Wannsee Conference in 100 Facts

[RolandVT]

The Sonderkommando revolt in Auschwitz occurred on October 7, 1944, when a large group of Sonderkommando members in the crematoria area of Birkenau camp (aka Auschwitz II) attacked the Nazi guards of the camp.

The revolt had three objectives: destroy Crematorium IV (it happened); kill a number of German guards (three were killed) – and organize an escape from the killing center (27 escapees survived the war). Therefore, the revolt was mostly successful (albeit not as successful as was initially planned – 452 members of the Sonderkommando died in the revolt).

The gas chamber killings, body burning, and handling of the victims’ belongings required a significant workforce. For this purpose, the Germans recruited about 1,000 Jews, called the Sonderkommando.

These workers received better living and food conditions; however, they constantly faced death, as the SS routinely killed group members every few months and brought in new workers. Figuring they had nothing to lose, the Jews started planning the revolt.

Uprising was triggered by the decision of the SS to execute 300 Sonderkommando members (they have already executed the same number). Revolt was set to commence on October 7, 1944, at 16:00.

The plan was to overpower the German soldiers during evening roll call, blow up the four crematoria (using explosives smuggled from nearby munitions factory), cut the fence (it was electrified only at night), and escape.

As usual, this plan went right out of the window almost immediately. On the day of the revolt, at noon, SS guards unexpectedly arrived at Crematoria IV and V and began to isolate a group of prisoners for execution.

The prisoners began to resist using knives, axes and the few firearms they had. The SS retreated and opened fire on the prisoners while simultaneously calling for reinforcements from the camp. Reinforcements arrived and began shooting indiscriminately at the prisoners hiding in the crematoria, killing many of them.

The inmates in Crematorium II exited the building, and using handmade knives, axes and grenades assembled with the obtained explosives, managed to make their way to the camp’s wire fence, cut it, and escape. It is estimated that about 80 prisoners managed to flee.

After the revolt, the crematoria were not returned to operation, and they were blown up before the SS left the camp.

[RolandVT]

Surprisingly few are aware of the fact that right after the end of the Second Great War the genuine “German Holocaust” and a near-total ethnic cleansing (of Germans) took place in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe (Allies approved).

Both were horrific crimes against humanity – and carbon copy of Nazi plans for occupied Poland (only the other way around). Both took place right during the IMT Nuremberg trial – which proved beyond the reasonable doubt that the latter was a disgusting judicial farce that had nothing to do with justice.

The Allies won – and the Germans lost; hence, exactly the same activities are called “war crimes” (when committed by the Nazis) and “humane population transfers” – when committed by countries of “Anti-Hitler coalition”. A typical hypocrisy of “victors’ justice”: cut and dry, plain and simple.

During the later stages of World War II and in the post-war period, Reichsdeutsche (German citizens) and Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans living outside the Nazi state) fled and were expelled from various Eastern and Central European countries.

And from the former German provinces of Lower and Upper Silesia, East Prussia, and the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania (Farther Pomerania), which were annexed by Poland and by the Soviet Union.

Death toll is officially estimated at TWO MILLION (half the number of Holocaust victims) and around 14 million Germans were deported to Germany (Nazis planned to deport a similar number of Untermenschen in their Generalplan Ost but deported only a few thousand Poles). Germans were expelled – and some killed – only because they were German. Hence, it was genocide – plain and simple.

This brutal ethnic cleansing was authorized by the victorious Allies at the (in)famous Potsdam conference – with full understanding that the death toll would be in the hundreds of thousands at least.

Which makes the conference at Potsdam no better than one in Wannsee… actually, it was worse. Far worse, because the death by gas or a bullet was far more merciful than brutal murder by rifle stock, bayonet often accompanied with rape and/or severe beating. Only because the victims were German.

The sad truth is that in World War II there were no “good guys” – ALL belligerents were very, very bad – because ALL committed horrible crimes against humanity. The only difference was in the number of victims – but in the eyes of criminal justice there is NO difference between Jack the Ripper (who killed five) and Andrei Chikatilo (who killed fifty). ALL were despicable serial mass murderers.

[RolandVT]

Theresienstadt Ghetto was not a death factory (for all practical purposes, it was a transit camp to the latter) and the number of its victims was small compared even to Majdanek. Hence, it is known rather than estimated – around 33,000 (mostly from malnutrition and/or diseases).

Reinhard Heydrich announced at the Wannsee Conference that Theresienstadt Ghetto was would be used to house Jews over the age of 65 from the Reich, as well as those who had been severely wounded fighting for the Central Powers in World War I or won the Iron Cross 1st Class or a higher decoration during that war.

They would be held until they die from natural causes… which was a blatant lie. In reality, they were to be the last to be taken to killing centers as the Final Solution required murder of ALL Jews under German control – regardless of age or their service to the German Empire. Thus, in reality, Theresienstadt Ghetto was to be but a transit camp to the death factories.

