The Death Camps 1942 to 1944

The death camps did not run at a constant rate. The killing rose, peaked, and fell over the three years of their main operation. Around 80 per cent of all the Jewish deaths in the death camps occurred in the eighteen months from March 1942 to August 1943. The Hungarian deportations of summer 1944 were the last major killing phase. By the autumn of 1944 the regime had wound down most of the gassing operations. The killing in the camps then ended, gradually, as the Allied armies advanced. This page covers the operational history of that programme: when, where, how fast, and how the killing varied across the six sites and across the period.

1941: the experiments

The first systematic gassing of Jews took place at Chełmno from 8 December 1941 onwards, using mobile gas vans. The technology had been developed earlier in the year for the T4 killing of disabled people in Germany. The same vans, with some adaptation, were now used to murder Polish Jews from the Łódź region and from the smaller communities of the Warthegau. The first experimental gassing at Auschwitz, of around 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 Polish prisoners using Zyklon B in the basement of Block 11, took place in early September 1941. The killing in 1941 was small in absolute scale: around 60,000 people in total at Chełmno, plus the Auschwitz experimental killings. It was not yet the industrial operation that came in 1942.

1942: the start of Operation Reinhard

Operation Reinhard began with the opening of the Bełżec camp on 17 March 1942. Sobibor opened in May. Treblinka opened in July. Together they were intended to kill the Jewish population of the Generalgouvernement, around 2.3 million people. The pace was startling. By the end of 1942 the Operation Reinhard camps had murdered around 1.5 million people, most of them in the second half of the year. Bełżec was effectively complete by the end of 1942: the Galician and Lublin Jewish populations had been killed.

Auschwitz-Birkenau began operating its dedicated gas chambers in March 1942 (Bunker 1 and Bunker 2, two converted farmhouses outside the main camp area), and ran the construction of Crematoria II, III, IV and V through 1942 and into spring 1943. The Auschwitz killings in 1942 ran at around 100,000 to 200,000 per month at peak, against a Reinhard camp combined rate of perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 per month at the same period. The total Holocaust death rate in 1942 was around 2.7 million people, more than half of all the Jews murdered in the entire Holocaust.

1943: the peak and the closing of Reinhard

The killing continued at high intensity through 1943. Sobibor and Treblinka completed most of their work in this year. The Sonderkommando uprisings at Treblinka in August 1943 and at Sobibor in October 1943 were the proximate cause of the closure of those two camps; the deeper cause was that they had run out of victims. The remaining Jewish populations of Poland had largely been killed by mid-1943. The three Operation Reinhard camps were dismantled in spring and autumn 1943, the buildings demolished, the sites planted with trees. The men who had run them, around 90 SS personnel, were redeployed to anti-partisan operations in Yugoslavia under the same commanders, particularly Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl.

Auschwitz-Birkenau took on most of the remaining killing work from autumn 1943. The Crematoria II, III, IV and V at Birkenau were now in operation. The camp was killing primarily through the deportations from the remaining Jewish populations of Western and Southern Europe: Greek, Italian, French, Belgian, Dutch, and the German Jews not yet deported.

1944: Hungary and the wind-down

The Hungarian deportations of May to July 1944 were the last great killing phase. Around 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in eight weeks. About three quarters of each transport was gassed on arrival. The Birkenau crematoria ran continuously through this period, with the bodies of those killed exceeding the cremation capacity and being burned on open pyres in the surrounding fields. The smoke was visible for miles. The smell, recorded by survivors and by local Polish villagers in post-war testimony, was the dominant sensation of the area for those eight weeks.

By August 1944 the Hungarian deportations had ended. Around 70,000 Łódź Ghetto inhabitants were the next major arrival; they were processed through Birkenau over the following weeks. By October 1944 the gassing operation was being wound down, partly because the supply of victims was dwindling and partly because Himmler had given the order to end the killing in anticipation of post-war negotiations.

The Auschwitz Sonderkommando revolt and the destruction of the crematoria

The Sonderkommando revolt of 7 October 1944, covered on its own page in the Concentration Camps section, destroyed Crematorium IV. The remaining three crematoria continued to operate at reduced capacity for a few more weeks. The last gassing at Auschwitz took place on around 30 October 1944. The crematoria were dismantled by the SS in November and December 1944, with the explicit intention of destroying the evidence. Crematorium V was demolished with explosives on 26 January 1945, the day before Soviet forces reached the camp.

1945: the death marches

The wind-down of the killing did not mean the end of the dying. The death marches of January to May 1945, covered in their own section, killed between 250,000 and 375,000 prisoners across Europe in the three months between the start of the camp evacuations and the end of the war. The death camp killings had ended; the killing had not.

The total figures

The total death toll across the six extermination camps over the three years from December 1941 to October 1944 is approximately three million people. The breakdown is:

  • Auschwitz-Birkenau: 1.1 million dead, of whom around 1 million were Jews
  • Treblinka: around 800,000 dead, almost all Jews
  • Bełżec: around 600,000 dead, almost all Jews
  • Chełmno: around 320,000 dead, almost all Jews
  • Sobibor: around 200,000 dead, almost all Jews
  • Majdanek: around 80,000 dead, of whom around 60,000 were Jews

The figures are working approximations, refined over the post-war decades by the recovery of German records and by the survivors’ testimony. Earlier Soviet figures, particularly for Auschwitz, were higher; the modern lower figure is now accepted by mainstream historians on the basis of the German documents that were preserved.

What the operational record shows

The death camps were an industrial operation conducted to a schedule. The pace was set by the supply of victims (the deportation trains), the available killing capacity (the gas chambers and crematoria), and the political timing imposed by the regime. The killing was not chaotic. It was administered. The Reichsbahn ran the trains. The SS ran the camps. The Reich Security Main Office ran the policy. The civil servants of the various Reich ministries provided the bureaucratic support. By 1944 the regime had built and operated the largest single industrial killing operation in human history, and had concealed it from most of its own population while doing so. The deniers who argue that the killing did not happen, or did not happen at the scale claimed, have to argue against this operational record. They cannot.

See also

Sources

  • Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Yale University Press, 2003
  • Yitzhak Arad, Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Indiana University Press, 1987
  • Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz, Indiana University Press, 2002
  • Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, HarperCollins, 2007
  • USHMM: Killing Centres Operational History