Auschwitz Greatest Escape: True Stories of Camp Escapees in the Holocaust (World War 2, WW2, WWII, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Irma Grese) by Ryan Jenkins

Author:Ryan Jenkins [Jenkins, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: success first publishing
Published: 2015-06-12T18:30:00+00:00

This roof is fitted with three traps which can be hermitically closed from the outside. A track leads from the gas chamber to the furnace room. The gassing takes place as follows:

The unfortunate victims are brought into hall where they are told to undress. To complete the fiction that they are going to bathe, each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad in whites coats. They are then crowded into the gas chamber in such numbers there is, of course, only standing room.

To compress this crowd into the narrow space, shots are often fired to induce those already at the far end to huddle still closer together. When everybody is inside, the heavy doors are closed. Then there is a short pause, presumably to allow the room temperature to rise to a certain level, after which 55 men with gas masks climb on the roof, open the traps, and shake down a preparation in powder form out of tin cans labeled "CYCLONE" "For use against vermin," which is manufactured by a Hamburg concern.

It is presumed that this is a "CYANIDE" mixture of some sort which turns into gas at a certain temperature. After three minutes everyone in the chamber is dead. No one is known to have survived this ordeal, although it was not uncommon to discover signs of life after the primitive measures employed in the Birch Wood.

The chamber is then opened, aired, and the "special squad" carts the bodies on flat trucks to the furnace rooms where the burning takes place. Crematoria III and IV work on nearly the same principle, but their capacity is only half as large. Thus the total capacity of the four cremating and gassing plants at BIRKENAU amounts to about 6,000 daily...”

As was mentioned earlier in this volume, Vrba and Wetzler's account, considering they did not have access to all the parts of the camp nor all of its records, is surprisingly accurate. However, some of the details gleaned from inmates in the Sonderkommando and others could only be estimated. Critics have pointed to these errors to completely discount the report and other statistics regarding Auschwitz and the Holocaust. However, it must be remembered that Vrba and Wetzler were inmates, the lowest of the low, and were not high ranking Nazi officials with an insider's detail of the camp. When matched up against the trial testimony of Adolf Eichmann for example, Vrba and Wetzler's report stands up to scrutiny.

The exact date of the reports' arrival in Hungary is contested, but regardless of whether it arrived before the mass deportations of Hungarian Jews began on May 15 or thereafter, it is known that Jewish leaders in Budapest (most significantly a man named Rudolf Kastner) were privy to the report before all the Jews of Hungary were gone.

Rudolf Kastner made the decision not to go public with the report. To the end of his life, Rudolf Vrba believed that Kastner suppressed the report in Hungary because he

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