The Sonderkommando were the prisoners forced to operate the gas chambers and crematoria at the death camps. They were almost all Jewish men, selected from the deportation arrivals on the platform, and put to work the same day. Their job was to take the bodies out of the gas chambers, extract the gold from the teeth, cut the hair from the women’s heads, and burn the bodies in the crematorium ovens. Some Sonderkommando also handled the new arrivals coming into the undressing rooms, calming them, helping them with their clothes, telling them they were going to be showered. The same Sonderkommando might minutes later be pulling those same people’s bodies out of the chamber.
Why the SS used prisoners
The SS could have done the work themselves. They chose not to. The work was psychologically catastrophic, and the SS men assigned to it had to be rotated quickly because they were drinking themselves to incapacity, requesting transfers, or having nervous breakdowns. The use of prisoner Sonderkommando solved this problem. The prisoners were doing the work; the SS were supervising. The SS men who supervised could go home in the evening to their families in the SS quarters near the camp. Many did exactly this.
The use of prisoner Sonderkommando also produced a cleaner separation in the regime’s self-image. The SS could maintain, even to themselves, that they were not personally killing the deportees. The killing was being done by the gas, which was being released by SS men into a chamber on instruction; the bodies were being handled by Jewish prisoners. The administrative chain of action was sufficiently broken up that no individual SS man had to think of himself as a killer of children. This was an important psychological mechanism for the SS.
The work
The Sonderkommando worked twelve-hour shifts. The work began with the arrival of a new transport. The Sonderkommando assisted the SS in directing the new arrivals into the undressing room and gave them the standard reassurances about the showers. After the gas chamber doors were sealed, the Sonderkommando waited in an adjacent room for the gassing to finish, around fifteen to twenty minutes. Then the doors were opened, the Sonderkommando entered the chamber, and the work began. The bodies were entangled, having struggled, climbed on top of each other, fought for the dwindling air. Each body had to be untangled and dragged out.
The bodies were laid out in the dissection room. Gold teeth were extracted with pliers. Hair was cut from the women’s heads and bagged for shipment to German textile mills. Personal items overlooked at undressing, jewellery hidden in body cavities, were searched out. Then the bodies were loaded onto trolleys and pushed into the crematorium ovens, which ran continuously, three bodies at a time per oven, around fifteen ovens in operation at the height of Birkenau’s capacity. The ash from the ovens was sometimes ground in special crushing equipment to break up bone fragments and was then dumped in nearby ponds and rivers, or used as fertiliser on local farms.
The conditions of the Sonderkommando
The Sonderkommando were kept separate from the rest of the camp. They lived in barracks above the crematoria. Their food was substantially better than the standard camp ration: they were allowed to take food from the bags of the new arrivals, which often contained hidden delicacies. They had access to better clothing, looted from the dead. They could hide jewellery and gold for themselves, although the SS conducted regular searches and would shoot any prisoner found with possessions. They were generally not allowed contact with other prisoners.
The conditions were materially better than the rest of the camp by every measure except one. The Sonderkommando knew that they would be killed. The SS rotated the Sonderkommando workforce regularly, killing the existing unit and replacing them with newly arrived deportees, on the basis that no Sonderkommando man was to be allowed to live long enough to give detailed evidence of what he had seen. The first generation of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, around 200 men assembled in 1942, was almost entirely killed in late 1942. The second generation was killed in 1943. The third generation, around 660 men in early 1944, was the unit that eventually staged the revolt.
The buried writings
Several Sonderkommando members buried written accounts of what they had seen, in canisters and bottles, in the ground around the crematoria. Eight of these accounts were recovered after the war. The longest is the manuscript of Zalman Gradowski, who wrote in Yiddish in the months before his death in the revolt of October 1944. Gradowski’s text, addressed to anyone who might find it, is one of the most extraordinary documents of the Holocaust: a man who knew he had no chance of survival writing carefully and at length, in coherent literary prose, about what he was being forced to do. Other recovered manuscripts are by Leib Langfus, Zalman Lewental, and Marcel Nadjari. The complete corpus of buried Sonderkommando writings was published in English as The Scrolls of Auschwitz.
The survivors
Around 70 Sonderkommando men survived to liberation. The two whose accounts are most cited are Filip Muller, a Slovak Jew who survived three years in the unit and wrote Eyewitness Auschwitz in 1979, and Henryk Tauber, who gave detailed evidence at the post-war trials. The historians Robert Jan van Pelt and Filip Muller have between them produced the standard reconstruction of how the gas chambers and crematoria physically worked, on the basis of survivor testimony, perpetrator confessions and the partial physical remains. Their work is the foundation of the case against the deniers.
What the Sonderkommando experience tells us
Primo Levi devotes a chapter of The Drowned and the Saved to the Sonderkommando, calling them the most extreme example of his concept of the grey zone. They were Jewish victims of the regime, dragged from deportation transports and forced into the work on pain of immediate death. They were also, in the most concrete possible sense, participants in the killing of their fellow Jews. Levi’s point is that the moral categories of normal life break down at this level of compulsion, that judgement of these men by ordinary standards of right and wrong is a category error. The Sonderkommando lived in a place no human being should have been asked to inhabit, and most of them did not survive it. The few who did spent the rest of their lives carrying it.
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
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Summit Books, 1988
- Gideon Greif, We Wept Without Tears, Yale University Press, 2005