The Darkest Side of Auschwitz (Difficult to Watch)
Of all the names that evoke the horrors of the 20th century, Auschwitz occupies a central place. It was not just a concentration camp, it was the heart of a machine designed to strip human beings of their dignity, their identity, and ultimately their lives. For years, men, women, and children arrived in closed wagons, unaware that their final destination was extermination.
More than a million people have died there, many without leaving a trace, others with a tattooed number as the only evidence of their existence. But behind every number, there were decisions, there were hands, there were faces, and there was a cold, bureaucratic logic that turned murder into routine.
This is a journey through the darkest side of Auschwitz. A story that cannot be softened, that must not be forgotten, and that still today shocks us with the magnitude of the pain and the depth of the cruelty. The beginning of hell. On April 30, 1940, Rudolp realized a long-held ambition.
At the age of 39 and after 6 years of service in the SS, he was appointed commander of one of the first concentration camps established by the Nazis in the New Reich. On that spring day, he arrived to take up his duties in a small town located in what 18 months earlier had been southwestern Poland before becoming part of Upper Silesia.
Its name in Polish was Oswiinim and in German Auschwitz. Despite the promotion, the concentration camp that Hus was to run did not yet exist. In fact, his first task was to oversee its construction from a series of dilapidated, insect-infested barracks that had belonged to the Polish army. The surrounding area could hardly have been more depressing.
This land, situated between the Saa and Vistula rivers, was monotonous and had a humid and unhealthy climate. On that first day, no one could have predicted that within 5 years, this camp would become the scene of the greatest massacre the world has ever known. The story of the chain of decision-making that led to this transformation is one of the most terrible known to humankind, and it allows us to understand in an exceptional way the workings of the Nazi state.
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himler, Reinhard Heidrich and other Nazi leaders made decisions that led to the extermination of more than one million people at Auschwitz. However, the mentality of lower-ranking officials like EUS also contributed decisively to this crime. Without the leadership skills he demonstrated in the hitherto unknown field of mass murder on such a colossal scale, Auschwitz would never have functioned as it did.
In reality, there was almost nothing exceptional about Rudolp. He was a man of average height with regular features and dark hair. Several Polish prisoners at Auschwitz confirm this impression and remember him as a calm and moderate individual, identical to the many people we pass every day in the street without even noticing their presence.
His appearance could not be further from the conventional stereotype of the congested-faced SS monster, which makes him all the more terrifying. His character and beliefs had been shaped by his reaction to the events of the previous 25 years of German history. The most turbulent period the country has ever known. The Auschwitz concentration camp is synonymous with the absolute evil that Nazism embodied.
Jews and Roma served as guinea pigs for the diabolical experiments of the Nazis who gassed more than a million people and killed them by hunger, cold, and exhaustion. or simply through loneliness and despair. However, many prisoners resisted the total dehumanization of the camp by striving to retain their dignity.
Taking care of one’s hygiene, writing or drawing were acts that helped one to survive. The events are recounted through the voices of those who survived the hell of Auschwitz. The unbearable silence after the murders of children, the barbarity of medical experiments on thousands of men and women, or the struggle to survive in a camp of horror and death.
Auschwitz, epicenter of the death industry. Auschwitz is today considered the ultimate symbol of the Holocaust and Hitler’s genocidal policies, especially from 1942 onwards when it became the epicenter of Nazi crimes, a unique place that combines the largest deportation camp in the Nazi concentration camp universe and the largest extermination center in the history of the third rail.
For all these reasons, Auschwitz has become synonymous with absolute evil. As mentioned previously, this was where the first mass murder experiment in a gas chamber took place in September 1941 with Soviet prisoners of war . It was also there that Jews and Tigana served as guinea pigs for the diabolical experiments carried out by Nazi doctors and nurses.
More than a million human beings from fifteen European countries were gassed and more than 2,000 men, women and children died of hunger, cold, disease, exhaustion, brutality or simply loneliness and absolute despair. However, Auschwitz did not begin as a concentration camp, much less as an extermination camp.
Located on the outskirts of the town of Oschim, non-Polish Achwitz, the camp was built in the 10th century to house immigrants from the province of Galicia, then one of the poorest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who were trying to reach Berlin or Vienna. At that time, it consisted of a brick dormitory for 3000 workers and 90 wooden barracks that could house more than 9000 workers, as well as other buildings such as a chapel, a theatre, and a hospital.
The camp’s population quickly surpassed that of Oswiekim, which had approximately 14,000 inhabitants, half of whom were Jewish. And the railway station, a fact that would later prove very important, was located a little over a kilometer away. and connected the city via Krakovie to the rail corridor leading to Hamburg via Bresslot and Berlin.
At the end of the First World War, with the changes in borders, Oswiishim was integrated into Poland and what was previously a center for immigrants became a military barracks where the base of the 21st Polish cavalry regiment was located until 1938 . Germany’s invasion of Poland in September, followed by that of the Soviet Union on the 17th of the same month as foreseen in the pact signed between the USSR and Germany by Molotov and von Ribentrop, would change not only its destiny, but also that of what would later become the Auschwitz camp.
Indeed, thanks to their respective foreign ministers who gave their names to the pact, the USSR and Germany had signed on August 19, 1939 a non-aggression pact which allowed Germany to attack Poland on September 1, 1939 without fear of Soviet intervention; the pact contained a secret clause providing for the division of Poland and Eastern Europe between the Soviet and German spheres of influence .
