Auschwitz-Birkenau

History of a man-made Hell

Shown in the 1944 photo above, from left to right, are Dr. Josef Mengele, Richard Baer, Karl Hoecker, and Walter Schmidetski. Richard Baer, known as the last Commandant of Auschwitz, was the commander of the main camp; his adjutant was Karl Hoecker. Dr. Josef Mengele was one of 30 SS officers at Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau, who decided who would live and who would die in the gas chambers. Dr. Josef Mengele arrived at Birkenau in early May 1943, just at the time that the second typhus epidemic at Birkenau was starting. Mengele himself contracted typhus while he was at Birkenau. Dr. Mengele was nicknamed the "Angel of Death" by the prisoners because he had the face of an angel, yet he callously made selections for the gas chambers at Birkenau. He was nice to the children in the camp, yet he experimented on them as though they were laboratory rats. He volunteered to do the selections at Birkenau, even when it wasn't his turn, because he wanted to find subjects for his medical research on genetic conditions and hereditary diseases, which he had already begun before the war. He particularly wanted to find twins for the research that he had started before he was posted to Birkenau. Dr. Mengele was known by all the prisoners because of his good looks and charm. According to Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, the authors of "Mengele, the Complete Story," many of the children in the Birkenau camp "adored Mengele" and called him "Uncle Pepi." This information came from Vera Alexander, a survivor of Birkenau, who said that Dr. Mengele brought chocolate and the most beautiful clothes for the children, including hair ribbons for the little girls. Child survivors at Birkenau death camp According to Eva Mozes Kor, one of the twins who survived Mengele's experiments, the children in the camp did not wear striped uniforms. It appears that the child survivors in the photo above have been provided with adult uniforms for a propaganda film that was made by the Soviet liberators in February 1945. Dr. Mengele had a Ph.D. in Anthropology as well as a degree in medicine, which he received in July 1938 from the University of Frankfurt. He earned his Ph.D. in 1935 with a thesis on "Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups." In January 1937, Dr. Mengele was appointed a research assistant at the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt. He worked under Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a geneticist who was doing research on twins. As the war-time director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching Genetics, located in Berlin, von Verschuer secured the funds for Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz. The results of Mengele's research on twins was sent to this Institute. The grant for Mengele's genetic research was authorized by the German Research Council in August 1943. Olga Lengyel, a prisoner at the Birkenau camp, wrote in her book entitled "Five Chimneys" that she had heard about Dr. Mengele from the other inmates before she saw him. Lengyel wrote that she had heard that Dr. Mengele was "good-looking" but she was surprised by how "really handsome" he was. Lengyel wrote, regarding Dr. Mengele: "Though he was making decisions that meant extermination, he was as pleasantly smug as any man could be." Lengyel described how Dr. Mengele would take all the correct medical precautions while delivering a baby at Auschwitz, yet only a half hour later, he would send the mother and baby to be gassed and burned in the crematorium. Lengyel herself was selected for the gas chamber, but managed to break away from the group of women who had been selected, before the truck arrived to take the prisoners to the crematorium. The first systematic selection for the gas chambers at Birkenau was made when a transport of Jews arrived at Auschwitz on July 4, 1942. Just the day before, the Birkenau camp had been quarantined because of a typhus epidemic. The train stopped a short distance from the Auschwitz train station at a wooden platform called the "Judenrampe," where the selection process took place. The Jews who were considered fit to work were marched to the Auschwitz main camp, which was close to the Judenrampe. There they were given a shower, their heads were shaved, a number was tattooed on their left forearm, and a registration card was made for them. Train tracks at Auschwitz where Jews arrived prior to May 1944 Those who were not considered fit for work were taken immediately by truck from the Judenrampe to two make-shift gas chambers at Birkenau, which were located in two converted farm houses called "the little red house" and "the little white house." At least 75% of the Jews in each transport of 2,000 to 3,000 prisoners were deemed unfit for work and were destined for the gas chamber. The little red house, also known as Bunker 1, had a capacity of 800 people in two rooms and the little white house, called Bunker 2, had a capacity of 1,200 in four rooms. All of the incoming prisoners were told that they would first be given a shower; the prisoners who were selected for work took a real shower, but the rest were taken by trucks to the two farm houses, where the gas chambers were disguised as shower rooms. The little white house was located on the west side of the Birkenau camp, behind the Central Sauna which was completed in 1943, and near Krema IV. The Central Sauna got its name because this was the location of the iron chambers where the prisoners' clothing was disinfected with hot steam. The Central Sauna also contained a shower room with 50 shower heads. The