The first transport to a killing center (on January 9, 1942) went for Riga Ghetto where they were promptly shot. Over 100,000 Jews entered Theresienstadt in the year of 1942, resulting in a peak population, on 18 September 1942, of 58,491.

To alleviate overcrowding, the Germans deported 18,000 mostly elderly people in nine transports in the autumn of 1942. Most of the Jews deported from Theresienstadt in 1942 were killed immediately, either in the Operation Reinhard death camps or at mass execution sites in the Baltic States and Belarus, such as Maly Trostenets, and Baranavichy. Many transports have no known survivors.

In January of 1943, 7,000 were deported to Auschwitz killing center. Interestingly, the RSHA archives were transported to Theresienstadt in July 1943, and stored in the barracks until they were burned on April 17, 1945.

By November of 1944, only 11,000 people were left at Theresienstadt, most of them elderly; 70% were female. On February 5, 1945, after negotiations with Swiss politicians, Himmler released a transport of 1,200 Jews (mostly from Germany and Holland) from Theresienstadt to neutral Switzerland. The Danish king secured the release of the Danish Jews from Theresienstadt on 15 April 1945.

The Red Cross took over the ghetto and removed the SS flag on May 2, 1945. The SS fled on May 6 and two days later the ghetto was liberated by Red Army.

In the postwar period, a few of the SS perpetrators and Czech guards were put on trial, but the ghetto was generally forgotten by the Soviet authorities… or the Western ones, for that matter.

[RolandVT]

Few are aware that ‘Majdanek’ is actually a nickname – the official name for this death factory was Konzentrationslager Lublin (it was located on the outskirts of that Polish city). The camp was nicknamed Majdanek (“little Majdan”) by the locals in 1941 by local residents, as it was adjacent to the Lublin Jewish ghetto of Majdan Tatarski (Tatar Square).

Another little-known fact is that with its seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, it was actually one of the largest of the SS concentration camps.

Unlike all other death factories, Majdanek was liberated (captured) relatively intact – due to rapid advance of the Red Army and ineptitude of Deputy Camp Commandant Anton Thernes. Hence, it provided a treasure trove of incriminating evidence of war crimes of the SS.

It did not help, however, to instantly arrived at more or less correct estimate (even an estimate) of the number of victims claimed by this death factory – as recordkeeping at every killing center was deliberately poor. Initially, a ridiculously high number of 360,000 was put forward which was later reduced to 235,000.

The Soviets propaganda predictably grossly overestimated the number of murders, claiming at the Nuremberg Trials that there were no fewer than 400,000 Jewish victims, and the official Soviet count was of 1.5 million victims of all nationalities.

The official estimate of 78,000 victims, of those 59,000 Jews, was determined in 2005 by Tomasz Kranz, director of the Research Department of the Majdanek State Museum, calculated following the discovery of the Höfle Telegram in 2000.

Konzentrationslager Lublin was established in October 1941 on the orders of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The original plan drafted by Himmler was for the camp to hold at least 25,000 Soviet POWs.

After large numbers of Soviet prisoners-of-war were captured during the Battle of Kiev, the projected camp capacity was subsequently increased to 250,000. However, the reality bit (it usually does) and Majdanek never grew beyond the capacity of 50,000 inmates.

With the commencement of Operation Reinhard, Majdanek was made into a secondary sorting and storage depot at the onset of Operation Reinhard, for property and valuables taken from the victims at the killing centers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

However, it soon became clear that these death factories did not have the capacity to “process” all Polish Jews by the deadline specified by Himmler. To remedy the situation, Majdanek was refurbished as a killing center around March 1942.

Initially, serial mass murder was performed by shootings (by the squads of Trawnikis – local collaborators), but soon it was – predictably – determined that their efficiency leaves much to be desired.

So, in September of 1942, stationary gas chambers were installed and made operational. They used the same method as the one in Auschwitz-Birkenau – serial mass murder by Zyklon-B.

Mass killings were carried out in Barrack 41 with crystalline hydrogen cyanide released by the Zyklon B. The same poison gas pellets were used to disinfect prisoner clothing in Barrack 42 (no surprise here).

Until June 1942, the bodies of those murdered at Majdanek were buried in mass graves – like in Operation Reinhard death factories. These were later exhumed and burned by Sonderkommando 1005.

From June 1942, the SS disposed of the bodies by burning them, either on pyres made from the chassis of old lorries or in a crematorium. The so-called First Crematorium had two ovens which were brought to Majdanek from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Operation Reinhard continued until early November 1943, when the last Jewish prisoners of the Majdanek system of subcamps from the District Lublin in the General Government were massacred by the firing squads of Trawniki men during Operation “Harvest Festival” (murder by shooting of up to 43,000 Jews at the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps).