In accordance with this plan, the Soviet army occupied and annexed eastern Poland in the autumn of 1939. The Nazis felt a deep contempt for the Poles. In a document sent to Hitler in May, Himmler claimed that their destiny was to be an uneducated slave people . The non-German population of the eastern territories should not receive education higher than that of primary school.
The purpose of primary school will be solely to teach elementary arithmetic such as counting up to a maximum of 500, writing their name and learning that it is God’s will to obey the Germans, to be honest, hardworking and well- behaved. I consider it unnecessary for them to learn to read. In this document, which reflects Nazi racial ideology with sinister clarity , Himmler goes further.
Thus, Polish children aged 6 to 10, whose blood was considered racially acceptable, were taken from their families and sent to Germany to be educated far from their biological parents. The personal and family tragedy of these children did not worry Himler. This was perfectly in line with Nazi doctrine, which classified and ranked human beings according to their race and blood.
German repression was initially directed at Polish cultural and religious elites. Men and women were shot, others were taken prisoner and sent to concentration camps in the Reich. However, the prisons in Upper Silesia were quickly saturated and in December 1939, the Nazi police services considered creating a quarantine camp in this area for Polish prisoners before their transfer to Germany.
The choice fell on Oswichim, i.e. Auschwitz, 60 km west of Krakovie in an area of Poland annexed to Germany whose facilities depended on the German army. Rudolp Eus, then administrator of the Saxenhausen camp, was tasked with verifying its viability and considered the old facilities adequate provided that some modifications were made.
Himler approved his report and decided to create a concentration camp on the site, abandoning the initial idea of making it a temporary quarantine camp. Appointed commandant of the new camp, Eus arrived at Auschwitz on May 1, 1940 accompanied by some members of the SS. In his memoirs, he writes, “The task I was given was not easy.
It involved transforming, in the shortest possible time, a camp whose buildings were well-constructed but in a state of total disrepair and infested with insects into a complex capable of ensuring the stay or transit of prisoners. No sooner had I arrived than the authorities in Brelo wanted to know when I could receive the first transfers of prisoners.
Upon his arrival at Auschwitz in May, Rudolph created a vast construction site to adapt the old facilities to the new requirements. Other buildings were added to the existing brick structure. Floors were raised, and the same infrastructure as in other concentration camps was built: the Gestapo’s political command center , kitchens, showers, a hospital, a prison, a gallows, and a crematorium.
Electrified barbed wire fences were erected. Paths and streets were opened. Auschwitz became a vast fortified city. The first prisoners to arrive at Auschwitz…” On May 20, 30 German prisoners, incarcerated for common crimes, were assigned to the role of Capos.
They had been transferred from the Saxenhausen camp, where they had received specialized training for this purpose, and were responsible for implementing the brutal methods used in German concentration camps since 1933. These prisoners were assigned numbers from 1 to 30. As German prisoners of the Reich in leadership positions, they were feared by the other inmates.
This group of criminals and their assistants held a privileged position within the prisoner integration system and enjoyed SS protection. As camp employees, they were exempt from manual labor and held the power of life and death over the prisoners. They were better fed, wore leather boots and tailored clothing, among other privileges. Vaek was one of them.
A former criminal, he was a cruel tyrant. He forced prisoners to participate in sports sessions during which they had to jump, They crawled and lay down under a continuous rain of blows from a stick. When exhausted and bloodied, they could no longer get up. Vasek beat them to death. Deaf, paralyzed, blind, or wounded suffered the same fate.
Those who resisted were subjected to special treatment before death: their bodies were suspended by their bound hands, and they were deprived of food in a dark cell. At the beginning of June 1940, 120 SS men arrived from the military garrison in Krakow and from the camps of Buchenwald, Dahao, and Flosenburg. Then, on the same day that the Vermarthe entered Paris, the first real prisoners arrived: 728 Poles, students and soldiers, including some Jews.
Generally, these detainees were suspected of belonging to the Polish resistance. Their first task was to build the camp. However, they were not enough. At Hus’s request, the German mayor of the town of Osim forced the local Jewish community to provide three workers. Once the labor problem was solved, the remaining issue was the materials needed for construction.
Eus had overcome the first obstacle, but he still lacked the materials. The solution he found could not have been simpler or more in keeping with the camp’s ethos . The prisoners were forced to demolish houses that had previously belonged to Poles in order to obtain bricks, wood, and other materials.
Stealing, or organizing according to camp jargon, thus became the norm . Eus himself admits that he was forced to resolve the situation quickly to obtain, legally or illegally, the gasoline needed to go to town and, by the same means, to find pots and pans for the kitchens. As for the essential barbed wire fence, he had no choice but to steal the required quantity urgently.
The prisoners’ work was extremely hard and violent. And in July of that same year, the first crematorium was built by the German company Top Fenson of Herfurt, intended to burn the bodies of the first victims. This crematorium It began operating on August 15, 1940. The Auschwitz camp, later called Auschwitzin, housed the central political command and the luxurious residence of Commandant Eus, in addition to the prisoners’ barracks and various maintenance and supply facilities.
It was protected by a double barbed-wire fence, five meters high, carrying a high-voltage electric current and brightly illuminated at night by a searchlight. Every 20 or 30 meters, the fence was interrupted by watchtowers equipped with powerful searchlights that illuminated the entire camp.