little red house was located north of where Krema V was built in 1943. Both Krema IV and Krema V had homicidal gas chambers, disguised as shower rooms, where Zyklon-B gas pellets were thrown through the outside windows, killing the unsuspecting victims inside. Although Dr. Josef Mengele did not join the staff at Birkenau until May 1943, survivors testified during the Allied war crimes trials that he did selections in 1942. Besides the initial selection when the transport trains arrived at Birkenau, there were later selections of the women in the camp. Dr. Mengele was the chief doctor for the women's barracks, and he would periodically show up to select women for work or the gas chamber. One of the women who survived one of these selections was Sophia Litwinska, a Polish Jewess who was married to an Aryan man. Sophia Litwinska made a sworn affidavit that was entered into the British trial of the SS staff at Bergen-Belsen in the fall of 1945. Some members of the SS staff at Belsen had previously worked at Birkenau and they were on trial for crimes committed at both Birkenau and Belsen. Franz Hoessler was the commander of the women's camp at Birkenau in 1942; he was transferred to Bergen-Belsen in December 1944. Franz Hoessler in front of load of corpses at Bergen-Belsen, April 1945 As quoted in the book "The Belsen Trial," Sophia Litwinska said the following in her affidavit: AT AUSCHWITZ, on 24th December, 1942, I was paraded in company with about 19,000 other prisoners, all of them women. Present on parade were Doctors Mengele and Konig and Rapportfuhrer Tauber. I was one of the 3000 prisoners picked out of the 19,000 by the doctors and taken to our huts, where we were stripped naked by other prisoners and our clothes taken away. We were then taken by tipper-type lorries to the gas chamber chute. They were large lorries, about eight in all and about 300 persons on each lorry. On arrival at the gas chamber the lorry tipped up and we slid down the chute through some doors into a large room. The room had showers all around, towels and soap and large numbers of benches. There were also small windows high up near the roof. Many were injured coming down the chute and lay where they fell. Those of us who could sat down on the benches provided and immediately afterwards the doors of the room were closed. My eyes then began to water, I started to coughing and had a pain in my chest and throat. Some of the other people fell down and others coughed and foamed at the mouth. After being in the room for about two minutes the door was opened and an S.S. man came in wearing a respirator. He called my name and then pulled me out of the room and quickly shut the door again. When I got outside I saw S.S man Franz Hoessler , whom I identify as No. 1 on photograph 9. He took me to hospital, where I stayed for about six weeks, receiving special treatment from Dr. Mengele. For the first few days I was at the hospital I found it impossible to eat anything without vomiting. I can only think that I was taken out of the gas chamber because I had an Aryan husband and therefore was in a different category from the other prisoners, who were all Jews. I now suffer from a weak heart and had two attacks since being at Belsen. I do not know the names of any persons who went into the gas chamber with me. It is not clear which of the four gas chambers at Birkenau that Litwinska was referring to. The Krema IV and Krema V gas chambers were on the ground floor and had "small windows high up near the roof" where the gas pellets were thrown in by the SS men. But neither of these two gas chambers had a "gas chamber chute" for dumping the victims into the gas chamber from "tipper-type lorries," which Americans would call dump trucks. According to the drawings done by Walter Dejaco, one of the architects of the Krema II building, the original blueprint showed a corpse slide for rolling bodies down into the vestibule between the two morgues, which were later converted into an undressing room and a gas chamber. The corpse slide was never built. Dejaco was acquitted by a court in Austria in 1972; at his trial, the drawings of the corpse slide were entered as evidence. (The morgue at the Sachsenhausen camp has a corpse slide which can still be seen today.) There were no crematory ovens at Birkenau in 1942, and at the Auschwitz main camp, there were only three ovens, which could burn 340 bodies in a 24-hour period. The bodies of the Jews who were gassed at Birkenau in 1942 were buried in mass graves near the little red house. The bodies were later dug up and burned on pyres, so as not to contaminate the ground water at Birkenau. The bodies of thousands of prisoners who had died in the typhus epidemic, that was out of control by July 3, 1942, also had to be exhumed and burned. Commandant Hoess wrote in his autobiography that "The number of corpses in the mass graves amounted to 107,000." Otto Moll, the SS man who was in charge of digging the mass graves at Birkenau in 1942, disputed Hoess' version of the story; on April 16, 1946, Moll told an interrogator at Nuremberg: When I was in charge of these excavations, as I told you about before, together with another comrade, which was confirmed by Hoess today, we put between 30,000 and 40,000 people in these mass graves. It was the most terrible work that could be carried out by any human being. The photo below shows Dr. Josef Mengele with Rudolf Hoess and Josef Kramer relaxing at Solahuette, the SS retreat near Birkenau. Kramer was the Commandant at Birkenau in 1944 when this photo was taken. In December 1944, he was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, which then became a