Between December 1943 and March 1944, Majdanek received approximately 18,000 so-called “invalids”, many of whom were subsequently murdered with Zyklon B. Executions by firing squad continued as well, with 600 shot on January 21, 1944; 180 shot on January 23, 1944; and 200 shot on March 24, 1944.

In late July 1944, with Soviet forces rapidly approaching Lublin, the Germans hastily evacuated the camp and partially destroyed the crematoria before Red Army arrived there on July 24, 1944.

Majdanek was the best-preserved camp of the Holocaust due to incompetence by its deputy commander, Anton Thernes (he was captured, tried and executed by the Soviets). It was the first major concentration camp liberated by Allied forces, and the horrors found there were widely publicized.

[RolandVT]

Estimated 200,000; the precise death toll is unknown, since no complete record survives. Estimates range from 170,000 to 250,000 with 200,000 believed to be closer to the true number of victims.

As a killing center rather than a labor camp, Sobibor existed for the sole purpose of murdering Jews. The vast majority of prisoners were gassed within hours of arrival. Those not killed immediately were forced to assist in the operation of the camp, and few survived more than a few months.

Sobibor is unique because it was essentially closed by its inmates – after they executed a highly successful revolt on October 14, 1943. After the revolt, the SS was forced to close and destroy the camp and cover up their crimes.

Nothing is known for certain about the early planning for Sobibor; however, it appears that the decision to build this particular killing center was made sometime in October of 1941 – concurrently with decisions to set up such centers in Chelmno (Kulmhof) and Belzec. Local witnesses support this assessment.

We do not know when the construction work on this death factory started – we only know that In March 1942, SS-Hauptsturmführer Richard Thomalla took over construction work at the site.

Thomalla was a former building contractor and committed Nazi whose service as an auxiliary police commander and adviser on Jewish forced labor had earned him a high-ranking position in Odilo Globocnik’s construction department.

Globocnik was the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district of the General Government – and the CEO of Operation Reinhard. It is believed that at a two-hour meeting with Himmler on October 13, 1941, Globocnik received verbal approval by the latter to begin construction of the Belzec extermination camp, the first such camp in the General Government. It is possible that at the same meeting a decision was made to construct the killing center in Sobibor.

Having previously overseen the construction of Belzec death factory, Thomalla allotted a much larger area for Sobibor than he had for Belzec, providing space for all of the camp’s facilities to be constructed within its perimeter.

The first gas chambers at Sobibor were built following the model of those at Belzec, but without any furnaces. To provide the carbon monoxide gas, SS-Scharführer Erich Fuchs acquired a heavy gasoline engine in Lemberg (Lviv), disassembled from an armored vehicle or a tractor. Other sources claim that the diesel engine of captured Soviet T-34 tank was used.

Fuchs installed the engine on a cement base at Sobibor and connected the engine exhaust manifold to pipes leading to the gas chamber. In mid-April 1942, the Nazis conducted experimental gassings in the nearly finished camp.

Christian Wirth, the commander of Belzec Inspector (Chief Operating Officer) of Operation Reinhard, visited Sobibor to witness one of these gassings, which murdered thirty to forty Jewish women brought from the labor camp at Krychów.

The initial construction of Sobibor was finished by summer 1942, and a steady stream of victims began arriving thereafter (although regular gassings began earlier – in mid-May).

After only a few months of operation, the wooden walls of the gas chambers had absorbed too much sweat, urine, blood, and excrement to be cleanable. Thus, the old gas chambers were demolished in the summer of 1942, and new larger ones were built made out of brick.

Because Sobibor was the death factory, the only prisoners who lived there were the roughly 600 slave laborers forced to assist in the operation of the killing center. The harsh conditions in the camp took the lives of most new arrivals within a few months – others were periodically gassed and replaced with new arrivals.

Trains entered the railway siding with the unloading platform, and the Jews on board were told they were in a transit camp. They were forced to hand over their valuables, were separated by sex and told to undress.

The nude women and girls were met by the Jewish workers who cut off their hair in mere half a minute. The victims, assembled into groups, were led along the 100m -long “Road to Heaven” to the gas chambers, where they were murdered using CO released from the exhaust pipes of a T-34 engine. The dead bodies were collected by Sonderkommandos and buried in mass graves or cremated in the open air.

On the afternoon of October 14, 1943, members of the Sobibor underground covertly killed eleven of the on-duty SS men and then led roughly 300 prisoners to freedom (47 survived the war).

Fearing exposure of SS crimes, Himmler on October 19th ordered that the camp be closed and demolished. Jewish slave laborers were brought to Sobibor from Treblinka in order to dismantle the camp.

They demolished the gas chambers and most of the camp buildings. The work was finished by the end of the October, and all of the Jews brought from Treblinka were shot during the first decade of November.

[RolandVT]

Chelmno (Kulmhof) was the first killing center of “Holocaust by Gas” – it became operational six weeks prior to Wannsee Conference (on December 8, 1941). It was established to (ultimately) kill all Jews of Lodz Ghetto (the second largest after the one in Warsaw) and to serve as a pilot project (and a proving ground) for “Holocaust by Gas” – the main phase of the “final solution to the Jewish question”.