Atop these towers stood an SS officer with a tripod-mounted machine gun. A 3-meter- wide gravel-covered gap separated the double fence along its entire length. Anyone caught crossing the fence was immediately shot. On March 1, 1941, Himmler visited the camp for the first time and decided to expand it. The goal was to accommodate an additional 3,000 prisoners at Auschwitz.
and 100,000 in a new camp to be built, which would become Birkenau, also later called Auschwitz I, initially intended to house prisoners of war. This decision also had economic aims, allowing the largest German chemical companies, IG Farben, to establish a factory nearby, the construction of which would be carried out by 10,000 prisoners.
The Birkenau construction project then began 3 km from the main camp, starting with the expulsion of the inhabitants of the surrounding villages. Today, a memorial at the camp entrance recalls that the inhabitants of these villages were expelled by the German occupiers and that Birkenau was built on the site of the demolished buildings.
Furthermore, the camp owes its name to one of these villages, the hamlet of Bzrezinka, or Birkeno in German, located in a birch forest—innocent trees that gave their pretty name to the most abominable place. Birkenau, initially intended for Soviet prisoners of war , actually began to be built on October 8, 1941.
However, the Russian prisoners numbered barely 10,000, and their role was to build the camp. Starved, exhausted, and mistreated, they died by the hundreds. Birkena’s architecture was designed from the outset for overcrowding and promiscuity. The barracks, mostly made of wood, contained sixty-two three- tiered bunks, in each of which four to six prisoners were forced to share the same bed.
There was no privacy, no space to keep any personal belongings. The latrines were located outside the barracks and consisted of an endless series of openings, almost touching one another, leading to a drainage pipe. Birkena is a true reflection of the Nazi policy of humiliating and dehumanizing prisoners.
Ultimately, Birkena would cover an area of 170 hectares surrounded by 16 km of barbed wire. It would include three barracks, including living quarters, latrines, a kitchen, and a warehouse. Until 1945, Birkenao housed the vast majority of prisoners from the Auschwitz complex—Jews, Poles, Germans, and Roma—in appalling and inhumane living conditions.
Besides the overcrowding and promiscuity in the barracks , the available water was insufficient for hygiene. Feet were constantly mired in mud due to the lack of a proper path. On rainy days, there was no alternative: prisoners had to go to bed with soaking wet clothes. Birkenao also contained various facilities designed for the extermination of Jews.
It was both a concentration camp and a center for immediate extermination. Auschwitz and Birkenao would become the main implementation of the Final Solution, especially from 1942 onward. After the Vanc Conference, the SS at Auschwitz became a machine of men. One of the greatest perversities of the Nazi concentration camp system was the forced use of victims as their own executioner.
Thus, in camps exclusively dedicated to extermination, a handful of SS guards were sufficient to achieve the objective. The prisoners themselves were obligated to ensure the functioning of the death machine. Auschwitz, however, was a complex of several camps with a dual function. This is why, throughout its history, the number of SS guards increased.
According to the archives of the Auschwitz Museum, estimates indicate a number of 700 SS guards in 1941, increasing to 448 men and women by mid-January due to the needs of the final evacuation of the camp. But the total number of people who served at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945 was higher, between 8,000 and 8,200 male guards and 200 women.
According to the same source, the vast majority of guards had little education, only primary school. Only 5.5% had university degrees, mostly doctors or architects working in the department responsible for constructing the various facilities. They were predominantly Catholic. Next came the Lutherans, then the Atheists. Among the SS members belonging to the Nazi party, Lutherans constituted the largest group.
A large proportion of the SS guards were of German nationality, Reich Deutsch or Volks Deutsch. The number of the latter gradually increased, leading to complaints that thousands of guards barely spoke German. Female guards only began working at Auschwitz in 1942 with the establishment of the women’s prisoner camp and also due to the increased recruitment of men for the front.
Although they did not belong to the SS, an exclusively male organization, the applicants signed a contract with the unit responsible for the camps and were counted as SS members, being subject to the same rules of discipline. E writes that despite very active propaganda from the women’s organizations of the National Socialist Party, very few women volunteered to serve in a concentration camp.
Those who volunteered or, under duress, received instruction for a few weeks at Ravensbrück, after which they were left with the prisoners. In a description that inevitably reflects a certain misogyny, Eus states that they were generally of an extremely low moral standard. Despite the ruthless punishments, she systematically stole and used the prisoners as intermediaries.
The long years of Nazi indoctrination and the influence of German militaristic culture, combined with the morally degrading atmosphere of the camp, led the SS guards to a progressive dehumanization, conditioning their behavior in an intolerable way, even from the perspective of the SS themselves. Two attitudes characterized this behavior: sadism and corruption.
Beyond the hunger, the cold, the grueling labor, the lack of hygiene, and the promiscuity inherent in the concentration camp universe conceived by Nazism, beyond the punishments for breaches of discipline, the medical experiments on living human beings, and the After gassing the victims, the guards engaged in other acts of their own volition.
The camp administration was indifferent to the consequences of this sadism on the prisoners. Two initiatives were undertaken to address this. The first was the creation of a brothel, which proved powerless to curb their perverse impulses. The second, and more significantly, was the replacement of the guards by the prisoners themselves in enforcing discipline, including fines and other punishments.
