January 27, 1945
[To commemorate all the victims of the Holocaust, this post will remain prominently at the top of the page all day. The post is a companion to a January 25 entry. Interested-Participant has joined the January, 2005, Blogburst.]
Auschwitz - Entrance
Each day the trains rolled into the camp through the passageway constructed in the far gate, down one of three tracks to the selection platform. As they fell out of the trains, the victims were sent one way or another, with tearful parting scenes. The procession moved to the crematoria yard where the SS told the Jews they were going to take disinfection baths. An orchestra of attractive women played gay tunes from operas and light marches. Then to the dressing room or reception center with numbered clothing pegs drivin into the walls. The SS ordered the victims to undress and to remember their numbers. Sometimes they gave them towels. Then the SS drove the victims through the corridor to the heated gas chamber. The heating was provided not for the comfort of the prisoners but to create a better setting for the evaporation of gas. The gas squads packed the 2,000 victims into the room. From the ceiling hung imitation shower heads. The doors were closed, the air was pumped out, and the gas poured in. Cyclone B, or hydrogen cyanide, is a very poisonous gas that causes death by internal suffocation. In sufficient concentrations, it causes death almost immediately. But the SS did not bother to calculate the proper quantities, so death took anywhere from three to twenty minutes. While the victims were dying, the SS watched through the peepholes.
When they opened the doors, they found the victims in half-sitting positions in a towerlike pile. Most were pink, others were covered with green spots. Some had foam on their lips, while others bleeding from the nose. Many had their eyes open. The majority were packed near the doors. The squads in special clothing moved in with hooks to pull the bodies off of each other.
[ ... ]
The scientifically planned crematoria should have been able to handle the total project, but they could not. The whole complex had forty-six retorts, each with the capacity for three to five persons. The burning in a retort lasted about half an hour. It took an hour a day to clean them out. Thus it was theoretically possible to cremate about 12,000 corpses in twenty four hours or 4,380,000 a year. But the well-constructed crematoria fell far behind at a number of camps, and especially at Aschwitz in 1944. In August the total cremation reached a peak one day of 24,000, but still a bottleneck occurred. Camp authorities needed an economic and fast method of corpse disposal, so they again dug six huge pits beside Crematorium Five and reopened old pits in the wood.
Thus, late in 1944, pit burning became the chief method of corpse disposal. The pits had indentations at one end from which human fat drained off. To keep the pits burning, the stokers poured oil, alcohol, and large quantities of boiling human fat over the bodies:
The sizzling fat was scooped out with buckets on a long curved rod and poured all over the pit causing flames to leap up amid much crackling and hissing. The air reeked of oil, fat, benzole and burnt flesh.
[ ... ]
Burning that many bodies produced an enormous quantity of ashes. To finish the task, the labor squad cooled the ashes with water, shoveled out the ashes, piled them in heaps, removed remaining bones and limbs with special tools, reburnt the limbs, pulverized the ashes, and buried them in pits or threw them into the marshes. Later they threw the ashes into the Vistula and Solo rivers. A small, carefully sifted quantity was kept in a shed. Sometimes families were notified of the death of their loved ones and in return for money they would recieve urns filled with the ashes. [Excerpted in original form from The Nizkor Project web pages.]
Auschwitz - Exit
Outside the Auschwitz - Birkenau complex, life was normal. Inside, well over 1 million innocent people, 90% Jewish, were murdered and cremated, causing a lingering, sickly smell to blanket the countryside from 1940 to 1945. People noticed but didn't say anything. Other camps killed millions more and people noticed the smell in each place but didn't say anything. Millions of murders were committed with tacit consent of the public. Was the general population ignorant? In the beginning, yes, the public was not told. But they had to know after a short while. Tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, children, and infants arrived on trains and no one was ever seen to leave. The German public knew. They were just too timid, too weak, too prejudiced, too gullible, and, eventually, too complicit in the horror of the monstrous massacre.
We have an obligation to teach our children well and tell them the details of this black chapter in human history. We must never forget the millions who died at Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Treblinka, and many other death camps during the Holocaust.
The exact number of people sacrilegiously murdered will never be known. Only estimates are available. Death came with no ceremonies nor records. No headstones mark their resting places. Only rational, civilized people can keep their memory alive and prevent another Holocaust from happening.
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