200,000 is the estimated most likely number of victims (given by the Kulmhof Museum of Martyrdom) as no records of the latter survived (or were even kept). Estimate range from 152,000 (most likely, too low) to 320,000 (way too high).

The facility, which was specifically intended for no other purpose than serial mass murder, operated from December 8, 1941, to April 11, 1943, parallel to Operation Reinhard during the deadliest phase of the Holocaust. And again, from June 23, 1944, to January 18, 1945. In 1943, modifications were made to the camp’s killing methods as the reception building had already been dismantled.

The first people murdered in Chelmno, were the Jewish and Romani populations of Kolo District. The early killing process carried out by the SS from December 8, 1941, until mid-January 1942, was intended to murder Jews from all nearby towns and villages, which were slated for German colonization.

On January 16, 1942, the SS and police began deportations from the Lodz Ghetto which lasted for two weeks. The transports included hundreds of Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. In addition, they included over 10,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia and Luxembourg, who had first been deported to the ghetto in Lodz and stayed there for weeks – waiting for their deaths. The victims were “processed” immediately upon arrival at the manor-house in Chelmno.

The German SS staff selected young Jewish prisoners from incoming transports to join the camp Sonderkommando, a special unit of 50 to 60 men deployed at the forest burial camp.

They removed corpses from the gas-vans and placed them in mass graves. The large trenches were quickly filled, but the smell of decomposing bodies began to permeate the surrounding countryside including nearby villages.

In the spring of 1942, the SS ordered burning of the bodies in the forest. The bodies were cremated on open air grids constructed of concrete slabs and rail tracks; pipes were used for air ducts, and long ash pans were built below the grid.

Later, the Jewish Sonderkommando had to exhume the mass graves and burn the previously interred bodies. In addition, they sorted the clothing of the victims, and cleaned the excrement and blood from the vans.

Periodically, the SS executed the members of the Jewish special detachment and replaced them with workers selected from recent transports. It was a common practice in all death factories.

Having murdered almost all Jews of Wartheland District, in March 1943 the SS closed the Chełmno killing center. Himmler ordered complete demolition of Schlosslager (death factory proper), which was razed to the ground.

To hide the evidence of crimes committed, from 1943 onward, the SS ordered the exhumation of all remains and burning of bodies in open-air cremation pits by a unit of Sonderkommando 1005.

The bones of the dead bodies were crushed on cement with mallets and added to the ashes. These were transported every night in sacks made of blankets to river Warta (or to the Ner River) where they were dumped into the water from a bridge and from a flat-bottomed boat. Eventually, the camp authorities bought a bone-crushing machine to speed up the process.

On June 23, 1944, in spite of earlier demolition of the palace, the SS renewed gassing operations at Chełmno in order to complete the annihilation of the remaining 70,000 Jewish inmates of the Lodz ghetto – the last Jewish ghetto in occupied Poland to produce war supplies for the Wehrmacht.

First, the victims were taken to the desecrated church in Chełmno where they spent the night if necessary, and left their bundles behind on the way to the reception area. They were driven to the forest, where the camp authorities had constructed two fenced-out barracks for undressing before “shower”, and two new open-air cremation pits, further up.

The SS and police guarded the victims as they took off their clothes and gave up valuables before entering gas-vans. In this final phase of the camp operation, some 25,000 Jews were murdered. Their bodies were burned immediately after death. From mid-July 1944, the SS and police began deporting the remaining inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau death factory.

In September 1944, the SS brought in Jewish prisoners from outside the Wartheland to exhume and cremate remaining corpses and to remove evidence of their crimes. Gas vans were sent to Berlin.

The remaining Jewish workers were executed just before the German retreat on January 18, 1945, as the Soviet army approached (it reached the site two days later).

[RolandVT]

This number is an estimate based on the (in)famous Höfle Telegram sent to Berlin on 11 January 1943 by Operation Reinhard’s Chief of Staff Hermann Höfle. The radio telegram indicated that 434,508 Jews were deported to Belzec through December 31, 1942.

This total was based on numbers shared by the SS with the state-run Deutsche Reichsbahn (DRG). The camp had ceased to operate by then – the last transport with victims arrived 20 days earlier. Given the fact that DRG numbers were incomplete, 500,000 appears to be a realistic estimate.

Decision to establish a killing center in Belzec was most likely made by Odilo Globocnik – the CEO of Operation Reinhard – in mid-October of 1941 and immediately approved by SS-Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. Death factory at Belzec commenced its operations on March 17, 1942.

Only seven Jews performing slave labor with the camp’s Sonderkommando survived World War II. Only one experience there became known, thanks to his official postwar testimony.

The lack of viable witnesses able to testify about the camp’s operation is the primary reason why Belzec is little known, despite the high victim number count (Sobibor with less than half that number is far more well-known).