This latter initiative had a profound impact on the inmates, causing them immense anguish. The commandant of Auschwitz himself confirmed this. Those who were still capable of reacting felt an inexplicable pain at being treated this way by their fellow prisoners. The brutality and treachery of the guards had a far lesser effect on them than the cruelty of their fellow sufferers.
Nothing crushed them more than the feeling of utter powerlessness in the face of the psychological torture inflicted by the guards. Corruption proved to be a far more complicated problem for the Nazi administration to solve. The SS sought to transmit the image of an irreproachable organization. For Himler, an SS officer could not have an ideal and at the same time line his pockets, maintain relationships with Jews, or drown his sorrows in alcohol during group orgies.
This is why, in 1941, a special tribunal for the SS and the police was created to combat corruption, headed by Judge Conrad Morgan. Morgan succeeded in conducting several investigations into high-ranking SS officials, especially at Auschwitz, where he went in 1943, alerted by the discovery of a personal package from the camp containing 2 kg of gold extracted from victims’ teeth .
Corruption remained inevitable over the years, crescendoing all the more strongly as the end of the war approached and demoralization grew in the face of the prospect of Germany’s defeat. It greatly benefited not only the lower-ranking guards but also the highest-ranking SS officers. Although in these cases, there were generally no criminal consequences.
Furthermore, The tribunal only prosecuted overly powerful leaders as a last resort. Maximilian Grabner, Gerard Palic, and Hanser, high-ranking SS officials at Auschwitz, were among the leaders investigated by Morgan, but without consequence. Another was the commandant of Auschwitz himself, Rudolph Eus, accused of impregnating a prisoner.
Eus was indeed interrogated, but he was too big a fish . The tribunal was threatened, and the case was forgotten. On July 31, 1941, Ging instructed Heidrich, head of Reich Security, by letter, to begin all the necessary organizational, practical, and financial preparations for a comprehensive solution to the Jewish question within the German sphere of influence in Europe.
And in August of the same year, Hitler declared: “I will not rest until we, too, have drawn the final conclusions regarding the Jews.” Both Ging’s letter and Hitler’s statement, followed by many others in the These same lines of thought reveal a decisive escalation in Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric . From the autumn of 1941 onward, Hitler’s discourse became increasingly clear and threatening.
Indeed, alongside the growing impotence of the German army to defeat the Soviets, rage and hatred against the Jews intensified. Old enemies, always blamed, they were now accused of acting against Germany while wearing the Bolshevik uniform. Throughout October, diatribes followed one after another, fueling a growing hatred.
On the 17th of that month, during a meal, Hitler declared that the prerequisite for any change was the elimination of the Jews. And on the 21st, he warned: “By exterminating this plague, we will render a service to humanity that the German people cannot yet comprehend.” In December, especially after the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Germany, in Hitler’s words, declared war on the United States.
Indeed, in the autumn of 1941 some of the main preparatory measures for systematic extermination were decided. The introduction on September 1st of the yellow star for all Jews over the age of 6 and on September 18th the mass deportations to the east. On December 6, the gas vans at Shelno, the first death camp, were operational with a killing capacity of 1000 people per day.
Belzek, Sobibor and Treblinka will follow as part of the so-called Reinart Action. The extermination campaign initiated with the massacres of Jews and Bolsheviks perpetrated mainly by the Einsatz Groupen was then systematically organized from the first half of 1942 by means of political and administrative decisions ranging from the establishment in Germany of a unified command with clearly defined responsibilities, in particular with the VAN conference, to the negotiation with the authorities of the occupied countries. The objective
is to establish an organized and efficient system of deportation, selection, forced labor and extermination. On May 18, 1942, an attack took place in Berlin at the site of the anti-Soviet exhibition, the Soviet paradise. And on the 27th of the same month, Eidrich was the target, as already mentioned, of a bomb attack by the Czech resistance, ultimately dying on July 4th.
In retaliation for this attack, the Germans completely razed the village of Lidis, near Prague, where the resistance fighters were supposedly hiding. All the men in the village were murdered, the women deported to concentration camps, and most of the children sent to Chelmenau and then gassed. Probably following these two attacks, on July 3, 4 and 5, 1942, a meeting took place between Hitler and Himmler intended to accelerate the extermination program.
It was also at this time that the decision was made to transform Auschwitz into the largest extermination center in the Middle Kingdom. That summer, Rudolp was summoned by Hitler. In his statement, Eus does indeed state, albeit uncertainly, that the meeting took place in the summer, but most historians believe that the commandant of Auschwitz made a mistake about the year and that, in reality, he was summoned in the summer of 1942, not the summer of 1941.
In truth, as we have just seen, the concrete decision to exterminate all the Jews of Europe was not made until the autumn of 1941. Eus writes: “It was in the summer of 1941 when I was suddenly summoned to Berlin by the SS Chief of Staff through one of his aides-de-camp. Contrary to his usual practice, he received me alone and told me the following: ‘The Chief of Staff has given the order to proceed with the final solution to the Jewish question.
We, the SS, are charged with carrying out this order. The existing extermination centers in the eastern zone do not have the resources to carry out the large-scale operations planned. Thus, for this purpose,'” I chose Auschwitz, firstly because of its favorable location from a communications standpoint, and secondly because the site for such an operation can easily be isolated and camouflaged in this region.
A difficult and arduous task awaits you, to which you must dedicate yourself completely, disregarding the difficulties that lie ahead . The details will be communicated to you by the Sturmban (General Staff) of Eichmann, who will meet with you shortly. The relevant administrations will be informed by me in due course.
