Auschwitz Claimed 1, 100, 000 Victims

Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau), to be more precise – Auschwitz I was the main camp (Stammlager); and Auschwitz III-Monowitz was a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben.

The number of victims of Auschwitz II death factory has been significantly revised since the end of the Second Great War: initially, the Soviets (who liberated the camp in January of 1945), that four million inmates had been murdered there, a figure based on the capacity of the crematoria. It was a lie – like just about everything uttered by the Soviets.

First Auschwitz commandant Rudolf H;ss told prosecutors at Nuremberg that at least 2,500,000 people had been gassed there, and that another 500,000 had died of starvation and disease. It turned out that he was lying – “only” 1.1 million died at Auschwitz (960,000 Jews, 75,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 15,000 “other Europeans”).

Around one in six Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in Auschwitz.[241] By nation, the greatest number of Auschwitz’s Jewish victims (430,000) originated from Hungary.

Followed by Poland (300,000), France (69,000), Netherlands (60,000), Greece (55,000), Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (46,000), Slovakia (27,000), Belgium (25,000), Germany and Austria (23,000), Yugoslavia (10,000), Italy (7,500), Norway (690), and others (34,000). Just about all murdered Soviet Jews were killed in the “Holocaust by Bullets”.

This statistic proves beyond the reasonable doubt that Auschwitz II killing center was established for serial mass murder of Jews all over Europe (unlike Chelmno and Operation Reinhard death factories set up to murder mostly Polish Jews).

The first (experimental) gassing, however, took place in Auschwitz I two months before construction of Auschwitz II even began. The decision to do that gassing was apparently made right after termination of Aktion T4 euthanasia program made its personnel available for the “Holocaust by Gas”.

Its objective was to study the feasibility of this method for the “final solution to Jewish question” via total extermination of the Jews. It was decided to use cyanide-based pesticide (Zyklon B) because (1) it worked very fast on humans; and (2) it was already used for de-lousing clothes of inmates.

This first experimental gassing took place around August 1941, when Lagerf;hrer Karl Fritzsch, at the instruction of Rudolf H;ss, murdered a group of Soviet prisoners of war by throwing Zyklon B crystals into their basement cell in block 11 of Auschwitz I.

A second group of 600 Soviet prisoners of war and around 250 sick Polish prisoners were gassed on September 3-5 in the old crematorium after being told they were to march naked there to receive new clothing. The morgue was later converted to a gas chamber able to hold at least 700–800 people. Zyklon B was dropped into the room through slits in the ceiling.

Gassings were considered a success… however, Aktion T4 officials were not impressed. They found Zyklon B far too toxic and otherwise difficult to use – thus death factories of Operation Reinhard and Chelmno killing center used CO from exhaust fumes to kill their victims.

Auschwitz belonged to a different chain of command (as did Majdanek) so its commandants decided to stick to Zyklon B – but build a dedicated killing center next to the labor camp.

We do not know exactly when the regular gassings commenced at Auschwitz II. I think that it commenced on March 20, 1941 when Auschwitz II gas chambers became fully operational. Prior to that date gassing was done on an irregular, ad hoc basis (starting possibly as early as in late December of 1941).

However, we know for sure that construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau began in October 1941 in Brzezinka, about three kilometers from Auschwitz I. Most likely, it was included into the initial plan to build five killing center (Majdanek was added later to augment the “insufficient capacity” of these death factories).

The first gas chamber at Auschwitz II was built in what prisoners called the “little red house” (known as “bunker 1” by the SS), a brick cottage that had been turned into a gassing facility.

Its windows had been bricked up and its four rooms converted into two insulated rooms, the doors of which said “Zur Desinfektion”. A second gas chamber, the “little white house” or “bunker 2”, was converted and operational by June 1942.

Use of bunkers I and 2 stopped in spring 1943 when the new crematoria were built, although bunker 2 became operational again in May 1944 for the murder of the Hungarian Jews. Bunker I was demolished in 1943 and bunker 2 in November 1944.

Unlike in Operation Reinhard killing centers. in Auschwitz gas chambers were built next to ovens in the same building with crematoria. Plans for Crematoria II and III show that both contained an oven room on the ground floor, an underground dressing room and a gas chamber with a capacity for about 700 victims.

