A) HITLER'S OPINION OF THE JEWS
(Extracts from Mein Kampf)

        Page 75: "Nothing gave more cause for reflexion than the gradual increased insight into the activities of Jews in certain fields. Was there any form of filth or profligacy, above all in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate ...? One could find a little Jew, blinded by a sudden light, like a maggot in a rotting corpse... This was pestilence, spiritual pestilence with which the people were infested. One must remember that for one Goethe, nature plays a dirty trick upon mankind in producing ten thousand such scribblers who, as germ carriers of the worst sort, poison the minds of the world..."

        Page 77: "Ninety percent of all literary and artistic rubbish and of theatrical humbug was due to a race which hardly amounts to one-hundredth of all inhabitants of the country.

        Page 78: "An icy shudder ran down my spine when seeing for the first time the Jew as a cool, shameless, and calculating manager of this shocking vice (Prostitution) ... The scales dropped from my eyes when I found the Jew as leader of Social Democracy... One did not know what to admire more: their glibness of tongue or their skill in lying."

        Page 418: "The Jew possesses no-culture-creating energy whatsoever... His intellect therefore will never have a constructive effect, but only a destructive one."

        Page 420: " He is remains the typical parasite, a sponger who, like a harmful bacillus, spreads out more and more..." Wherever he appears, the host people die sooner or later."

        Page 903: "The Jew knows only too accurately that, owing to his millennium of adaptation, he has it well within his power to undermine European people and to train them to be sexless bastards.

        Page 949: "The Jews inhabit this world as the advocates of lying, deceit, theft, raping and plundering."
 
 

        Page 83: "The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle in Nature; instead of the eternal principle of force and strength, it places the mass of numbers and its dead weight... I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator."

        Page 405: "As long as the Aryan kept up ruthlessly the master's stand-point, he not only remained master but also the preserver and propagator of the culture."

        Page 827: "Systematically these black parasites (Jews) of the Nation ravish our innocent young blond girls and thus destroy something that can never be replaced in this world. Both, yes, both Christian denominations regard with indifference this desecration and annihilation of a noble and unique race to whom the Earth was given by the grace of God... What is important for the earth's future is... whether Aryan humanity maintains itself or dies out."

        Page 829: "The most believing Protestant could stand in the ranks of our movement (National Socialism) next to the most believing Catholic, without ever having to come into the slightest conflict of conscience with his religious convictions. The great common struggle which both carried on against the destroyers of Aryan humanity had, on the contrary, taught them mutual respect and esteem."
 
 

        "The National Socialist has recognized (that) the Jew is not human..." (Statement made years earlier by Walter Buch, supreme judge of the Nazi Party.)

        On instructions from Hitler in October 1939, Heinrich Himmler is appointed Reich Commissioner for the strengthening of German Nationhood. It was declared that the war in Poland was to be viewed as "a hard racial struggle which will not permit any legal restriction.... The methods will be incompatible with the principles which we otherwise adhere to..."

        Heinrich Himmler on March 15, 1940 says to the camp commanders of occupied Poland: "It is the Nazi policy to see to it that all Poles disappear from the world" simply through "the extirpation of Polishdom." Hence the aim of the war is "to destroy all the Poles..." But, the deferment in the implementation of genocidal policy towards non-Jews in Poland and the other European countries, was explained by Erhard Wetzel, a high official in the ministry of occupied Eastern territories: "It goes without saying that one cannot resolve the Polish problem by liquidating the Poles as is being done with the Jews. Such a solution would brand the German people into the far future and would cost us sympathies on all sides..."

        On January 20, 1942 during the Wansee Conference in Berlin, Heydrich referred to "further possibilities of a solution after previous authorization by the Führer.... Under appropriate direction, in the course of the final solution, the Jews are now to be suitably assigned to labor in the East." "In big labor gangs, with separated sexes, Jews capable of work will be brought to these areas, employed in the road building, in which task a large part will undoubtedly disappear through natural diminution. The remnant that may eventually remain, being undoubtedly the most capable of resistance, will have to be appropriately dealt with, since it represents a natural selection and in the event of a release is to be regarded as a germ cell of a new Jewish renewal."