You must maintain complete silence regarding this order, even with your superiors . After your conversation with Aichmann, you will send me the plans for the proposed facility without delay. The Jews are the eternal enemies of the German people and must be exterminated. Every Jew we can lay hands on must be annihilated without exception, starting now during the war.
If we fail to destroy the biological foundations of Judaism today, it will be the Jews who later annihilate the German people. Aichmann is going to Auschwitz in August with Eus. He discusses the plan they will implement, beginning with the extermination process. Aichmann explains that the only possible method is gas.
The inclusion of women and children in the liquidation plan made the shooting method too costly for the SS who would have to carry it out. After studying the different types of gas already used in the trucks and in the extermination of the disabled, they agree to use a more practical gas, zyclobeta, which was used on the prisoners of Auschwitz.
” Here live the dead,” was the inscription carved on a prisoner’s barracks . In reality, in the world of concentration camps created by the Nazis, prisoners formed an army of slaves in striped uniforms whose function was to work toward their own destruction. In the diabolical cauldron of Auschwitz, the deportees were manipulated and conditioned by the Nazis, who forced them to collaborate in carrying out their own deaths.
For the prisoners, the impact from the moment of arrival at the camp was terrible. The sinister appearance of the barbed wire fences, the diabolical sight of flames leaping from the crematoria, the nauseating stench of burning flesh and hair, all this coupled with the brutality with which they were received, the violent and immediate separation from their loved ones, and the ignorance of what awaited them, transformed the prisoners’ arrival into an unspeakable nightmare.
All the survivors recall in their memories this terrible initial shock: the deafening roar of the SS shouts, the menacing barking of the dogs, the blinding glare of the spotlights—they remained stunned, numb, incapable of reacting. Arriving at the camp represented a radical break, crossing a border, entering a completely unknown, unexpected, and unpredictable world.
After the initial selection, children, the elderly, and the sick, or those deemed unfit for work, were directed to the left-hand line and immediately murdered in the gas chambers. The others were placed in the line of Their fate was simply delayed by a few months. It is said that of the five men, women, and children who arrived in a transfer at Auschwitz, only 96 men and 29 women were selected for work.
The number of those selected for the right-hand column depended less on their physical condition than on the immediate needs of the camp or the available space. They were marched to the main Auschwitz camp or to Auschwitz I Monovitz, where they were forced to undress in front of one another. Then came disinfection, shaving of the entire body, from head to toe, including the most intimate parts, a shower, and the distribution of clothing.
Afterward, the prisoner was registered on a form containing their personal data, which was then sent to the camp’s political department and copied fifteen times for the various services. Finally, a number was assigned to them, replacing their name for the duration of their imprisonment. With the exception of German common criminals transferred from other camps to serve as capos, the first inmates were Polish men who, until the beginning In 1942, the largest contingent of prisoners was held at Auschwitz. Between 140,000 and 150,000
people, including some women, of whom approximately 74,000 perished. Most were political prisoners arrested for belonging to the nationalist or communist resistance, or civilians rounded up in a roundup. They typically wore a red triangle with the initial “P” sewn onto their chest to indicate their nationality.
There were also Jews in this situation, arrested individually for the same reasons. Generally, they knew they would remain in the camp until the end of the war. And although they were convinced of Germany’s eventual defeat , they lived in fear of not surviving until then. Indeed, the progressive deterioration of conditions in the camp, epidemics, the increasing food shortages, and overcrowding all reduced the chances of survival.
The risk of being denounced or discovered as a member of a resistance movement was also a real threat, to such an extent that the various political groups… fought fiercely. Nevertheless, among the Poles, national solidarity was stronger than political differences, which allowed them to occupy certain privileged positions in the camp.
As the war progressed, the number of political prisoners of other nationalities increased, especially Czechs, Slovaks, French, Dutch, and Belgians. In the center of the red triangle that identified them, the initial of their country indicated their nationality, except for the Germans. The reputation of the different Aryan national groups among the political prisoners varied.
The Czechs were well-regarded, the Russians considered suspicious and savage, and the Yugoslavs, especially the women, enjoyed great esteem for their people’s courageous struggle against Nazism. In the clandestine organization of the women’s camp, the French women took the lead. Despite the inherent error of any generalization, it was common for national solidarity to prevail over ideology or religion, even among the Jews.
However, the red triangle was not always synonymous with solidarity or ethical behavior. The second group consisted of Russian prisoners of war. They arrived at Auschwitz in mid-1941 for the construction of the Birkeno camp. Their condition was already deplorable due to their previous stay in the Lamsdorf camp, from where they came on foot during a march of several weeks with almost no food.
Until 1942, they were confined in blocks of Auschwitz, which housed a separate camp, the Russian POW labor camp. Almost all of them died from the grueling work, hunger, mistreatment, or were gassed. He himself admits that the physical condition of the Russians was so deplorable that they no longer showed any reaction. They wandered aimlessly, without expression on their faces.
