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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
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Page 464 |
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The gas chamber of Krematorium II was fitted with four openings
for pouring Zyklon-B. The witnesses state that there were only
three, and a photograph of January 1943 does indeed show this gas
chamber as having only three devices for introducing the toxic
product at that time.
There remains the problem of the
rails. According to the witnesses, they ran from C (the gas chamber)
to A (the furnace room), connecting two different levels, the
basement and the ground floor. This can be done only if there is a
shallow slope between the two levels. This is the most dubious part
of the testimony, for the corpses in Krematorien II/III, were in
fact brought up from the underground gas chamber to the ground floor
furnace room by means of a goods lift. There were no rails or wagons
involved in this process. Three Bauleitung photographs [Documents
11,12 and 13] confirm that in late 1942 and early 1943 there
were narrow-gauge rails running between the furnace room and the
future undressing room, Leichenkeller 2, apparently to facilitate
the transport of building materials between these two places
[Document 10 (“Schéma 3”)]. This railway was
visible from outside the two Krematorien. However, it did not
run between the gas chamber and the furnace room. The witnesses’
confusion between C and B’ is all the more understandable in that
they could see only the outside of Krematorien II and III. To show
just how easy it is to be mistaken, I would simply refer to the book
“KL Auschwitz: Documents photographiques”, published
by the Warsaw national publishing agency in 1980, where, 35 years
after the event, Photo 61, identical to PMO neg. no. 286, is
captioned “Construction of the gas chamber of Krematorium IV or V”
and Photo 62, showing concrete being poured for the roof of the
undressing room of Krematorium II, is captioned “Prisoners
concreting the ceiling above the gas chamber of Krematorium II or
III”.
The presence of rails during the construction of
Krematorien II and III, easily visible to witnesses outside, first
led the witnesses into error because they thought they were a
permanent feature and found them difficult to explain, then
subsequently confused the translators, who had just as much trouble
in inserting them logically in the text. Some — the version in G
Wellers’ book — got round the problem by talking of “path” and
“lorries” for track and trucks, without bearing in mind that they
were describing a building, the Krematorium, that they had never
seen and whose overall dimensions did not exceed 50 by 100 metres.
The same type of “vagueness” can be seen in all versions on the
subject of the interior of the gas chamber, an indirect proof that
the witnesses had never seen it. Version 1 describes it as “masked
by hangings”, Version 2 has “shower installations ... painted on the
wall”, and Version 3 “the walls ... are also camouflaged with
simulated entrances to shower rooms”. The details that were clear
and well-established in the report were well-understood and rendered
by the translators. Those that were less clear gave rise to
different interpretations and hence to the different
“versions”.
The gassing of the 8000 Cracow Jews described by
the witnesses corresponds fairly closely in date with the known
history of the month of March 1943. The first tests of the
Krematorium II furnaces took place on 4th March according to the
deposition of former Sonderkommando member Henryk TAUBER, a day on
which 45 “well-fleshed” bodies, specially selected from a batch
gassed at Bunker 2, were cremated. The furnaces were subsequently
kept going for another ten days without any further cremations. On
13th March, Messing, the Topf fitter who installed the ventilation
systems, announced that he had finished that of Leichenkeller I,
which meant that the gas chamber was now operational. And on the
14th, apparently in the evening, about 1500 Jews from the Cracow
ghetto — rather than the 8000 of the report — were led to the
undressing hut erected perpendicular to Krematorium II in its north
yard. Preparation and gassing lasted two hours. Cremation proceeded
at full pace for 48 hours. On 20th March, six days later, 2200 more
victims, this time from Salonika, arrived to join the remains of the
first 1500 victims of Krematorium II [Documents 14 and
15].