        After the first extensive mass execution at Auschwitz in the spring of 1942, Goebbels writes in his diary on March 27: "The procedure is pretty barbaric and is not to be described here more definitely... 60% will have to be liquidated, 40% can be used as forced labor. The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is to carry out this measure, is doing it with considerable circumspection, and in a way that does not attract too much attention.... They fully deserve it. It's a life-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus... Fortunately a whole series of possibilities presents itself in war-time which would be denied us in peace time.

        "A mass execution order, according to legislation still in force, was impossible."

        "Reichstadthalter Greiser writes to Himmler May 1, 1942: "The action for the special treatment of about 100,000 Jews in my province that has been approved by you in agreement with the chief of the RSRA SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich will be concluded in the next two or three months."

        The chief of the Führer's chancellery, Victor Brack writes:

        "With the present state of affairs, there should be no hesitation about doing away with those Jews who are unable to work, with the aid of Brack's expedient. In this manner occurrences like those at the time of the execution of Jews at W. as described in a report, I have before me, prompted by the fact that the executions we carried out in public, in a way that can hardly by tolerated, will no longer be possible."

        Goebbels diaries: "The Jews have always been the carriers of infectious diseases; they should either be concentrated in a ghetto and left to themselves or be liquidated, for otherwise they will infect the populations of civilized nations."

        Report on "The Solution of the Jewish Problem," October 4, 1941, sent to Rosenberg describes mass murders, apparently adding that death by firing squads had created problems, and that it was necessary to find an alternative method of extermination.

        The answer: "Brack of the Führer's chancellery, has agreed to collaborate in the manufacture of the necessary buildings and gas apparatus.... In our present position we cannot afford to have scruples about taking advantage of Brack facilities for the elimination of the Jews who are not fit to work, as these will provide a way of avoiding any possible recurrence of the events which occurred... at the shooting of the Jews in Vilna..."

        Rudolf Höss, the former commandant at Auschwitz, explained how the gas chambers worked:

        "The two big crematoria, I and II, were built during the winter of 1942 to 1943 and were put into service in the spring of 1943. Each had five three-well ovens and could incinerate about two thousand corpses in twenty-four hours.... In the basement they had undressing rooms and gassing rooms. They could be aired, or ventilated. The corpses were brought up in an elevator to the ovens above ..."

        "According to the estimates made by the builder, the firm of Topf, in Erfurt, the two smaller crematoria III and IV, could each incinerate fifteen hundred corpses in twenty-four hours. The scarcity of raw materials due to the war obliged the construction department to build these two crematoria economically. The undressing rooms and gassing rooms were built it ground level, and the ovens were made of light materials. But it soon turned out that this less solid construction of the ovens, each of which had four wells, was not up to requirements. No. III soon failed and was never used again. No. IV had to be stopped several times because, after a short period of operation, four to six weeks, the ovens or the chimneys were burned out Most of the time, the people who had been gassed were incinerated in ditches located behind crematorium IV."

        Further on Höss says:

        "The Jews who were destined to be exterminated were escorted as quietly as possible-men and women separated -- to the crematoria. In the undressing room, the prisoners who made up the special work detail told them in their own language that they were going to have a bath and be deloused: they should put their clothes in order and take care to note where they had left them, so as to be able to find them again quickly after the delousing...

        "Once undressed, the Jews went into the gas chamber, which had shower heads and water pipes and looked exactly like a shower room. First came the women and children, and then the men, who were always less numerous. This always took place calmly; those who were afraid, or who may have suspected what was going to happen, were reassured by the prisoners who made up the special work details [Sonderkommandos]. These prisoners and the SS men stayed in the room until the list minute.

        Then, very quickly, the door was hermetically sealed, and a can of gas was immediately thrown onto the floor, through an opening connected to an air duct in the ceiling of the gas chamber, by the disinfectors, who were standing ready. This led to the immediate release of the gas. Through the peephole one could see that those who were near the air duct died immediately. It can be said that about a third died within a moment's notice. The others began to struggle, to scream, to choke. But very quickly the cries became death rattles, and after a few minutes, all were on the ground. After a maximum of twenty minutes, nobody moved.