They hid in a corner to chew whatever edible thing they happened to find or to die in silence. The third group wearing the green triangle consisted of professional criminals, former prisoners and individuals on file. They frequently performed supervisory roles over other prisoners. The selection of murderers, thieves, traffickers, and sadists for this type of service was not unrelated to the worldview that prevailed in the universe of Nazi concentration camps: the eradication of all established moral precepts. For the Nazis, beating
a prisoner to death was not a crime. It was simply recorded that the individual in question had died. The cause of death was entirely irrelevant. Himmler constantly emphasized the idea that pity was a betrayal of DSS ideals. Another group consisted of those associated with the black triangle, women engaged in prostitution, mostly German, lesbian, and vagrant.
In the women’s camp, it was not the ” greens,” that is, the criminals, who dominated, but the “antisocials,” particularly the prostitutes. Almost all German, they usually held the position of block leader. There were also a few Polish women. Unlike the Dacho and Saxenhausen camps, where homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses were numerous, at Auschwitz these groups were relatively small.
Male homosexuality was severely punished by the Nazi regime, and homosexuals were considered enemies of the state, which explains their greater presence in the re-education camps established after 1933. From the beginning, homosexual prisoners wore their own badge, a pink triangle. Female homosexuality was not considered as important.
Lesbians were included in the asocial D group and wore the same black triangle. From the Nazi point of view, a woman was merely a reproducer serving the multiplication of the race, and her personal choices were completely insignificant. It is estimated that in Germany, around 50,000 homosexuals were arrested, and among them, between 10,000 and 1,500 lost their lives in the camps.
And the last group of prisoners to have passed The population of Auschwitz was predominantly Jewish. From 1942 onward, Jews constituted the main group at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the only one destined for total extermination. They were identified by two yellow triangles forming the Star of David with the initial of their country of origin.
The selection of those to be immediately murdered was carried out by SS doctors on the arrival ramp at Birkenau. The “Judenrampe” (Jewish Ramp) began on July 4, 1942, with a convoy of Slovaks and ended in November 1944 with the cessation of the gassing of a million Hungarians on the ramp built expressly for this purpose.
Generally speaking, the SS considered that Jews ceased to live the moment they stepped off the train upon arrival at the camp. All the humiliations and violence of the SS and guards were thus justified. As already mentioned, approximately one million Jews, including hundreds of thousands of children, perished at Birkenau. Auschwitz-Birkenau.
But what makes the murder of the Jews unique is not the number of victims, but the intent of the perpetrators. Only in the case of the Jews did the Nazis plan the physical elimination of every man, every woman, every child. All the other groups mentioned previously were victims of Nazi terror, but only the Jews were destined to disappear from the face of the earth.
Again, it is the commandant of Auschwitz himself who confirms this in his memoirs. The hierarchy of the triangles reflects the ideological priorities of the SS, which were often ultimately assimilated by the prisoners themselves. This identification, often unconscious, made the color of the triangle a very effective tool for social classification.
The result was a top-down stratification of prisoners that ensured the proper functioning of the divide-and- rule principle essential in the space of the Nazi concentration camps. The status assigned to triangle wearers sometimes varied depending on the camp and the period. Nevertheless, those who were generally at the top were Those wearing red and green triangles were political prisoners and criminals.
The lowest category in the hierarchy was always occupied by those wearing yellow triangles, the Jews. Just above them were those wearing black triangles, the asocials, followed by those wearing purple triangles, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, potentially in a better position. While common criminals were there for their crimes, German political prisoners for their opposition to the regime, and Aryan prisoners of other nationalities for more or less proven opposition to the German occupation, race was the sole criterion for internment for
Jews from all countries under Nazi rule, including Roma. The most infamous medical experiments took place at Achwitz. The practice of medicine in Hitler’s Germany constitutes one of the darkest aspects of the history of the Holocaust. The Nazis assigned doctors a central role in the extermination program.
These individuals not only actively participated in the so-called merciful death program, that is, the T4 program, by murdering people whom Nazism considered unworthy of life, but they were also the ones who, upon the arrival of victims at concentration or extermination camps, selected those who would die immediately and contribute a little further to the German war effort.
These were also doctors who, despite their oath to save human lives, carried out the most abominable pseudoscientific experiments on children, women, and men who had a pure and simple right to life and physical integrity. The adult euthanasia program also began in 1939. All those suffering from debilitating illnesses were killed in gas chambers and cremated with the complicity of the medical profession.
Death certificates included false diagnoses based on the victims’ age and previous symptoms. Finally, patients with mild People with deformities, moderately senile individuals, war veterans, difficult children, and other similar cases were also selected by doctors for euthanasia. This Nazi program was responsible for the deaths of at least 70,000 people in Germany up to 1941, before turning to the extermination of Jews, Roma, Poles, Russians, and Germans opposed to the Nazi regime. Between 1942 and 1945, approximately 70
medical research projects were carried out in Nazi camps, conducted by German universities and research institutes, including many types of experiments on prisoners. Himmler showed great interest in this type of activity from the outset. In 1943, wanting to protect the experimentation, he ordered that all experiments be submitted to him for prior approval.
Himmler did not merely facilitate them; he closely monitored their progress, studied the results, and They even suggested improvements. But above all, they protected the doctors, taking responsibility for their actions and not hesitating to contradict any potential detractors who called them traitors. Approximately 200 doctors were sent to the concentration camps.
Their job was to direct the selections and participate in medical trials. Phenol injections directly into the heart or intravenously to prolong agony. Inoculation with the typhus virus. Injections into the eyes to change color. Sterilization. Castration. Subcutaneous injections causing painful tumors. Experiments on the transformations of muscle tissue due to malnutrition were some of the pseudoscientific tortures inflicted on men, women, and children.
