On 7 October 1944, the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau staged the only armed prisoner revolt in the camp’s history. They attacked their SS guards with hammers, axes and improvised firearms, killed three SS men, blew up Crematorium IV using gunpowder smuggled out of the Union Werke factory by four women prisoners, and tried to escape across the wire. They did not succeed. Around 450 of the 663 Sonderkommando in the camp were killed in the immediate fighting and the pursuit that followed. The remaining 200 or so were killed over the next few weeks. The revolt destroyed Crematorium IV and damaged Crematorium II. The camp’s killing capacity was not significantly reduced. The killing of Hungarian Jews had peaked three months earlier, and most of the work the crematoria had been built for was already done. But the Sonderkommando had said no, in the only way they could.
Why they revolted
The Auschwitz Sonderkommando knew they would be killed. The SS had killed the previous generations of the unit at intervals of around four to six months, replacing them with new prisoners drawn from incoming transports. The third generation of the Sonderkommando, around 660 men assembled in the spring of 1944, knew they were on borrowed time. They had also seen the operation of the gas chambers at full capacity during the Hungarian deportations of May to July 1944, when between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews per day were being murdered at Birkenau. The Sonderkommando had handled the bodies of those people. They had recognised some of the dead as their own family members.
The plan was set in motion when the SS announced that part of the Sonderkommando workforce was to be killed and replaced. The conspirators decided to act before the killing took place. Their preparations had been underway for months: the gunpowder smuggling from Union Werke, the building of improvised weapons from camp materials, the establishment of contacts with the camp’s wider underground organisation. They were not ready when the announcement came. They went anyway.
The day
The plan had been for a coordinated action across all four crematoria. In practice, the action started in Crematorium IV before the others were ready. The Sonderkommando in Crematorium IV attacked their SS guards with hammers and stones, killed three of them, set fire to the building, and blew up part of the structure with the smuggled gunpowder. Some of them tried to escape across the wire. The other crematoria did not join the revolt simultaneously. The Sonderkommando in Crematorium II made a partial attempt: they killed an SS man, set fire to part of the building, and tried to break out. The men in Crematoria III and V did not act, partly because of confusion and partly because they were under SS guard before they could organise.
The SS reinforcement was rapid. Camp guards from across Birkenau converged on the burning crematorium. Heavy machine guns were brought up. The fighting lasted around an hour. Some of the Sonderkommando from Crematorium IV escaped across the wire and hid in a barn near the camp. The barn was located, surrounded, and set on fire. The men inside were killed. By the evening of 7 October, the revolt was over. Around 450 Sonderkommando had been killed. Three SS men were dead. Crematorium IV was a ruin.
The investigation
The SS investigation traced the gunpowder back to the Union Werke factory and to the four women prisoners who had smuggled it out: Roza Robota, Ester Wajcblum, Ala Gertner, and Regina Safirsztajn. They were arrested, tortured for several months, and hanged at Auschwitz on 5 and 6 January 1945. Their story is told on the page on the Four Women of Auschwitz.
The survivors
Around 200 of the Sonderkommando who had not been killed in the revolt itself remained in the camp through the autumn of 1944. They continued to work at the remaining crematoria, which were now down to three from four. The killing operation had wound down after the Hungarian deportations, and by November 1944 Himmler had ordered the gassing to cease entirely. The remaining crematoria were dismantled by the SS in the closing weeks of the camp’s operation, with the prisoner work details being killed as the work finished.
Some of the third-generation Sonderkommando survived. Filip Muller, the Slovak Jew who had been in the unit for three years and would write Eyewitness Auschwitz, was one. Henryk Tauber was another. They survived the disbanding of the Sonderkommando, the death marches in January 1945, and the chaos of the final months. Their testimony, given to post-war investigators and to the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963 to 1965, is the documentary basis on which the operation of the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria has been reconstructed in detail.
The buried writings
The Sonderkommando, knowing they would not survive, buried written accounts of what they had seen in the ground around the crematoria. The accounts were written in Yiddish, in coherent literary prose, by men who knew their words might be the only record. Eight of these accounts were recovered after the war. The longest is by Zalman Gradowski, who was killed in the revolt of 7 October 1944. The accounts cover the operation of the gas chambers, the procedures, the men who supervised them, the categories of arrivals, and the sense of helplessness of the men forced to do the work. They are the closest the world has to a contemporary account from inside the killing process.
What the revolt achieved
The revolt did not save lives in any direct sense. The Sonderkommando who carried it out were almost all killed. The remaining prisoners in the camp were not freed. The gas chambers continued to operate, on a reduced scale, for several more weeks. But the revolt produced two outcomes that mattered. It destroyed one crematorium and damaged another, demonstrating that the killing apparatus could be partly broken from inside the camp. And it left a record. The men who fought on 7 October were the men who had handled the bodies, who had seen the gas chambers in operation, who had known what was being done. By acting, by destroying the crematorium, by leaving buried writings in the ground around it, they made sure that the camp could not erase its own history. The deniers who would later try to claim the gas chambers had not existed had to argue against, among other evidence, the demolition by Sonderkommando hands of one of those gas chambers.
See also
Sources
- Filip Muller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Stein and Day, 1979
- Ber Mark (ed), The Scrolls of Auschwitz, Am Oved, 1985
- Gideon Greif, We Wept Without Tears, Yale University Press, 2005
- Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz, Indiana University Press, 2002
- USHMM: The Sonderkommando Revolt