the Krematorium: first in the
northern gas chamber, then in the Birch Wood to the cast of the
building, the camera being hidden in his hand while he was out in
the open. The two most dangerous moments in this episode were the
transfer of the camera from David Szmulewski (on the roof of the gas
chambers) to the Sonderkommando man (on the ground) and the reverse
process when the pictures had been taken. Only three of these
photographs are exploitable [see the study of them in
annex]. |
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Documents 11 and 12
[PMO
file BW 30/27, pages 11 and 12]
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Document
11 |
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| Document 12 |
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Letter of 9th June 1943 from
Messrs Topf & Sons to the Auschwitz Bauleitung following the
meeting of 18th May concerning 2 air extraction installations for
Krematorien IV and V to he supplied at a total cost of 2,510 RM.
Two copies of Topf drawing D 59.620 were enclosed, showing the
construction of the brick-built extraction ducts and the arrangement
of the suction duct, blower and pressure duct to be supplied by
Topf. The electric motors to be used were of 3.5 HP and the system
would have had a capacity of 8,000 m³ per hour. The installation was
never fitted in either of the two Krematorien. |
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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