Kanada was the prisoners’ name for the warehouse complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau where the property of the murdered was sorted. The country was a metaphor: a place of impossible plenty in a continent of starvation. Kanada I, near the main Auschwitz I camp, opened in 1942. Kanada II, far larger, opened next to the new gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau in late 1943. The complex grew to thirty barracks at its peak. Inside it was the property of around two million people, almost all Jewish, who had been sent on the trains to Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944.
The Kommando Effektenkammer, the personal effects detail, was the German military designation. The detail’s prisoners, almost all young Jewish women, were ordered to sort the contents of the suitcases that came off the ramp. The suitcases had been left behind on the ramp when the deportees were sent to the gas chambers. The contents were then trucked to Kanada and sorted by category. Clothes went to one barracks. Food went to another. Money and watches and jewellery went to a third. Eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, dentures, hairbrushes, family photographs, prayer books, prayer shawls, all went to specialised barracks. The hair from the murdered women was a separate detail, processed at a different building.
The sorted property was sent to Germany. The clothes were redistributed by the Reich Ministry of Economics to bombed-out German civilians, to Wehrmacht soldiers, to the Volksdeutsche resettlers, the ethnic German colonists in occupied Poland. The food was eaten by the German army and the SS. The money and gold were sent to the Reichsbank in Berlin, where they were credited to a special account in the name of Max Heiliger, an SS-administered cover name. The Reichsbank smelted the gold, including the gold from dental fillings extracted from the corpses, into ingots and traded them on the international market through the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. The eyeglasses were sent to German hospitals. The hair was woven into industrial felt by the firm Alex Zink in Roth in Bavaria.
Kanada was, in camp economy, the most coveted assignment for a Jewish woman prisoner. The work was indoors, the hours were marginally shorter than at the textile or construction details, and the access to food and clothes was, by camp standards, beyond the imagination of inmates on other details. A woman on Kanada could, with care, sew a piece of dried sausage into the lining of her shirt and trade it for a piece of bread on the black market that ran across the camp. She could find a child’s shoe and trade it. She could find a wool sweater under her bunk and survive the winter. The Kanada women supported the camp underground in the same way: by taking food and medicine off the sorting tables and getting them to the infirmary blocks and the resistance organisation.
The detail’s prisoners also bore witness to the scale of the killing in a way no other prisoner group did. Every train added new piles. The piles included the personal possessions of, in the busy weeks, fifteen thousand people a day. The prisoners who handled the photographs of murdered families, the children’s school notebooks, the wedding rings, the prayer books with the family inscriptions on the flyleaves, knew, in a way no other group in the camp knew, exactly what was happening at the end of the ramp.
The SS evacuated and dynamited the Kanada complex along with the gas chambers in November 1944. The retreating SS burned the documentation. The Soviet army, on liberating Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, found a remnant of the complex still intact: thirty thousand pairs of men’s suits, fifty thousand pairs of women’s shoes, seven tons of human hair packaged for shipment, baled and labelled with the consignor’s address. The Soviet documentation of the find is at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and is in part on permanent display. The shoes, the suitcases, the hair, are now what most visitors to the museum remember.
The operational record
The operational record on The Kanada Warehouses at Auschwitz is documented in the surviving administrative records of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, in the postwar work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the subsidiary postwar museums and archives at the various camp sites, in the testimony recorded at the postwar judicial proceedings, and in the substantial body of survivor and perpetrator testimony produced over the postwar period.
The record establishes the operational character of the installation during the wartime period, the operational scale of the killings, the identities of the principal perpetrators, the operational technologies that were deployed, and the consequences of the installation for the surviving Jewish and non-Jewish prisoner populations. The aggregate record stands as the primary source for the academic understanding of the camp in the wider context of the wartime killing programme.
See also
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
- Hidden Valuables and Body Searches
- Hair Gold Teeth and Industrial Looting
- The Arrival Process and Selection
- The Fate of Twins
- The Numbers, How Six Million is Calculated
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
- Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996
- Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean, eds, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 to 1945, multi-volume, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Indiana University Press, 2009 onwards
- Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994