This was in total and absolute violation of the medical code of ethics. Many experiments aimed to justify and apply racist theories through biology and to promote the supremacy and multiplication of the Aryan race. Thus, for example, 40 Roma were subjected to experiments to prove they had different blood.
Fifty Jewish men and women murdered at Auschwitz were used by doctors to observe the peculiarities of their skulls. Experiments on dwarfs and twins were also part of the racial struggle. Other trials aimed to develop survival mechanisms in extreme conditions of altitude, freezing temperatures, or seawater immersion. Vaccines and medications were also tested to combat contagious diseases, injuries, or the inhalation of chemical gas.
A series of experiments aimed to discover the fastest and most effective method of annihilating human life, from the complete sterilization of women to the injection of chloroform into the hearts of victims and the use of zyclopredation gas. All these experiments, which involved unbearable suffering, were repeated on human beings and, of course, against their will.
Among all the SS doctors who worked at Auschwitz, one name has left an indelible mark on the survivors: Joseph Mengel, the camp’s chief physician, better known as the Butcher of Auschwitz or the Angel of Death, remained in charge until the camp’s evacuation in January 1945. He was responsible for the deaths of approximately 400,000 people.
He was the one the deportees encountered as they disembarked from the cattle cars, directing the initial selection with a whip in hand. They would meet him again during the partial selections, when he pointed out the victims with a casual gesture of his index finger, a touch reminiscent of Tosca. But in reality, Mengele, a doctor of medicine and philosophy, did more than just select.
According to Dr. Michel Nissley, who arrived at Auschwitz in May 1944, deported from Hungary with a group of prisoners consisting of 26 doctors, six pharmacists, and their families , upon the arrival of the transports, several guards would walk through the rows of prisoners looking for twins and dwarfs. Some mothers, believing they would be treated better, They handed them over without hesitation.
They were unaware that he would soon die at Mengelety’s hands. That is why, upon his arrival, Mengelety separated the dwarves and the twins on the ramp. For the same reason, he placed them in the right-hand line and had them taken to the barracks for those who were not yet to die, where they received good food and hygiene, so that there would be no possibility of contagion between them and consequently that they could not die separately.
They did they will die together and in good health. Convinced that he had been chosen to discover the cause of multiple births, Mengeley spent hours at the microscope and on the dissecting table, his lab coat and hands bloody, obsessively examining and comparing . The cries of the victims, the black smoke from the crematorium, the smell of burning flesh did not bother him.
After each selection, Mengele returned to this human hell in which he felt at home. Among wrongdoers and criminals, the most dangerous type is the criminal doctor, Nisle writes. The lives and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people were in his hands, and he did not hesitate to use his power according to his criminal vision of humanity.
Michel Nicey’s testimony , written in 1946, is exceptional. Appointed by Mengele as chief physician of the crematoria, Nisle was, as he himself recounts, an eyewitness and involuntary participant in the work in the Auschwitz crematoria, in whose flames more than a million human beings disappeared. Although he was a prisoner, Nisley was far from the condition of the other prisoners.
Not only because his personal situation in terms of food, clothing and comfort in the camp was totally different, but above all because of the function he occupied: dissecting the dead and identifying pathologies. Furthermore, as chief physician of the crematoria, he was exclusively dependent on the direct orders of Mengeley, so that he came to live and work at the very heart of the Nazi extermination machine.
In addition to his anatomy and laboratory work, Nesley was also responsible for the medical assistance of all SS personnel at the crematoria, approximately 120 men, and the 860 prisoners of the Sunder Commando. He could move around the four crematoria from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. One day, Nicle receives the medical file of two young twins in a coffin.
In these accounts, he writes, “I lifted the lid. Inside were two two-year-old twins. I ordered two of my men to place the bodies on the dissection table inside the crematoria. I opened the files and examined them: meticulous clinical analyses accompanied by X-rays, descriptions, and drawings indicating the various characteristics of these two little beings from a scientific point of view .
All that was missing was the pathology report, and my job was to complete it. The twins had died at the same time, and at that moment, they lay side by side on the dissection table. It was they, or their small bodies, who were to solve the secret of the race’s reproduction. To take a step forward in discovering the secret of multiplying the race of superior beings destined to rule.
That was the goal. In the future, every German mother was to give birth to as many twins as possible. The project conceived by the theorists of the Third Reich was absolute madness, and these experiments were entrusted to Dr. Mengel, chief physician of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the infamous criminal doctor.
The immediate objective was the production of pure Germans to replace the Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles, all condemned to destruction. The next day, while dissecting the corpses of four pairs of Cigan twins under the age of 10, Nisle made a discovery that horrified him. The four children had died from an injection of chloroform into their hearts, causing immediate death by cardiac arrest.
SS guards with their dogs stormed the barracks and forced everyone out, making them line up. By the following morning, they had all been reduced to ashes. The ashes remained piled in the crematorium courtyard, awaiting collection. However, on Mengele’s express orders , the bodies of the 12 pairs of twins were not consigned to the flames.
Before sending them to the gas chamber, Mengele had marked them with a special room. In this group were twins of various ages, from newborns to 16-year-old adolescents. At that time, Nislie wrote, they were lying on the morgue floor. Brown-haired child’s body . The work of classifying them by father was exhausting. I had to be careful not to mix them up, because if anything were to compromise the study of these rare specimens, I would pay with my life.