The history of Belzec death factory (the first in Operation Reinhard) can be divided into two stages of operation. The first phase, from March 17 to the end of June 1942, was marked by the existence of smaller gas chambers housed in barracks constructed of planks and insulated with sand and rubber.

There were many technical difficulties with the early process of mass murder. The gassing installation was imperfect and usually only one or two rooms were working, causing a backlog and forcing victims to wait to be “processed”.

In the first three months, 80,000 people were murdered and buried in pits covered with a shallow layer of earth. The victims were Jews deported from the Lublin Ghetto and its vicinity (Belzec was for Lublin what Chelmno was tor Lodz). The original three gas chambers were found insufficient for completing their purpose.

The second phase of extermination began in July 1942, when new gas chambers were built of brick and mortar on a lightweight foundation, thus enabling the facility to “process” Jews of the two largest cities nearby – the Kraków and Lwów (Lviv/Lemberg) ghettos.

The wooden gas chambers were dismantled. The new building had six gas chambers, insulated with cement walls. It could handle over 1,000 victims at a time. This design was soon replicated in the other two Operation Reinhard killing centers: Sobibor and Treblinka. In all three death factories powerful (500 hp) V-2 diesel engine taken out of captured Soviet T-34 medium tank (what irony!) was reportedly used.

There was a hand-painted sign on the new building that read Stiftung Hackenholt or Hackenholt Foundation named after the SS man who designed it (he disappeared after the end of the war). Until December 1942, at least 350,000 Jews were murdered in the new gas chambers.

In October 1942, the exhumation and burning of all corpses was ordered to cover up the crime on direct orders from SS general Odilo Globocnik, the CEO of Operation Reinhard.

The bodies were placed on pyres made from rail tracks, splashed with petrol and burned over wood. The bones were collected and crushed. The last period of camp’s operation continued until June 1943 when the area was ploughed over, and (not very successfully) disguised as a farm. Still, model for guarding and disguising murder sites was also adopted at the Treblinka and Sobibor killing centers.

The last train with 300 Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners who performed the clean-up operation departed to Sobibor death factory for gassing in late June 1943. They were told that they were being evacuated to Germany. Any equipment that could be reused was taken by the German and Ukrainian personnel to Majdanek killing center.

[RolandVT]

Treblinka II, to be more precise – Treblinka I was a forced labor camp. As was the case with all other killing centers, no comprehensive statistics on the victims survived (most likely, it never existed to begin with). Most scholarly estimates range from 700,000 to 900,000 with 800,000 being the most likely number.

Treblinka II (officially the SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka) was divided into three areas: Camp 1 was the administrative compound where the guards lived, Camp 2 was the receiving area where incoming transports of prisoners were offloaded, and Camp 3 was the location of the gas chambers.

The entire killing center was surrounded by two rows of barbed-wire fencing 2.5 m high. This fence was later woven with pine tree branches to obstruct the view of the death factory from the outside.

Decision to establish Treblinka II was most likely made in October 1942 (by Himmler, Heydrich and Globocnik) but for some reason – possibly, insufficient resources – its construction began only on April 10, 1942, when Belzec and Sobibór death factories were already operational. Treblinka II commenced its murderous operations on July 23, 1942.

The primary objective of Treblinka II was to facilitate the extermination of Jews in Warsaw Ghetto (the largest one in Poland); consequently, it was to play the same role for Warsaw as Chelmno for Lodz and Belzec for Lublin, Krakow and Lwow.

Camp 3 (also called the upper camp) was the killing zone, with gas chambers at its center. It was completely concealed from the railway tracks by an earth bank built with the help of a mechanical digger.

On the other sides, the zone was shielded from new arrivals like the rest of the camp, using tree branches woven into barbed wire fences. From the undressing barracks, a fenced-off path led through the forested area to the gas chambers.[78] The SS cynically called it the Road to Heaven – just like in Belzec

For the first eight months of the camp’s operation, the excavator was used to dig burial ditches on both sides of the gas chambers. In early 1943, these ditches were replaced with cremation pyres up to 30 m long, with rails laid across the pits on concrete blocks.

Unlike SS forced labor camps in which inmates were used as slaves, killing centers such as Treblinka had only one function: to kill those sent there. To keep the victims in the dark about the true nature of the facility until the very last moments, Treblinka II was disguised as a transit camp for deportations further East.

For this purpose, it had fake railway station, fake train schedules, a fake train-station clock with hands painted on it, names of destinations, a fake ticket window… everything was fake there except death.

The mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto began on July 22, 1942 with the first transportation of 6,000 people. The gas chambers became operational the following morning. For the next two months, deportations from Warsaw continued daily, via two shuttle trains (the second one was launched on August 6, 1942).

