CentreNews_2014_Issue1

The Sonderkommando
in Auschwitz-Birkenau:
the death factory’s squad
of Jewish workers
Gideon Greif
‘The creation of the special squad, the Sonderkommando,
has to be considered as the worst crime of the National
Socialist regime,’ wrote author Primo Levi, himself an
Auschwitz survivor, in his well-known book, The drowned
and the saved. He was absolutely right! To force Jews
to work in the Auschwitz death factory, where over
1,300,000 Jews were poisoned to death, is the utmost of
evil, cruelty, barbarity and sadism.
This was exactly the intention of the Germans in
compelling male Jewish prisoners to become slaves on
the biggest assembly line in the world, producing human
ashes. Humiliation was an integral and permanent part
of the ‘Final Solution’, and this was humiliation in the
extreme.
It is important to note at the outset that the Jewish
Sonderkommando prisoners were present in all parts of
the industrial process, with one crucial exception: they
did not kill a single Jew with Zyklon B, the poisonous
gas used in the gas chambers. This murder, with no
exceptions, was perpetrated by the Germans.
The Sonderkommando were slaves who had no
alternative but to obey the orders of their tormentors.
Their only way of escape was to commit suicide. Few
chose this alternative, hoping to survive somehow to tell
the world about the Nazis’ crimes in Auschwitz and to
keep the memory of the murdered Jews alive.
In all killing sites and camps, a central principle of the
Germans was the complete elimination of any sign of
their crimes. For this reason, they decided not to leave
even one survivor of the Jewish Sonderkommando
slaves alive. So, from the moment of their recruitment,
the Sonderkommando men were automatically
condemned to death. The Germans almost succeeded
in achieving their goal, but after murdering more than
3,000, between 80 to 100 miraculously survived. Today
there are only four remaining Jewish Sonderkommando
survivors alive worldwide.
The survival of these Jewish men has enabled us to
document the mass killing of 1,500,000 innocent people,
mostly Jews, in Auschwitz and Birkenau. Since 1986, I
have systematically interviewed those last survivors,
who have provided essential information about the inner
life of the Sonderkommando prisoners and the deceitful
methods of the Germans. My other important source
has been the collection of texts called The Auschwitz
Scrolls, clandestine notes which Sonderkommando
men wrote and hid in the grounds of the crematoria in
Birkenau. These two main sources, supported by a few
reports of former SS-Crematoria guards, have enabled
us to portray the daily life and routine deaths of the
Sonderkommando prisoners and the crimes perpetrated
by the Germans at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The first stage of mass killing in Auschwitz began in
the Main Camp, in the ‘Old Crematoria’, where the
Sonderkommando was born. Still of modest dimensions,
in the first months of 1942, some provisional installations
were used in Birkenau for the killing of the masses of
Jews who were deported to Auschwitz by freight train
from all over Europe. As the two provisional installations
– Bunker 1 and Bunker 2 – were too small to cope with
the huge transports, between March and June 1943,
four modern and sophisticated gas chambers and
Crematoria, numbered 2 to 5, came into operation in
Birkenau. Those facilities were planned to murder as
many Jews as possible each day, as quickly and as
efficiently as possible. Since so many transports were
arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau – especially during the
mass murder of the Hungarian Jews in spring and early
summer of 1944 – the German perpetrators had to find
a way of organising the process of killing as effectively
as possible. As a result, German engineers from
technological companies, including Topf und Söhne,
planned the more modern four ‘death factory’ facilities
in Auschwitz-Birkenau. These worked just like any other
factory, with two main differences: its raw material was
human beings, and its end product was ashes from burnt
corpses.
The death rate in all gas chambers and crematoria,
working non-stop day and night from May 1944 to
September 1944 during the Hungarian transports, was
between 10,000 and 20,000 murdered Jews per day.
During this period Sonderkommando prisoners had to
work in two shifts, 12 hours per shift.
Without murdering anybody themselves, the
Sonderkommando men were involved in the process of
murder from beginning to end. The first stage was the
‘Undressing Hall’, part of the deceit of the Germans to
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