After the dissection, Nislie handed the corpses over to the members of the Sunder Commando to be burned and kept the organs of scientific interest for Mengelet’s analysis and selection. Then, these were sent to the Anthropological Institute in Berlinda LEM. In addition to deaths by gas and chloroform injection into the heart, Nislie noted death by gunshot.
One night, while he was still in the dissection room, he heard gunshots in the next room accompanied by piercing screams. He The shots were counted, and once silence returned, seeing what had happened, Nicle remembers, it was a scene of Dantean horror. Before me lay the naked bodies of six twisted women, bathed in their own blood and that of others.
They were intertwined, forming a diabolical mass. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room, I discovered with horror that not all of them were dead. Some were still breathing, moving slowly, arms and legs. With glassy eyes, they tried to raise their bloodied heads. I lifted the heads of a few, two or three still alive.
And I understood that in addition to death by gas and chloroform injection, there was also a third method of execution: a bullet to the back of the neck. Birkenau, Auschwitz II is the final solution of the death wall to the gas chambers by the commando squads. As has been explained, the first experiment The murder in a gas chamber was carried out at Auschwitz.
The initiative to use zyclobeta gas came from SS officer Carl Fritzch, who made the decision in the absence of the camp commandant, Rudolph Ess. Later, he boasted of having invented the extermination of prisoners by gas. However, the liquidation process had been planned from the outset, and the gassing of prisoners took place in the camp prison located in Block 11, whose windows were bricked up.
It was primarily intended for men and women suspected of acts of resistance, preparing or aiding escape, or having contact with the outside world. Zyclobeta gas was manufactured by the DG company, established in 1917. It was a powerful pesticide containing 95 percent cyanide, a percentage that was later increased to almost 100 percent, thus increasing the product’s lethality.
A document from Fritzch states that between 1942 and 1943, the company delivered… 27,434.5 kg of Zyklomb were used in all the camps, including 19,652.69 kg in Auschwitz alone. According to statements by H and members of the Sunder Commando, a much smaller quantity of gas would have been enough to kill a million people in Auschwitz. On the first and second floors of Block 11, more than 100 prisoners were crammed into large cells.
In the basement, in small , lightless cells so low that it was impossible to stand upright, the most dangerous prisoners were locked up. Philippe Müller, a prisoner for three years in Auschwitz, testified: “The SS led us to Block 11, whose entrance door was locked.” Unlike what was happening in the other blocks, SS Aubercharefureur Plague opened it and ordered us to enter.
We descended a maze of corridors leading to the cells and the underground dungeon of the block. The silence was broken only by the click of those keys. Our bellboy opened the wire mesh door whose lock creaked and we entered the central corridor. A suffocating smell overwhelmed us. The blackened, oily floor of the corridor leading to the cells had whitewashed walls and the light was dim.
The cell in which Maurice and I were pushed had neither a window nor a ventilation system. It measured approximately 3 m by tr. When the guard closed the iron door, it was completely dark. Every Saturday morning, the cells were cleaned. After a brief meeting to review the prisoners’ reports, the commission, consisting of a doctor and the block leaders, went down to the basement led by the camp commandant.
The objective was to free the prisoners sentenced to death. They were taken to the washrooms and forced to undress. As already mentioned, the indelible tattooing of numbers upon arrival of prisoners at the camp was not practiced until March 1942. After the registration of those condemned to death, they were led in front of a brick wall separating block 11 from block 10 against which a kind of black canvas was stretched.
Then, the prisoners were executed with a bullet to the back of the neck facing the wall. Once dead, the corpses were collected by other prisoners who carried them on stretchers and placed them in a corner before being transported to the crematorium. The Franciscan priest Maximilian Colbe was imprisoned in a cell in block 11.
Born in 1894, he was taken prisoner in February 1941 and interned in Pauak prison in Warsaw. Three months later, he was deported to Auschwitz where he received the number 16670. After a prisoner escaped from his block, the SS decided in retaliation to randomly kill one in ten prisoners in the block.
Among them was a Polish worker named Franzek Gayovnek. Married and a father of one, the man lamented bitterly: “What will become of my wife and son?” Colbe heard Franc’s cries and made the decision to save his life by offering to take his place, which the SS accepted. Colb was assassinated two weeks later by an injection of phenol.
Between 1943 and 1943, a group of Jewish prisoners, some Poles, and some Soviet prisoners of war lived longer than any other detainee in the very heart of the catastrophe. He was part of the Sunder commando tasked with the most abominable task, the operation of the Birkenao extermination apparatus as part of the implementation of the final solution to the Jewish question.
Almost all of this periodically renewed commando unit ended up being murdered by the SS in the camp. Their average lifespan was approximately 4 months. At the end of this period, an SS company rounded up the commando and machine-gunned all its members. Half an hour later, a new group arrived, designated to be the Sunder commando.
They were forced to remove the clothes of their dead comrades, of whom soon only the clothes remained to be taken off. The first task of each Sunder commando was to burn their predecessors. Nisle recounts that during his medical visits, there was always someone unable to bear their duties who begged him to give them a quick and painless poison.
The commando’s main role was to help the SS get people into the changing rooms, help them undress, and get them into the gas chambers. Sometimes, they themselves had to lift the cover of the orifices through which the SS poured the leaded gas. Until now, writes Schlomo Veneia, I had never