Geographically, Treblinka was mainly used for the murder of Polish Jews, Belzec to kill Jews also from Austria and the Sudetenland, and Sobibór was used to “process” Jews from France and the Netherlands. Auschwitz-Birkenau was used to kill Jews from almost every country in Europe.

The Holocaust trains’ passage to their destination was routinely delayed; some transports took many days to arrive. Hundreds of prisoners died by exhaustion, suffocation and thirst while in transit to the camp in the overcrowded wagons. In extreme cases, such as the Biała Podlaska transport of 6,000 Jews travelling only a 125 km distance, up to 90% of inmates were already dead when the sealed doors were opened at Treblinka.

The deportees (those who survived the trip, that is) were told that they had arrived at a transit point on the way to Ukraine and needed to shower and have their clothes disinfected before receiving work uniforms and new orders.

All new arrivals were sent immediately to the undressing area by the Bahnhofskommando squad that managed the arrival platform, and from there to the gas chambers.

Victims were separated by gender behind the gate; women were pushed into the undressing barracks and barber on the left, and men were sent to the right. All were ordered to tie their shoes together and strip. Some kept their own towels.

Those who resisted were taken to the “Lazarett” (infirmary), and shot behind it. Women had their hair cut off before gassing; therefore, it took longer to prepare them for the gas chambers than men. Their hair was used in the manufacture of socks for U-boat crews and hair-felt footwear for the Deutsche Reichsbahn.

After undressing, newly arrived Jews were often beaten with whips to drive them towards the gas chambers; hesitant men were treated particularly brutally. Men were always gassed first, while women and children waited outside the gas chambers for their turn.

During this time, the women and children could hear the screams of suffocating victims from inside the chambers, and they became aware of what awaited them, which caused panic, distress, and even involuntary defecation.

The gas chambers at Treblinka were completely enclosed by a high wooden fence. Originally, they consisted of three interconnected barracks 8 m long and 4 m wide, disguised as showers.

They had double walls insulated by earth packed down in between. The interior walls and ceilings were lined with roofing paper. The floors were covered with tin-plated sheet metal, the same material used for the roof. Solid wooden doors were insulated with rubber and bolted from the outside by heavy cross-bars.[78]

According to Stangl, a train transport of about 3,000 people could be “processed” in three hours. In a 14-hour workday, 12,000 to 15,000 people were murdered.[106] After the new gas chambers were built, the duration of the killing process was reduced to an hour and a half.

The victims were murdered by the exhaust fumes conducted through pipes from V-2 diesel engine of a captured Soviet T-34 tank – just as in Sobibor and Belzec. Usually, it took about 20 minutes to kill everyone in death chamber. Then the bodies were removed by dozens of Sonderkommandos, placed onto carts and wheeled away.

In August-September 1942, ten new gas chambers were constructed (it took about five weeks to complete this project) in a new large new building built from bricks and mortar under the guidance of Erwin Lambert, who had supervised the construction of gas chambers for the Aktion T4 (no surprise here).

The building was equipped with two diesel engines instead of one. The metal doors, which had been taken from Soviet military bunkers around Białystok, had portholes through which SS guards watched the process of mass murder.

Old gas chambers were capable of murdering 3,000 people in three hours.[106] The new ones had the highest possible capacity of any gas chambers in the three Reinhard death camps and could murder up to 25,000 victims every day. However, the new gas chambers were seldom used to their full capacity; about 15,000 was the daily average.

Mass graves with hundreds of thousands of rotting bodies presented a serious health hazard; besides, after the discoveries in Katyn forest there was a significant political danger as well. So, Himmler, concerned about covering up their own crimes, issued the secret orders to exhume the corpses buried at killing centers and burn them.

Cremations in Treblinka began shortly after Himmler’s visit to the camp in late February or early March 1943. To incinerate bodies, large cremation pits were constructed at Camp 3 within Treblinka II.

The burning pyres were used to burn the new corpses and the old ones, which had to be dug up as they had been buried during the first six months of the camp’s operation. Built under the instructions of Herbert Floss, the camp’s cremation expert, the pits consisted of railroad rails laid as grates on blocks of concrete.

The bodies were placed on rails over wood, splashed with petrol, and burned. According to witnesses, it was a genuine Hell on Earth. The bodies burned for five hours – after that the bones (that did not burn) had to be crushed. The pyres operated 24 hours a day. Once the system had been perfected, up to 12,000 bodies at a time could be incinerated.

The last two rail transports of Jews were brought to Treblinka II for gassing from the Białystok Ghetto on 18 and 19 August 1943. On October 19, 1943, Odilo Globocnik officially terminated Operation Reinhard and started a massive coverup.

The following day, a large group of Jewish Arbeitskommandos who had worked on dismantling the camp structures over the previous few weeks were loaded onto the train and transported, to Sobibór where they were gassed on 20 October 1943.

As part of these operations, Jews from the surviving work detail dismantled the gas chambers brick-by-brick and used them to erect a farmhouse on the site of the camp’s former bakery.