        Half an hour after the gas had been thrown in, the door was opened and the ventilating system was turned on. The removal of the corpses was begun immediately. No bodily change was perceptible, no stiffening or coloration. It was only once they had lain for a long time, after several hours, that the usual marks of death appeared on the contact surfaces ... The special work detail pulled out the corpses' gold teeth and cut the women's hair. Then the corpses were taken up in the elevator to the crematory ovens which had been lighted in the meantime. Depending on the corpulence, up to three bodies could be put into a single well of the oven. Incineration time varied with corpulence. On average, it was twenty minutes.⁽¹⁾

        A year and a half before this account was written, while Höss was still at liberty, Pery Broad described the gas chambers in these terms:

        "There was never a break. Hardly had the last corpse been dragged out of the chamber to the cremation ditch in the corpse-covered yard behind the crematorium, than the next batch was already undressing. At such speed it was hardly possible to carry all the clothes out of the cloakroom. Sometimes the high-pitched voice of a forgotten child was heard from under a bundle. The child would be pulled out and held in the air, and one of the brutes who assisted the executioners would put a bullet through its head."

        Dr. Bendel, one of the French physicians deported to Auschwitz, says:

        "One day in 3une 1944, at six o'clock in the morning, I joined the day shift (150 men) of crematorium IV... At eleven, a member of the political division arrived on his motorcycle to announce that a convoy was on the way ... It was noon when a long line of women, children, and old men entered the courtyard of the crematorium. They were people from the Lodz ghetto. One could feel that they were harassed, tired, anxious. The overall head of the crematoria, Herr Hauptscharführer Moll... climbed up on a bench to tell them that they were going to have a bath and that a cup of hot coffee would be ready for them afterward. They applauded... Everybody undressed in the courtyard. The doors of the crematorium opened, and they went into the big room that in winter serves as a cloakroom. Packed together like sardines, they realized that they were caught in a trap from which they could no longer escape. They still hoped, however -- a normal brain could not conceive of the atrocious death that awaited them ...

        Finally everything was ready. The doors of the cloakroom were opened, and an unbelievable mob scene began. The first to enter the gas chamber began to fall back. They sensed that death was awaiting them. The 55 men put an end to this seething human tide with their sticks, smashing the heads of frightened women who were convulsively hugging their babies. The double doors, made of solid oak, were closed. For two interminable minutes we could hear fists being beaten against the wall, cries that were no longer like anything human. And then nothing more ... Five minutes later the doors were opened piled-up, contracted bodies rolled out like a cataract. Still warm, they passed through the hands of the barber, who cut off the hair, and the dentist, who pulled out the gold teeth ... One more convoy had gone through crematorium IV."

        The most detailed description of crematoria II and m was given by Henryk Tauber, a member of the special work detail assigned to crematorium II on March 4, 1943, as soon as it began to operate. He made his deposition to the examining magistrate of the court in Cracow on May 24, 1945:

        "I state that in the beginning there were neither benches nor clothes lockers in the undressing room, nor showers in the gas chamber. All these things were installed only in the Fall of 1943, to camouflage the undressing room and gas chamber as a shower room and disinfecting.. .. No water pipe led to the shower heads, and therefore not a drop of water ever flowed from them. An elevator, or rather a freight elevator, was used to take the corpses from the corridor to the ground floor."

        This statement of Tauber's explains why the fake showers are not mentioned in all the descriptions: between March 4 and the autumn of 1943 they did not yet exist.

        The smaller crematoria, W and V, were described in testimony given by Szlama Dragon to a court m Cracow on May 10, 1945:

        "I worked in crematorium V up until May 1944.... It had been built on the same model as IV. Both had four ovens on each of two sides. Three corpses could fit into each oven. The undressing room and the gas chambers were at ground level. The gassing operations themselves were carried out in the same way as in bunkers I and 2. The victims were taken there in trucks, but later, when a rail connection was set up with Birkenau, they were taken there on foot from the railroad ramp. The new arrivals entered the undressing room, where Gorger [in fact, SS-Unterscharführer Johann Gorges] got them to hurry by saying, 'Hurry upl The food and the coffee are going to get cold.' The people were really thirsty, but Gorger told them that the water was too cold and they couldn't drink it; they had to hurry; they would be given tea after the bath.

        When they were all grouped in the undressing room, Moll got up onto a bench and talked to them. He told them that they had arrived in a camp were those who were in good health would work, while the sick and the women would stay in the blocks. Then he went on to talk about the Birkenau installations and said that they all had to take a bath before entering the camp, otherwise the camp authorities would not admit them ... When all had undressed, they were chased toward the gas chamber... Once it was full the door was closed. It was the guards, and often Moll himself, who closed it.

