were unable to work. Still another
improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims
almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz
we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go
through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our
true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to
that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under
their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the
children in to be exterminated."
He described the actual killing by stating:
"It took from three to fifteen
minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon
climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their
screaming stopped. We usually waited about one half-hour before we
opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were
removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the
gold from the teeth of the corpses."
Beating, starvation, torture, and killing were
general. The inmates were subjected to cruel experiments at Dachau in
August 1942, victims were immersed in cold water until their body
temperature was reduced to 28° Centigrade, when they died
immediately. Other experiments included high altitude experiments in
pressure chambers, experiments to determine how long human beings
could survive in freezing water, experiments with poison bullets,
experiments with contagious diseases, and experiments dealing with
sterilization of men and women by X-rays and other methods.
Evidence was given of the treatment of the
inmates before and after their extermination. There was testimony
that the hair of women victims was cut off before they were killed,
and shipped to Germany, there to be used in the manufacture of
mattresses. The clothes money, and valuables of the inmates were also
salvaged and sent to the appropriate agencies for disposition. After
the extermination the gold teeth and fillings were taken from the
heads of the corpses and sent to the Reichsbank.
After cremation the ashes were used for fertilizer, and in some
instances attempts were made to utilize the fat from the bodies of
the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap. Special groups
traveled through Europe to find Jews and subject them to the
"final solution". German missions were sent to such
satellite countries as Hungary and Bulgaria, to arrange for the
shipment of Jews to extermination camps and it is known that by the
end of 1944, 400,000 Jews from Hungary had been murdered at
Auschwitz. Evidence has also been given of the evacuation of 110.000
Jews from part of Rumania for "liquidation". Adolf
Eichmann, who had been put in charge of this program by Hitler, has
estimated that the