concentration camp. The Bergen-Belsen camp had previously been a holding camp for Jews who were available for exchange with the Allies for German civilians held in British and American prisons. Hoess was the Commander of the SS garrison at Auschwitz in 1944. Dr. Josef Mengele, Rudolf Hoess and Josef Kramer Josef Mengele wearing his Iron Cross medal, October 1943 The photo above was taken while Mengele was home on leave, after spending 5 months at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He is wearing an Iron Cross medal on the pocket of his uniform. Mengele was very proud of his medals; he earned the Iron Cross 2nd Class shortly after he was sent to the Ukraine in June 1941 at the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In January 1942, Mengele joined the prestigious 5th SS Panzer Division, nicknamed the Viking Division. In July 1942, he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class after he pulled two wounded soldiers out of a burning tank under enemy fire on the battlefield, and administered medical first aid to them. After being wounded in battle on the Eastern front in 1942, Dr. Mengele was promoted to Hauptsturmführer (Captain) and sent to the Race and Resettlement Office in Berlin, the same office where Adolf Eichmann was in charge of transporting the Jews for "resettlement in the East," a Nazi euphemism for sending the Jews to be gassed in the death camps. In May 1943, Dr. Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz and was assigned to take care of the medical needs of the Gypsy camp. The following quote is from the book "Mengele, the Complete Story": Within days after his arrival, while Auschwitz was in the throes of one of its many typhoid epidemics, Mengele established a reputation for radical and ruthless efficiency. The nearby marshland made clean water difficult to obtain and posed a constant threat from mosquitoes. (Mengele himself contracted malaria in June 1943.) Other SS doctors had failed in their efforts to curb typhus in the close quarters of the camp barracks. Mengele's solution to the problem was set out in one of the seventy-eight indictments drawn up in 1981 by the West German Prosecutor's Office, when the authorities thought he was still alive. In terms of detailed evidence, this arrest warrant is the most damning and complete document that was ever compiled against him. According to the warrant, on May 25, 1943, "Mengele sent 507 Gypsies and 528 Gypsy women suspected of typhus to the gas chamber." It also charged that on "May 25 or 26 he spared those Gypsies who were German while he sent approximately 600 others to be gassed. According to the book "Mengele, the Complete Story," a severe outbreak of typhus struck the women's camp in Birkenau in late 1943, while Dr. Mengele was the chief doctor for the women's barracks. Around 7,000 of the 20,000 women in the camp were seriously ill and Mengele proposed a radical solution to stop the epidemic. The following quote is from Dr. Ella Lingens, an Austrian doctor who was a political prisoner at Birkenau. In a personal interview given to S. Jones and K. Rattan on February 14, 1984, Dr. Lingens said the following as quoted in "Mengele, the Complete Story": He sent one entire Jewish block of 600 women to the gas chamber and cleared the block. He then had it disinfected from top to bottom. Then he put bath tubs between this block and the next, and the women from the next block came out to be disinfected and then transferred to the clean block. Here they were given a clean new nightshirt. The next block was cleaned in this way and so on until all the blocks were disinfected. End of typhus! The awful thing was that he could not put those first 600 somewhere. The Birkenau camp was 425 acres in size. Seven small villages had been torn down to make room for the camp; it was like a small city with a total of 300 buildings. There was a total of 140,000 prisoners in the camp in 1943, but the barracks had a capacity of 200,000 prisoners. There was plenty of space to put the first 600 women somewhere, even if he had to set up tents on the soccer field which was near one of the gas chambers at Birkenau, but Dr. Mengele didn't try to find a place for them because he had a complete disregard for human life, as far as the Jews and Gypsies under his care were concerned. In his performance review, his superior officer complemented him on his work in stopping the typhus epidemic; there was no mention of the 600 women that he had murdered to accomplish this. Dr. Josef Mengele died on February 7, 1979 when he suffered a stroke while swimming in Embu, Brazil. It was not until a couple of years after his death that survivors began to come forward with stories about the crimes that he had committed at Birkenau, and a massive manhunt was made to find him. After the war, Dr. Josef Mengele had worked on a farm under an assumed name for a few years, then escaped to South America; he was never put on trial as a war criminal. If he had been captured and put on trial, Dr. Gisella Perl was prepared to testify against him. Dr. Perl worked as a prison doctor under Dr. Mengele, and was a prisoner herself. According to the book "Mengele, the Complete Story," Dr. Perl claimed that a woman prisoner named Ibi had escaped the gas chamber six times by jumping off the truck that was taking the prisoners from the Judenrampe to the gas chambers; Dr. Mengele was enraged when he discovered that she had returned to the selection line. The following quote is from a book by Gisella Perl, entitled "I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz," published in 1948: "You are still here?" Dr. Mengele left the head of the