Hitler's Shadow War by Donald M. McKale

Author:Donald M. McKale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Published: 2002-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Assembly-Line Murder

Essentially the three camps followed the same killing procedure. When the transports arrived, SS men and collaborators herded the Jews out of the train cars and camp prisoners cleared the dead from the transports. As the Jews arrived, especially those in the first phase of the deportations between March and August 1942, nearly all had no idea where they were. They believed SS officers, who told them they had reached a transit facility and would soon be sent to labor camps.

First, however, the officers moved the new arrivals to a transport yard amid chaos and turmoil produced by SS beatings of and screaming orders at the victims. Once at the yard, the Jews were ordered to undress, leave their clothing, money, and other valuables, and then proceed to the “bathing” and disinfecting area. The officials separated the men from the women and children and shaved the prisoners’ heads. In keeping with their rule to plunder everything possible from the victims, the Germans used the hair for a variety of purposes; they processed it for industrial felt and spun it into thread for socks for German submarine crews and railway workers.

Then SS men and Ukrainian collaborators took the groups naked, women and children first, to the gas chambers, which the Nazis had disguised as showers. The guards hurried the Jews through a corridor or “tube” that connected the transport yard with the gas chambers, continually beating the people with whips and turning dogs on them. The killers intended to conceal the victims’ fate from them to the end.

Most of the Jews had no idea of what was happening until the doors closed behind them and the gas began filtering into the chamber. Within twenty to thirty minutes, all had died. Initially with the deportations, from the moment the Jews arrived at the camps on the transports until the removal of their corpses from the gas chambers, the procedure took between three and four hours; later, as the killers built larger gassing facilities, it took barely two hours.

Each camp carried out the killings with hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid) pumped by fixed installations of diesel motors or tank engines through pipes into the hermetically sealed gas chambers. To dispose of the bodies, none of the camps had crematoria, but instead buried the victims in gigantic graves; only at the end of 1942 did the Germans begin burning the corpses on huge funeral piles to destroy the evidence of their crimes.

For removal of the bodies from the gas chambers, as well as stripping them of gold teeth and fillings and burying or burning the remains, the camps used hundreds of Jewish prisoners, who hoped to avoid in this way being gassed themselves. After a few days or weeks, however, the SS murdered such prisoners and replaced them with new arrivals off the transports. Other prisoner details collected and sorted the clothes and valuables of the dead. Still another Sonderkommando unloaded the deportees’ luggage from the trains and cleaned the cars that had brought the victims to the camps; often they only completed their task as another transport arrived.

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