        Then Mengele gave an order to Scheinmetz, and Scheinmetz went to a car with Red Cross insignia on it that was parked near the bunkers; he took a can of gas out of it and threw the contents through a window in the wail of the room. This window was placed fairly high; a ladder was needed to climb up to it. As in the bunkers, he (Scheinmetz] wore a mask. After a little while, Mengele announced that the people were dead; he said, 'It's finished.' And he left with Scheinmetz in the Red Cross car. Then Moll opened the door of the gas chamber; we put on our masks and dragged the corpses from the different gas chambers through the corridor into the undressing room, then from there through the neighboring corridor to the crematory ovens. In the first corridor, near the entrance door, 1 the barbers shaved the heads, and, in the second, dentists pulled out the teeth.

        Getting rid of so many corpses raised problems. When he was questioned for the first time in Minden, on March 14, 1946, Rudolf Höss explained the procedure initially used:

        "It was only in 1942 that the new crematoria were complete. Before then, the prisoners had had to be gassed in temporary gas chambers, and the corpses had had to be burned in ditches Before cremation, the gold teeth and the rings were removed. Layers of corpses were alternated with layers of wood, and when a pyre containing about a hundred corpses had been built up, the wood was set on fire with the help of rags soaked in kerosene. Once the cremation was going well, the other corpses were thrown into the fire. The fat that ran down on the bottom of the ditch was collected in pails and thrown back into the fire to hasten the course of the operation, especially in damp weather. The cremation lasted six or seven hours. When a west wind was blowing the stench of the burning corpses could be smelled Inside the camp itself. When the ditches were cleaned, the ashes were crushed. This was done on a cement slab where prisoners pulverized the rest of the bones with wooden rollers. Then the ashes were taken in a truck to the Vistula and thrown into the river in an out-of-the way spot."

        In his deposition in Nuremberg on April 5, 1946, Höss explained: "We were supposed to carry out the extermination secretly. But the continuous cremation of corpses gave off a stench that nauseated people. It permeated the whole neighborhood, and all the people who lived in the villages round about knew quite well that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz."

        In his autobiography he tells how the SS men tried to solve the problem of getting rid of the corpses:

        "As late as the summer of 1942, the corpses were still carried to mass graves. It was only toward the end of the summer that cremation began to be used-first by means of a wood pyre with about two thousand corpses, and later in the ditches, with the corpses that had been buried there earlier and then been exhumed. Used motor oil was poured over them, and later methanol. Burning went on continuously in the ditches, by night was well as by day. By the end of November 1942 all the ditches had been emptied. They contained 107,000 corpses. This figure included not only the Jews who had been gassed during the period preceding the onset of cremation. but also the corpses of the prisoners who had died during the winter of 1941 to 1942, as the crematorium of the hospital had ceased functioning long before. All the prisoners who had died at the Birkenau camp were also included.

        The Reichsführer-SS [Himmler], during his visit in the summer of 1942, watched the whole course of an extermination operation, from the unloading to the elimination in bunker no.2. At the time, corpses were not yet burned. He found nothing to criticize; he did not even discuss the matter. Gauleiter Bracht and Obergruppenfürhrer Schmauser were present Shortly after the visit of the Reichsführer-SS, Standartenführer Blobel, of Eichmann's service, came with an order from the Reichsführer that the mass graves should be emptied and the corpses burned. The ashes were also to be eliminated, so that no trace might remain that would later permit one to deduce the number of corpses that had been burned. Blobel was already testing various methods of cremation at Culenhof (Kulmhof). He had received orders from Eichmann to show me these arrangements.

        I went on an inspection tour of Culenhof with Hossler. Blobel had had various makeshift ovens built, and he had used wood and gasoline residues as fuel. He had also tried to destroy the corpses with explosives, but the results were very bad. The ashes were strewn across the big forest region nearby, after having been ground to dust in a bone mill. SS-Standartenführer Blobel's mission was to locate all the mass graves in all the eastern regions and get rid of them. His staff was designated by the code number 1005.

        The actual work was carried out by details of Jews, who were shot as soon as the operations in a given sector had been completed. The Auschwitz concentration camp had to supply Jews continuously to commando 1005."