As there was no kind of camouflage around any of the
Krematorien for virtually the whole period of their activity,
witnesses could observe them directly, especially Krematorien II and
III, but probably only very briefly. Most of their
observations date from late 1942 and early 1943. They were also for
a long time in contact with members of the Sonderkommando of Bunkers
1 and 2, who supplied them with food and money, and perhaps also
with information. This barter relationship is explained by
the fact that despite the repugnance that the members of the
Sonderkommando inspired, they and the witnesses were compatriots.
This relationship was broken off on 17th December 1942, with
the “preventive” elimination of the Sonderkommando. This seems to
dry up the source of information, but it is difficult to confirm
this even though the concordance of dates seems to point to this
conclusion. The photographs of the rails date from late 1942.
The break between the witnesses and the Sonderkommando also. |
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| WHAT DID THE WITNESSES ACTUALLY SEE?
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| Their observations may be summarized as
follows: |
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| A. |
What they could see
and hear from the outside: |
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1. |
Without being able to
interpret the significance immediately (during
construction): |
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a) |
The excavation for and building
of two underground rooms. From one of these (Leichenkeller 2 or the
future undressing room) narrow-gauge rails ran up to the furnace
room. In December 1942 it was impossible to know which basement the
SS would use for gassing, or whether they would use
both. |
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b) |
The installation of 3 (later 4)
introduction traps in the roof of one of the basements
(Leichenkeller 1). |
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2. |
With a little
interpretation: |
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a) |
The erection in the yard of
Krematorium II of a stable-type hut, where people entered clothed at
one end and emerged shortly afterwards naked at the other end, then
disappeared into a stairway near the main entrance of the
Krematorium, never to be seen again. |
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b) |
Shots that could be heard coming
from the basement access stairway, fired a few metres from the gas
chamber entrance door. |
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c) |
SS-men, wearing gas masks, on
the roof of the gas chamber, handling cans of Zyklon-B and pouring
the contents into small chimneys sticking out of the roof.
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d) |
The starting of the extractor
fan motor in the roof space of the Krematorium and that of the
furnace pulsed air blowers on the ground floor. |
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e) |
The smoke billowing from the
chimney one or two hours after the SS had poured in the
Zyklon-B. |
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| B. |
What they did not see,
but heard in the accounts of other prisoners:
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1. |
The internal
arrangements of the Krematorium and of its gas chamber, which would
explain the discrepancies in the number of furnaces and the varying
descriptions of the gas chamber. |
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2. |
The cremation
statistics. |
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3. |
The attitude of the SS
officers and civilian officials during the gassing and cremation of
the “8000” Cracow Jews. In fact, direct witnessing of the “Final
Solution” shocked even the most rabid anti-semites so much that they
were virtually struck dumb (cf. Rudolf Hoess: “Commandant of
Auschwitz”, page 173). |
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| C. |
What they could only
imagine: |
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l. |
The function of the
rails seen during construction. |
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2. |
The transport of the
gassed victims on flat wagons pushed from the basement to the
furnace room, as was done between Bunkers 1 and 2 and their mass
graves. In Krematorien II and III, this job was actually done using
first a temporary goods hoist and subsequently an electric lift.
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In conclusion, this early testimony, somewhat
unreliable and even quite wrong on some points, has the merit of
describing exactly the gassing process in type II/III Krematorien as
from mid-March 1943. It made the mistake of generalizing internal
and external descriptions and the operating method to Krematorien IV
and V. Far from invalidating it, the discrepancies confirm its
authenticity, as the descriptions are clearly based on what the
witnesses could actually have seen and heard.
To
conclude this chapter, I quote an extract from the book by Hanna
Reitsch, “The sky my kingdom” [Document 16] in order to show
that external alarm bells — such as the War Refugee Board report —
were not the only ones ringing in the office of the Reichsführer,
for whom things were getting hot. I draw no conclusions on the
attitude of Hanna Reitsch or Peter Riedel with regard to the date of
the episode and the disastrous turn the war was taking for them, but
simply observe that it was high time for Himmler to order the
destruction of the instruments of the “Final Solution”, in view of
the increasingly widespread reprobation.
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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