[RolandVT]

Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), to be more precise – Auschwitz I was the main camp (Stammlager); and Auschwitz III-Monowitz was a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben.

The number of victims of Auschwitz II death factory has been significantly revised since the end of the Second Great War: initially, the Soviets (who liberated the camp in January of 1945), that four million inmates had been murdered there, a figure based on the capacity of the crematoria. It was a lie – like just about everything uttered by the Soviets.

First Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss told prosecutors at Nuremberg that at least 2,500,000 people had been gassed there, and that another 500,000 had died of starvation and disease. It turned out that he was lying – “only” 1.1 million died at Auschwitz (960,000 Jews, 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 15,000 “other Europeans”).

Around one in six Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in Auschwitz.[241] By nation, the greatest number of Auschwitz’s Jewish victims (430,000) originated from Hungary.

Followed by Poland (300,000), France (69,000), Netherlands (60,000), Greece (55,000), Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (46,000), Slovakia (27,000), Belgium (25,000), Germany and Austria (23,000), Yugoslavia (10,000), Italy (7,500), Norway (690), and others (34,000). Just about all murdered Soviet Jews were killed in the “Holocaust by Bullets”.

This statistic proves beyond the reasonable doubt that Auschwitz II killing center was established for serial mass murder of Jews all over Europe (unlike Chelmno and Operation Reinhard death factories set up to murder mostly Polish Jews).

The first (experimental) gassing, however, took place in Auschwitz I two months before construction of Auschwitz II even began. The decision to do that gassing was apparently made right after termination of Aktion T4 euthanasia program made its personnel available for the “Holocaust by Gas”.

Its objective was to study the feasibility of this method for the “final solution to Jewish question” via total extermination of the Jews. It was decided to use cyanide-based pesticide (Zyklon B) because (1) it worked very fast on humans; and (2) it was already used for de-lousing clothes of inmates.

This first experimental gassing took place around August 1941, when Lagerführer Karl Fritzsch, at the instruction of Rudolf Höss, murdered a group of Soviet prisoners of war by throwing Zyklon B crystals into their basement cell in block 11 of Auschwitz I.

A second group of 600 Soviet prisoners of war and around 250 sick Polish prisoners were gassed on September 3-5 in the old crematorium after being told they were to march naked there to receive new clothing. The morgue was later converted to a gas chamber able to hold at least 700–800 people. Zyklon B was dropped into the room through slits in the ceiling.

Gassings were considered a success… however, Aktion T4 officials were not impressed. They found Zyklon B far too toxic and otherwise difficult to use – thus death factories of Operation Reinhard and Chelmno killing center used CO from exhaust fumes to kill their victims.

Auschwitz belonged to a different chain of command (as did Majdanek) so its commandants decided to stick to Zyklon B – but build a dedicated killing center next to the labor camp.

We do not know exactly when the regular gassings commenced at Auschwitz II. I think that it commenced on March 20, 1941 when Auschwitz II gas chambers became fully operational. Prior to that date gassing was done on an irregular, ad hoc basis (starting possibly as early as in late December of 1941).

However, we know for sure that construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau began in October 1941 in Brzezinka, about three kilometers from Auschwitz I. Most likely, it was included into the initial plan to build five killing center (Majdanek was added later to augment the “insufficient capacity” of these death factories).

The first gas chamber at Auschwitz II was built in what prisoners called the “little red house” (known as “bunker 1” by the SS), a brick cottage that had been turned into a gassing facility.

Its windows had been bricked up and its four rooms converted into two insulated rooms, the doors of which said “Zur Desinfektion”. A second gas chamber, the “little white house” or “bunker 2”, was converted and operational by June 1942.

Use of bunkers I and 2 stopped in spring 1943 when the new crematoria were built, although bunker 2 became operational again in May 1944 for the murder of the Hungarian Jews. Bunker I was demolished in 1943 and bunker 2 in November 1944.

Unlike in Operation Reinhard killing centers. in Auschwitz gas chambers were built next to ovens in the same building with crematoria. Plans for Crematoria II and III show that both contained an oven room on the ground floor, an underground dressing room and a gas chamber with a capacity for about 700 victims.

The dressing rooms had wooden benches along the walls and numbered pegs for clothing. Victims would be led from these rooms to a five-yard-long narrow corridor, which in turn led to a space from which the gas chamber door opened.

The gas chambers were white inside, and nozzles were fixed to the ceiling to resemble showerheads (to disguise their true purpose). The daily capacity of the crematoria was 340 corpses in 24 hours in Crematorium I; 1,440 each in Crematoria II and III; and 768 each in Crematoria IV and V.

By June 1943 all four crematoria were operational, but crematorium I was not used after July 1943. This made the total daily capacity equal to 4,416 corpses, although by loading three to five corpses at a time, the Sonderkommando were able to burn some 8,000 bodies a day. This maximum capacity was rarely needed, though; the average between 1942 and 1944 was 1,000 bodies burned every day.