        Further on, Höss writes:

        "The first cremations in the open air had already shown that, in the long run, this task was impossible to accomplish. When the weather was bad or the wind was strong, the smell of burning was carried for kilometers, and all the populace round about talked about the cremation of the Jews, in spite of the counter-propaganda of the party and the local administration. Naturally, all the 55 members who took part in the extermination operation were supposed to keep quiet about the whole process. But subsequent 55 penal procedures showed that the participants had not always held their tongues. The severest punishments had not been enough to prevent talking.

        In addition, the anti-aircraft personnel protested against night fires in the open air, which could be seen from a great distance. However_, we had to continue to burn corpses at night if we were not to be obliged to stop the ensuing convoys. The transportation plan for the different operations, which had been set up by the Reich Transportation Ministry, had to be strictiy observed so as to avoid congestion or disorder on the railroad lines, especially important for military reasons."

        Pery Broad, for his part, describes the situation in the summer of 1942:

        "The methods of extermination at Auschwitz no longer satisfied Himmler. First, they were too slow. Next, the big pyres give off such a stench that the air reeked with it over a radius of several kilometers. At night one could see the red hue of the sky above Auschwitz from far away. But without these gigantic pyres it would have been utterly impossible to get rid of the Infinite number of corpses of people who had died in the camp or in the gas chambers. The chimney of the Auschwitz crematorium had developed dangerous cracks through overheating. Although talkative sentinels were punished in the severest manner and were blamed for divulging the secret. nothing could prevent the sweetish odor, whose meaning was all too evident, or the light of the flames at night from revealing, at least to nearby neighbors, what was happening in the Auschwitz death camp ...

        In the spring of 1944, Auschwitz reached its zenith. Long trains shuttled between the annex camp of Birkenau and Hungary. A three-track siding that went clear to the new crematoria made it possible for a train to arrive immediately after one had been unloaded. The percentage of those destined to "special lodging" -- as we had been calling it for a while, instead of "special treatment"-- was particularly high among the deportees in these convoys .... The four crematoria were working at full capacity. But soon the ovens burned out because of the excessive, continuous operation that was demanded of them. Only crematorium III was still ... One of the thatch-roofed houses was even put back into operation, under the name of bunker no.5... The last corpse had hardly been removed from the chambers and dragged to the incineration ditch, across the corpse-strewn yard behind the crematorium, than the next gassing victims were undressing in the big room."

        In 1945 Dr. Bendel wrote: "When I entered the special work detail, the results produced by the ovens in crematoria IV and V were considered insufficient. They were replaced by three big ditches, each twelve meters long, six meters wide and one and a half meters deep. The number of bodies that could be cremated in them was incredible: a thousand persons per hour. It was further increased when a tunnel was drilled beneath the ditches to conduct the human fat into a salvage tank."

        In the report made by Mordowicz and Rosin, the two prisoners who escaped on May 27, 1994, we read: "On 15 May massive convoys began to arrive from Hungary... A railroad siding ran through the camp and ended at the crematorium, which had been completed in great haste ... Only about 10 percent of the people in these convoys were admitted to the camp. The rest were immediately executed by gas and incinerated... Three crematory ovens ran night and day. At that time the fourth was being repaired, and, because the capacity of the ovens was not sufficient, big ditches, thirty meters by fifteen, were once again dug (as at the time when there were not yet any ovens) in the birch wood, where bodies were burned night and day."

