No matter how little one delves into the analysis of the German concentration system during the Third Reich, the small number of members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) that kept it running in relation to the thousands and thousands of inmates who kept it running immediately becomes apparent. They passed through their fields.
It’s more. A significant percentage of the SS carried out bureaucratic and managerial functions, with relatively few uniformed officers, always in relation to the total number of prisoners, who acted as guards or in direct control of the inmates.
This situation reached the point of having to enlist auxiliaries of Baltic or Ukrainian origin to reinforce these functions, as happened in Auschwitz in the spring of 1943. The key to this apparent paradox lies in the fact that it was the prisoners themselves who made the different functions work. centers, whether concentration or extermination.
Today, almost all of us are able to identify the figure of the Kapo, responsible for the discipline and work of the inmates in his charge, over whom he had almost complete power. The work generally fell to common prisoners of German origin, who usually acted in a brutal manner.
However, the SS reserved the right over the life and death of the inmates and the application of the last sentence, including the handling of lethal gas. Which did not prevent some of those starving prisoners, who had lost almost all hope, from losing their lives under the baton of the Kapo on duty.
There were many more positions to fill for interns in any camp. From working in the lazaretto to peeling potatoes, from taking care of the plants in the SS residence to working in the industries that were emerging around them. In this article we will refer to one of them. Perhaps the most dramatic and painful of all: the Sonderkommando, and, more specifically, the one who worked in the enormous Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.
When the construction of the Nazi camp in Auschwitz (O?wi?cim, Poland) was ordered, the existence of a crematorium was foreseen, as occurred in any other camp, to dispose of the bodies of the prisoners who were going to die there, either by natural causes, or because they have been executed. It came into operation in August 1940, and was initially managed by members of the so-called stoker command, which seemed to be sufficient for its needs.
The situation changed after the inspection visit of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on March 1, 1941. He ordered the head of the camp, Rudolf Höss, to expand the facilities, creating what would be known as Auschwitz II, or Birkenau (Brzezinka), 2.5 km from the main field. The bulk of the murders perpetrated by the SS took place there.
After testing the effect of Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide, to gas inmates at Auschwitz I, it was decided to build a new gas chamber in Birkenau, the Little Red House, which came into operation in March 1942. A She was followed by a second one, the Little White House, in order to “treat” the new contingents of Jews arriving at the facility, adding over time others built at ground level, instead of underground, and divided into smaller rooms. .
It soon became obvious that the meager numbers of the stoker command and the body carriers were not going to be enough for the enormous task that lay ahead, with the transfer of thousands of Jews from the ghettos for mass murder, so it was decided to create a Sonderkommando (special commando) in April 1942, supervised by an SS (Kommandoführer) and led by a series of Kapos, from the Vorarbeiter (foreman), through the Oberkapo (senior Kapo) and the Schreiber (administrative), until reaching to the Unterkapo (lower Kapos).
The members of the Sonderkommando, with some exceptions soon corrected, were all Jews, and were selected as soon as they got off the train upon arriving at the camp. Without the possibility of resignation – this would have led to immediate death – they were chosen following eminently physical criteria, so they tended to be young men with a strong and healthy appearance.
Their main tasks were to accompany those who, after selection, were sentenced to the gas chamber, calm them down, help them undress, and hang their clothes and belongings on hangers. After their murder, they had to remove the corpses, comb and cut the hair of the dead women, extract the gold teeth from the bodies, place them in the cremation ovens and dispose of the ashes. In carrying out such a terrible burden, it was not strange to recognize the remains of a family member, friend or acquaintance.
Likewise, they had to make a first selection of the clothes of the dead to take them to the barracks where they were stored (known as “Canada”, because of how rich such a country was supposedly), and clean the chambers for the next shift, whitewashing them with lime. the floor and walls, full of urine and excrement, for which they used to cover their mouths with a handkerchief, since traces of gas could also remain. In endless shifts of at least twelve hours, they carried out other no less hard tasks.
Thus, since the crematoriums could not cope, it was decided to bury the bodies in mass graves outside Birkenau. However, the natural putrefaction process not only caused a strong pestilence that was difficult to hide, but also ended up contaminating the waters.
In order to reverse the process, since September 21, 1942, the nearly 107,000 buried corpses were exhumed and burned on pyres in open pits. This was what became known as Aktion 1005. This process was carried out by men from the Sonderkommando under the supervision of SS-Untersturmführer Franz Hössler. Once it was finished, those who participated in it were in turn exterminated.
Although most of the bodies were reduced to ashes after cremation, there were always long bones and skulls that were difficult to burn, so they had to be crushed with clubs by members of the Sonderkommando, after which they were loaded onto trucks and taken away. to a bend in the Vistula, where they were thrown into the water with shovels.
The task was daunting, so in mid-1942 a second Sonderkommando was created. Between them they reached about four hundred members, although their number always fluctuated; The more work, the more incorporations. Thus, when the extermination of the Hungarian Jews (Sonderaktion Ungarn) and those of the Lodz ghetto was proposed in mid-1944, their number increased to nine hundred. The destruction of lives in those days reached such extremes that the light poles in the crematoriums came to warp due to the high and permanent temperature.
In exchange for their work, the members of the group obtained a more substantial diet, better quality clothing and, ultimately, better living conditions, thanks, in part, to what they scavenged from those who were going to die – especially, gold–, since the complex was a great center of corruption in which tobacco, alcohol or narcotics were never lacking.
However, they were segregated from the other prisoners, with whom they could not interact, since it was forbidden under penalty of death to explain what was happening there. An open secret that everyone knew, but that no one could talk about. The truth is that their life expectancy was also limited, since their limbs were periodically decimated – generally between four and six months –, preferably with a shot to the back of the head. Suicides were also recurrent.
Their work was mentally destructive, and, not surprisingly, they did not usually receive signs of appreciation from the other prisoners. The Italian writer Primo Levi, deported in 1944 to the Auschwitz III-Monowitz camp, said of them: “Their clothes gave off a nauseating smell; “They were always very dirty and had an absolutely wild appearance, like real ferocious beasts.” It doesn’t seem like it was exactly like that.
Their situation was very complex, and, like the other inmates, they could not choose. Between 1945 and 1980, various manuscripts were found in the crematorium area buried in metal or glass containers written by some of them, in which they described their situation, what their life was like, and the spiritual and mental dilemma in which they lived. , which led them to despair or brutality, aware of what was happening around them and the process in which they were participants.
Although a more or less general uprising had been being prepared for some time for December 24, 1944, which would take advantage of the circumstance that many SS would be out on leave, the news that the Sonderkommando was going to be exterminated shortly It moved those who worked at Crematorium IV to rebel.
Armed with axes, sticks and all kinds of weapons, on October 7, 1944 they attacked their guards, killing three SS and wounding others. With gasoline and gunpowder collected from the Union-Werke factory, they disabled the crematorium. An unknown number managed to escape, but others were surrounded by the SS near the village of Rajsko and killed or burned alive.
After the count, a purge was carried out, and the Sonderkommando was reduced to about two hundred men, half of whom were executed shortly afterwards. After the evacuation of the camp, starting on January 18, 1945, before the imminent arrival of the Red Army, few survived the so-called death marches; just a little more than a dozen.
Of the nearly 1,300,000 human beings who arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau-Monowitz complex and the dependent subcamps, 1,100,000 saw death there. Every word is unnecessary given the magnitude of the genocide perpetrated.