To keep the victims calm, they were told they were to undergo disinfection and de-lousing; they were ordered to undress outside, then were locked in the building and gassed.

From 1942, Jews were being transported to Auschwitz from all over German-occupied Europe by rail, arriving in daily convoys. The gas chambers worked to their fullest capacity from May to July 1944, during the Holocaust in Hungary (a very strange phase in the “Holocaust Project”). The incoming volume was so great at that time that the Sonderkommando resorted to burning corpses in open-air pits in addition to in the crematoria.

During “selection” on arrival, those deemed able to work were sent to the right and admitted into the camp (registered), and the rest were sent to the left to be gassed. The group selected to die included almost all children, women with small children, the elderly, and others who appeared on brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor not fit for work.

Practically any fault—scars, bandages, boils and emaciation—might provide reason enough to be deemed unfit. Children might be made to walk toward a stick held at a certain height; those who could walk under it were gassed.

Inmates unable to walk or who arrived at night were taken to gas chambers on trucks; otherwise, the new arrivals were marched there. Their belongings were seized and sorted by inmates in the “Kanada” warehouses, an area of the camp used as storage facilities for plundered goods; it derived its name from the inmates’ view of Canada as a land of plenty.

The crematoria consisted of a dressing room, gas chamber, and furnace room. In crematoria II and III, the dressing room and gas chamber were underground; in IV and V, they were on the ground floor. The dressing room had numbered hooks on the wall to hang clothes.

SS officers told the victims they had to take a shower and undergo delousing. The victims undressed in the dressing room and walked into the gas chamber; signs said “Bade” (bath) or “Desinfektionsraum” (disinfection room). The new gas chamber could hold up to 2,000; one former prisoner said it was around 3,000.

Zyklon B was delivered to the crematoria by a special SS bureau known as the Hygiene Institute. After the doors were shut, SS men dumped in the Zyklon B pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber. The victims were usually dead within 10 minutes (i.e., in half the time it took to kill all the victims with carbon monoxide from diesel exhaust fumes).

Sonderkommando wearing gas masks and protective clothing dragged the bodies from the chamber. They removed glasses and artificial limbs and shaved off the women’s hair; women’s hair was removed before they entered the gas chamber at Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, but at Auschwitz it was done after gassing.

Just before cremation, jewelry was removed, along with dental work and teeth containing precious metals. Gold was removed from the teeth of dead prisoners from 23 September 1940 onwards by order of Heinrich Himmler. By early 1944, 10-12 kg of gold was being extracted monthly from victims’ teeth.

The corpses were then burned in the nearby incinerators, and the ashes were buried, thrown in the Vistula river, or used as fertilizer. Any bits of bone that had not burned properly were ground down in wooden mortars.

The last gassing took place on October 30, 1944. On the next day, Himmler ordered the SS to stop all gassings. On November 25, he ordered Auschwitz’s gas chambers and crematoria be destroyed. The Sonderkommando and other prisoners began the job of dismantling the buildings and cleaning up the site.

Beginning on 17 January, some 58,000 Auschwitz detainees (2/3 of them Jews) were evacuated under guard, at first heading west on foot, then by open-topped freight trains, to concentration camps in Germany and Austria. Fewer than 9,000 remained in the camps, deemed too sick to move.

By December 1944 some 15,000 Jewish prisoners had made it from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated by the British on April 15, 1945.

Gas chambers and crematoria were blown up; buildings set on fire. On January 27th, the Red Army soldiers liberated the camps… and promptly raped all female survivors left in the camp. Those who resisted were brutally murdered.

[RolandVT]

Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan

To The Reich Minister of the Interior

January 29, 1939

The emigration of the Jews from Germany is to be furthered by all possible means.

A Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration is being established in the Reich Ministry of the Interior from among representatives of the agencies concerned. The Reich Central Office will have the task to devise uniform policies as follows:

1. Measures for the preparation of increased emigration of Jews. This will include the creation of a Jewish organization that can prepare uniform applications for emigration; the taking of all steps for the provision and efficient use of local and foreign funds; and a decision on suitable target countries for emigration, to be selected in coordination with the Reich Center for Emigration.

2. The direction of emigration, including, for instance, preference for the emigration of the poorer Jews.

3. The speeding up of emigration in individual cases, by means of speedy and smooth provision of the State documents and permits required by the individual emigrant, through central processing of applications for emigration.

The Reich Center for Emigration will be headed by the Chief of the Security Police. He will appoint a Responsible Manager and make rules for the operation of the Reich Center.

Regular reports on the work of the Reich Center will be forwarded to me. I will be consulted continuously on measures requiring decisions of principle.

In addition to representatives of other agencies involved, the Committee will include Ambassador Eisenlohr, who is responsible for official inter-state negotiations, and Ministerial Director Wohlthat, who is responsible for negotiations in connection with the Rublee Plan.

signed Goering