        In mid-1943 a peculiar procession could be seen every morning at Auschwitz. It wound its way from the camp gate, across which huge letters proclaimed that "Work makes man free," to a former postal barracks which had been turned into an Interrogation room. At the head of the procession were two police prisoners who carried two strange-looking wooden scaffold: that looked something like hurdles. They were followed by sixty to eighty other police prisoners who could just barely make it to the interrogation room and many of whom helped to prop each other up. A large number of Gestapo employees brought up the rear of this sad procession. Some had horse whips stuck in their gun belts or the specially treated, dried bull whips so familiar in all concentration camps. Typewriters and thick file folders were also part of their equipment. Guards with automatic pistols escorted the weak, unresisting prisoners. The Gestapo men disappeared with the wooden scaffolds, and the prisoners whom they wished to interrogate first followed them into the barrack. The majority had to wait outside under guard. Before long, one could hear the shouts of the interrogating Gestapo men, the noise of chairs falling over, and resounding slaps. The terrible cries of the tortured victims could be heard far away. Everyone who was not prepared to confess his "guilt" or who was suspected of knowing something about arms caches or the names of "gang members" was treated brutally. Not too many people in Auschwitz knew the significance of these wooden scaffolds. Those who did knew that they were "swings," the name by which these torture instruments were known. A Gestapo man had been the inspiration for the construction of the swing in Auschwitz. He had come from a Gestapo office to interrogate a prisoner. Suddenly a strangled, muffled moaning came from the room he was in. The scene that met the eyes of those entering surprised even concentration camp people who had become used to all sorts of things. Two tables stood about three feet apart. The victim was made to sit down on the floor and fold his hands in front of his bent knees. Then his wrists were handcuffed, a heavy rod inserted between his elbows and knees, and the ends of the rod put on the tables. Thus he swung helplessly, head down, between the tables. The victim was then hit with a bullwhip on his backside and the soles of his feet so violently that he would make an almost complete somersault. Every time his backside came into proper. position he would be hit full force. When his cries became too loud the sadistic Gestapo fiend would put a gas mask over him. Now only stifled moans were to be heard. From time to time the mask was removed and he was asked whether he was now ready to confess. The victim of some informer or other, he had been accused of possession of a weapon. After about fifteen minutes the convulsive movements of the tortured man abated. He was no longer able to talk and only shook his head feebly when the gas mask was removed and he was asked to confess. His pants had become drenched with blood and the blood trickled to the floor. Finally his head just hung down motionlessly; he had become unconscious. The Gestapo man, however, was by no means dismayed. With a knowing smile he pulled a flask with a highly pungent liquid from his pocket and held it to the prisoner's nose. After a few minutes the man regained consciousness. Since his backside was already so bloodied that further beatings could hardly have increased his pain, the inquisitor had a fresh idea. He dripped hot water into the nose of his prisoner. The burning pain must have been unbearable. He had achieved his goal. In response to a new question, posed with mocking certainty, the brutally abused man nodded his head. Now the rod was taken off the table and upended, so that the chained man slid down, and the rod was removed. The handcuffs could be removed from the discolored, swollen wrists only with difficulty. The prisoner was lying on the floor lifelessly. When he was unable to follow the order to come to the table and sign his "confession," he was hit over the head with the bull whip and kicked. Finally he managed to get to his feet and with fingers hardly able to hold a pen he signed his "confession." From the shaky letters and the perspiration on the paper an expert could tell that this was a "rigorous" interrogation, conducted "with all the means at one's disposal," or, as is frequently said in interrogation reports, it was a "probing questioning." This method was in favor in Auschwitz. But they considered this arrangement with the two tables on which the rod moved around and sometimes rolled off with the prisoners too primitive. They therefore had two wooden scaffolds made by prisoners in the carpentry shops and fitted with removable steel poles. Thus they achieved an intensification of the torture, because the victim could now be turned around the pole as well.

        During the final period of the war, Himmler was anxious not to leave traces that would reveal the poison-gas murders to the Allied armies. It was for this reason that on November 26, 1944 he ordered the destruction of the Auschwitz crematoria. The deportation of Jews had already stopped: the last convoy of which there is any evidence arrived at the camp on November 3, 1944.

        On October 7 the prisoners who made up the special work detail assigned to crematorium IV had staged a revolt. None survived, but they did manage to blow up the crematorium and its gas chamber; three SS members died with them.

        In a document that an unknown member of the work detail was buried near one of the crematoria, in which the last entry is dated November 26, 1944, we read: "Today, 25 November, crematorium II began to be dismantled; the dismantling of crematorium III followed immediately after."

        In his deposition Szlama Dragon described the last phase: "Crematorium V operated until the final days of the Germans' presence in the camp. They blew it up with dynamite shortly before they fled. That was on 20 January 1945. During the last period, only the bodies of those who had died or been killed in the camp were incinerated there. Nobody was gassed any more."

        Pery Broad noted: "All the documents that had anything to do with 'special treatment' or 'special lodging' were ripped out of the staff files."

        On January 18, 1945 the camp administration began the evacuation: "In about the middle of January, Auschwitz was evacuated in panic. In front of all the administration buildings there were fires in which documents were burning, and the buildings that had served to carry out the greatest massacre in the history of mankind were blown up."

Note to Appendix D:

1. The prisoners who made up the Sonderkommandos were those who, to save their lives or obtain a better treatment, accepted the job. Let us not judge them.

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