“…For a time there was quite a bit of rivalry among the S.S. leaders as to which was the most efficient gas to speed the Jews to their death. Speed was an important factor, especially at Auschwitz, where towards the end the camp was setting new records by gassing 6,000 victims a day. One of the camp’s commanders for a period was Rudolf Hoess, an ex-convict once found guilty of murder, who deposed at Nurenberg on the superiority of the gas he employed.
The “Final Solution” of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time there were already in the general government of Poland three other extermination camps: Belzec [page not ready], Treblinka, and Wolzek [page not ready]…
I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their extermination. The camp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of half a year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto.
He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient [page not ready]. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Zyclon B [page not ready], which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions.
We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about a half hour before we opened the door and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold fom the teeth of the corpses.
Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accomodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their ten gas chambers only accomodated 200 people each.
“Hoess then explained how the victims were ‘selected’ for the gas chambers, since not all the incoming prisoners were done away with — at least not at once, becuase some of them were needed to labor in the I.G. Farben [page not ready] chemical works and Krupp’s factory until they became exhausted and were ready for the “final solution.”
We had two S.S. doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. These would be marched by one of the doctors, who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit to work were sent into the camp. Others were snt immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender yars were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.
“Always Herr Hoess kept making improvements in the art of mass killing.
Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated, while at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children to be exterminated.
We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all the people in the communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz” (Shirer, 1260-62)
Work Cited
Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. ISBN 0-449-21977-1.
The original plaintext version [page not ready] of this file is available via ftp [page not ready].