The dressing rooms had wooden benches along the walls and numbered pegs for clothing. Victims would be led from these rooms to a five-yard-long narrow corridor, which in turn led to a space from which the gas chamber door opened.

The gas chambers were white inside, and nozzles were fixed to the ceiling to resemble showerheads (to disguise their true purpose). The daily capacity of the crematoria was 340 corpses in 24 hours in Crematorium I; 1,440 each in Crematoria II and III; and 768 each in Crematoria IV and V.

By June 1943 all four crematoria were operational, but crematorium I was not used after July 1943. This made the total daily capacity equal to 4,416 corpses, although by loading three to five corpses at a time, the Sonderkommando were able to burn some 8,000 bodies a day. This maximum capacity was rarely needed, though; the average between 1942 and 1944 was 1,000 bodies burned every day.

To keep the victims calm, they were told they were to undergo disinfection and de-lousing; they were ordered to undress outside, then were locked in the building and gassed.

From 1942, Jews were being transported to Auschwitz from all over German-occupied Europe by rail, arriving in daily convoys. The gas chambers worked to their fullest capacity from May to July 1944, during the Holocaust in Hungary (a very strange phase in the “Holocaust Project”). The incoming volume was so great at that time that the Sonderkommando resorted to burning corpses in open-air pits in addition to in the crematoria.

During “selection” on arrival, those deemed able to work were sent to the right and admitted into the camp (registered), and the rest were sent to the left to be gassed. The group selected to die included almost all children, women with small children, the elderly, and others who appeared on brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor not fit for work.

Practically any fault—scars, bandages, boils and emaciation—might provide reason enough to be deemed unfit. Children might be made to walk toward a stick held at a certain height; those who could walk under it were gassed.

Inmates unable to walk or who arrived at night were taken to gas chambers on trucks; otherwise, the new arrivals were marched there. Their belongings were seized and sorted by inmates in the “Kanada” warehouses, an area of the camp used as storage facilities for plundered goods; it derived its name from the inmates’ view of Canada as a land of plenty.

The crematoria consisted of a dressing room, gas chamber, and furnace room. In crematoria II and III, the dressing room and gas chamber were underground; in IV and V, they were on the ground floor. The dressing room had numbered hooks on the wall to hang clothes.

SS officers told the victims they had to take a shower and undergo delousing. The victims undressed in the dressing room and walked into the gas chamber; signs said “Bade” (bath) or “Desinfektionsraum” (disinfection room). The new gas chamber could hold up to 2,000; one former prisoner said it was around 3,000.

Zyklon B was delivered to the crematoria by a special SS bureau known as the Hygiene Institute. After the doors were shut, SS men dumped in the Zyklon B pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber. The victims were usually dead within 10 minutes (i.e., in half the time it took to kill all the victims with carbon monoxide from diesel exhaust fumes).

Sonderkommando wearing gas masks and protective clothing dragged the bodies from the chamber. They removed glasses and artificial limbs and shaved off the women’s hair; women’s hair was removed before they entered the gas chamber at Belzec, Sobib;r, and Treblinka, but at Auschwitz it was done after gassing.

Just before cremation, jewelry was removed, along with dental work and teeth containing precious metals. Gold was removed from the teeth of dead prisoners from 23 September 1940 onwards by order of Heinrich Himmler. By early 1944, 10-12 kg of gold was being extracted monthly from victims’ teeth.

The corpses were then burned in the nearby incinerators, and the ashes were buried, thrown in the Vistula river, or used as fertilizer. Any bits of bone that had not burned properly were ground down in wooden mortars.

The last gassing took place on October 30, 1944. On the next day, Himmler ordered the SS to stop all gassings. On November 25, he ordered Auschwitz’s gas chambers and crematoria be destroyed. The Sonderkommando and other prisoners began the job of dismantling the buildings and cleaning up the site.

Beginning on 17 January, some 58,000 Auschwitz detainees (2/3 of them Jews) were evacuated under guard, at first heading west on foot, then by open-topped freight trains, to concentration camps in Germany and Austria. Fewer than 9,000 remained in the camps, deemed too sick to move.

By December 1944 some 15,000 Jewish prisoners had made it from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated by the British on April 15, 1945.

Gas chambers and crematoria were blown up; buildings set on fire. On January 27th, the Red Army soldiers liberated the camps… and promptly raped all female survivors left in the camp. Those who resisted were brutally murdered.