Gas chambers
The poisonous gas Zyklon B was used for the first time in the history of Auschwitz on 3 September 1941 to kill a group of 600 Soviet prisoners of war and approximately 250 sick Polish prisoners. The crime was perpetrated in the cellars of Block No. 11. As using them entailed certain “inconveniences” for the SS, especially the need to relocate the inmates living in the block for the time of the “operation”, the mortuary by the crematorium was remodelled into a gas chamber late in September. For this purpose four openings were made in the chamber’s beam, on top of which short chimneys were constructed and sealed with felt lined, metal lids.
In this gas chamber were murdered several successive groups of Soviet prisoners of war and – for the first time – sick and emaciated Jews brought over to Auschwitz from forced labour camps in Upper Silesia.
On the basis of a very limited number of prisoner witness accounts and SS personnel testimonies, we know that the Jews were led in columns straight from the railway station to the square next to the crematorium, which was surrounded by a high wall of concrete slabs. Next an SS officer standing on top of the crematorium building ordered them to undress and leave any luggage they had; he assured them that after being washed and disinfected they would be put into a labour camp where jobs appropriate to their qualifications would be given. Once the Jews, unaware of the dangers, had all entered the chamber, the doors were closed. An SS man in a gas mask would next take off the chimney lids, open the Zyklon B cans and pour the contents straight onto the heads of the victims. The engine of a nearby lorry would be started to drown out the cries of the dying people.
Yet the SS only used the gas chamber adjacent to Crematorium I when there was need to kill a small number of people, as its role was limited by the furnace capacity: originally burning 200 bodies a day, and later, after adding the third furnace—340 bodies a day. If far larger transports of Jews were sent for extermination, the crematorium would not be able to burn the bodies of inmates who were murdered in the camp for two or three days.
That is why, on the order of Commandant Höss, a residential house standing on the edge of woodland in Brzezinka/Birkenau, which had previously belonged to an evicted Polish family, was remodelled into a gas chamber (so-called Bunker I) in March 1942. The initial works, entailing the walling up of the windows, breaking holes in the walls for dropping Zyklon B, and installation of a powerful door had been completed by around 23 March, because on that day, a few hundred Jews were probably killed inside.
The gas chamber by crematorium I at the Auschwitz I camp was used for the last time in December 1942, while the crematorium ovens themselves operated until July 1943.
The provisional gas chambers
In the spring of 1942, a second gas chamber went into operation in a specially adapted farmhouse whose owner had been expelled. The house stood outside the fence of the Birkenau camp, which was then under construction. Camp commandant Rudolf Höss and Adolf Eichmann, the Reich Main Security Office representative in charge of deportation to extermination center, chose this house together during a visit by Eichmann.
The adaptation work involved partially walling up the windows and reconfiguring the interior. According to Höss, about 800 people at a time could be killed in the house. Two barracks for undressing were erected nearby. This gas chamber was withdrawn from service in the spring of 1943, after the entry into use of the new gas chambers at crematoria II-V.
A second house belonging to a farmer who had been expelled, and also standing outside the Birkenau camp fence, was adapted as a gas chamber in mid-1942. Höss estimated that 1,200 people at a time could be killed in this house. Three barracks for undressing were erected nearby. This gas chamber was also withdrawn from use in the spring of 1943. It was put back into use in the spring of 1944, at the time of the extermination of the Hungarian Jews.
The four large gas chambers and crematoria
The construction of 4 large gas chambers and crematoria began in Birkenau in 1942. They went into operation between March 22 and June 25-26, 1943. The gas chambers at crematoria II and III, like the undressing rooms, were located underground, while those at crematoria IV and V stood at ground level. About 2 thousand people at a time could be put to death in each of them. According to calculations made by the Zentralbauleitung on June 28, 1943, the crematoria could burn 4,416 corpses per day—1,440 each in crematoria II and III, and 768 each in crematoria IV and V. This meant that the crematoria could burn over 1.6 million corpses per year. Prisoners assigned to do the burning stated that the daily capacity of the four crematoria in Birkenau was higher—about 8 thousand corpses.
The construction of another facility according to a new design, crematorium VI, never progressed beyond the planning stage.
Murdering people in the gas chambers
In principle, all Jews classified because of their age or physical condition as unfit for labor were subject to immediate extermination directly after their arrival in the camp, without being registered or assigned a number.
In addition to the Jews, a certain number of Soviet POWs, estimated by witnesses as several thousand men, were killed with gas. A certain number of Poles were also killed in the gas chamber. The first group of prisoners selected and killed in a gas chamber outside the camp, at the Sonnenstein euthanasia center, consisted mostly of Poles. Cases are also known of the killing in the gas chambers of groups of Poles selected in the so-called camp hospital, numbering up to several hundred at a time, or as a punishment for the revolt of the penal company, or sentenced to death by the summary court. Several thousand Roma were also murdered in gas chambers. Prisoners of other nationalities also died during the period, from mid-1941 to the spring of 1943, when selection took place in the camp, usually in the blocks for the sick.
