Wide diversity of prisoners, complicated administrative structure, brutally harsh conditions—all are aspects of Auschwitz that render it unique among Nazi concentration camps and extermination centers. Although these characteristics are essential to our understanding of Auschwitz and are central to Polish commemorative uses of Auschwitz, the murder of nearly nine hundred thousand Jews immediately after their arrival at the camp remains the most salient and important, but not entirely definitive aspect of its history. The scale of the killing operations at Auschwitz and the manner in which they were carried out have, more than any other aspects of the camp’s history, remained in the consciousness and memory of Jews and non-Jews around the world, and an awareness of the machinery of mass extermination at Auschwitz and its role in the execution of the “final solution of the Jewish question” continues to awaken both horror and interest on the part of scholars, students, and visitors to the memorial site. As the largest single killing center for European Jews, Auschwitz has appropriately emerged as a metonym for the Shoah, and its memorial grounds have become a primary destination for millions of pilgrims, both Jewish and Gentile.
Raul Hilberg has noted that the status of Auschwitz as the foremost symbol of the Shoah is based on at least three of its characteristics: first, more Jews died in Auschwitz than anywhere else; second, Auschwitz was an international killing center with victims from across the European continent; third, the killing at Auschwitz continued long after the other extermination centers of Nazi-occupied Europe had been liquidated.26 There are other bases for the symbolic and metonymic value of Auschwitz—bases that will be addressed in the course of this study—but these three characteristics are an appropriate point of departure for a brief description of the killing operations that were undertaken at the Auschwitz complex.
Auschwitz, as the description of its early history has made clear, was not initially intended to be an extermination center for European Jews, but was a large concentration camp on annexed Polish territory. As at all concentration camps, death was omnipresent and had numerous causes. Executions by hanging or by shooting at the so-called “wall of death” adjacent to Block 11 were commonplace at the base camp and later at Birkenau, Monowitz, and the various auxiliary camps. So-called “selections”—the weeding-out of prisoners considered unfit for work—and the subsequent murder of prisoners by lethal injection or gas began in the spring of 1941. Moreover, prisoners at the Auschwitz complex were continually subjected to various forms of what could be called indirect extermination, that is, death resulting from the effects of hunger, disease, so-called “medical experiments,” exhaustion, or torture.
The systematic and efficient killing of prisoners and recently arrived deportees in gas chambers was, however, a later development at Auschwitz. According to the postwar testimony of Rudolf Höss, the camp’s first commandant, Himmler summoned him to Berlin in the late summer of 1941 and announced, in Höss’s words, the following: “The Führer has ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and for all and that we, the SS, are to implement that order. The existing extermination centers in the East are not in a position to carry out the large actions which are anticipated. I have therefore earmarked Auschwitz for this purpose, both because of its good position as regards communications and because the area can easily be isolated and camouflaged.”27 Höss was also informed that further details of the extermination plans would be brought to Auschwitz by Adolf Eichmann, chief of the Jewish Department of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Later that year Eichmann and Höss worked out many of the details of the plan, including transport and railroad arrangements and, in September, development of a suitable killing method.
When Eichmann visited Auschwitz, he acquainted Höss with the workings of gas chambers used at “euthanasia” installations and the mobile gassing vans used at various locations. Both used carbon monoxide as the poison, but neither, it was decided, would be suitable for the sort of mass extermination that was to be undertaken at Auschwitz. Instead, a preparation of hydrogen cyanide normally used as a disinfectant, fumigator, and delousing agent was chosen. The product, commercially marketed as “Zyklon-B,” was readily available at the Auschwitz complex. While Höss was away, his deputy Karl Fritzsch used Zyklon-B as a killing agent for humans on a group of Soviet prisoners. When the commandant returned, he supervised the first large-scale killing in the cellar of the base camp’s Block 11, where approximately six hundred Soviet prisoners of war and two hundred fifty other prisoners were gassed to death. After witnessing this second experiment, Höss became convinced that death by Zyklon-B gas would be the most efficient and appropriate means of killing Jews at Auschwitz in the future, and the mortuary of the “old crematorium” (later named Crematorium I) was converted to a gas chamber. It was first used on transports of Jewish deportees in February 1942.
The gas chamber attached to Crematorium I operated for another year, but with the advent of Nazi plans for the “final solution of the Jewish question” in late 1941, the bulk of gassing operations at Auschwitz was moved to Birkenau. Construction on the Birkenau camp had begun in October 1941, and in early 1942 the first gassings took place there in a provisional bunker known as the “little red house.” A second bunker, the “little white house,” began operation in June. Both of these installations were surrounded by trees. Mass graves, later to be replaced by incineration pits, were also in the near vicinity but hidden from the victims by hedges. The Jewish deportees were unloaded at a rail station two and a half kilometers from Birkenau and were then “selected” for registration and work or, in most cases, immediate death.28 Those deemed unfit to live were then marched to the killing facilities or brought there in trucks. They were forced to undress, told that they would bathe and be deloused, instructed to remember where they had left their belongings, and then forced into the gas chamber. Once the chamber was full, the doors were sealed and SS men wearing gas masks poured the Zyklon-B pellets into slots in the side wall. The victims were usually dead within minutes. When the chamber was opened a half hour later, members of the Sonderkommando began their work. The Sonderkommando was a special detail of Jewish prisoners who were charged with removal of the bodies, extraction of valuables from the corpses, cremation, and cleaning of the gas chambers of blood and excrement prior to the arrival of the next group of victims.29
Corpses of the victims of gassings at the base camp, as well as those who had been gassed at Birkenau, were buried in pits near the Birkenau bunkers. In the summer of 1942, however, SS Colonel Paul Blobel from Eichmann’s RSHA arrived at Auschwitz with orders that the corpses be removed. From September until late November 1942 a mass exhumation and incineration effort took place, as pyres of up to two thousand bodies each and, later, mass incineration pits were used to dispose of more than one hundred thousand corpses.
Work on four specially designed gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau had begun in July 1942, but the first of the new installations there was not completed until March 1943. By June of that year four new facilities (Crematoria II, III, IV, and V) were in operation. The killing process in the new gas chambers at Birkenau was similar to that in the temporary bunkers, but it took place on a larger and more streamlined scale. At Crematorium II the process was perhaps at its most efficient. After having been selected for death, the victims were led to the entrance of the crematorium or, in the case of invalids or the weak, they were brought there in trucks. Every effort was made to delude the victims, who were told that they would bathe and be deloused. They were then led into a subterranean undressing room where they could see signs in German and in their native languages bearing the instructions “To the Baths” and “To Disinfection.” Some were even given soap and towels.
As many as two thousand people could be forced into the gas chamber of Crematorium II. Once they were inside, the door was bolted and sealed, and, on the order of an SS doctor, the SS “disinfectors” opened cans of Zyklon-B and poured their contents into induction vents on the roof. In a matter of minutes—at most twenty—all inside were dead. Rudolf Höss, having witnessed the gassing process, described the effects of the sublimated poison: “It could be observed through