column, and with a few easy strides caught up with her. He grabbed her by the neck and proceeded to beat her head to a bloody pulp. He hit her, slapped her, boxed her, always her head--screaming at her at the top of his voice, "You want to escape, don't you. You can't escape now. This is not a truck, you can't jump. You are going to burn like the others, you are going to croak, you dirty Jew," and he went on hitting her poor unprotected head. As I watched, I saw her two beautiful, intelligent eyes disappear under a layer of blood. Her ears weren't there any longer. Maybe he had torn them off. And in a few seconds, her straight, pointed nose was a flat, broken, bleeding mass. I closed my eyes, unable to bear it any longer, and when I opened them up again, Dr. Mengele had stopped hitting her. But instead of a human head, Ibi's tall, thin body carried a round blood-red object on its bony shoulders, an unrecognizable object, too horrible to look at; he pushed her back into line. Half an hour later, Dr. Mengele returned to the hospital. He took a piece of perfumed soap out of his bag and, whistling gaily with a smile of deep satisfaction on his face, he began to wash his hands. According to the testimony of Rudolf Hoess at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler gave repeated orders that the staff members at the concentration camps were forbidden "to lay violent hands on the prisoners." According to the survivors of Birkenau, Dr. Mengele frequently lost his temper and beat the prisoners, yet he was never punished by his superior officers. Two other Holocaust survivors who escaped death by jumping off the truck taking the Jews to the gas chamber were Gloria Lyon, then 14 years old, and her 12-year-old sister, who were among the Hungarian Jews sent to Birkenau in 1944. Lyon spoke to 10th grade students at Oceana High School in the San Francisco bay area in February 2008. The following quote is from a news article written by Jane Northrop on the web site www.insidethebayarea.com about Gloria Lyon's ordeal in the Birkenau camp: There, the family was separated. Lyon's father and brothers went in one direction, and Lyon and her mother were in another group. Her little sister, who was 12, was supposed to go with a different group, but she jumped off the back of the truck and ran to stay with her mother and sister. "That saved her life. They were sent to the gas chamber," Lyon said. [...] They endured Dr. Josef Mengele's infamous experiments. Entire groups of people were told to strip and report to the doctor for a "medical exam." "It took a lot of energy to face Dr. Mengele. Some dropped faster than others," she said. When prisoners passed out, they were taken to the other side of the building, from where no prisoner ever returned. When Lyon herself fainted in the doctor's office in December, she was sent to the other side. Naked and terrified, she was placed with the other weakened prisoners in a truck guarded by an SS trooper. The guard spoke to her in Hungarian, which she understood from living in Czechoslovakia. The guard said he knew who she was, because it was so unusual for so many members of a single family to remain alive. The truck was headed for the gas chamber, but if she wanted to jump off the back, he wouldn't stop her or anyone who wanted to go with her. She promised not to rat him out. None of her fellow prisoners, however, wanted to join her. "Everyone was starved and stripped of hope," she said. She jumped and saw a ditch where she could hide in a culvert. She was so thin from the months of starvation she could fit inside the pipe and out of sight. There she hid without food or clothing. She was still in the camp, but at least she had escaped the gas chamber. "I have no recollection of feeling any cold whatsoever. I remember feeling triumphant. I felt like I defeated the entire German army," she said. When her escape was discovered, an alarm was sounded but no one found her hiding place. After 24 hours in the darkness, she followed one shining light that turned out to be at an unguarded barracks. The small group of surprised prisoners took her in. This group, with Lyon among them, was ordered into cattle cars and taken away from Auschwitz. Lyon longed to see her mother and sister again, but knew she faced certain death if she were discovered in Auschwitz. After three days of travel, the group arrived at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp where the crematorium was burning day and night. That's where Lyon passed her 15th birthday. Among the survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau was Philip Riteman, a Polish Jew sent to the camp in 1941, who had the presence of mind to lie about his age in order to be selected for the line that was destined for slave labor. In a speech which Riteman gave to Riverview and Central Collegiate students in Moose Jaw, Canada in May 2008, as reported by Lacey Sheppy in the Moose Jaw Times Herald on May 23, 2008, Riteman said that he grew up in Szereszow, Poland, a town of about 25,000 people - not unlike Moose Jaw. He was in Grade 5 when the war began in 1939. The Ritemans were rounded up and sent to the Pruzhany ghetto, where they lived for nine months in a 10-foot by 12-foot room with two other families. The following quote is from the article written by Lacey Sheppy, which was published on May 23, 2008 in the Moose Jaw Times Herald: In 1941, Riteman's family was put on a train with about 10,000 other people. Seven days later, after being crammed in alongside 100 people in a rail car with no food, no water or bathrooms, the train finally stopped . . . at Auschwitz-Birkenau. As Riteman's eyes adjusted to the sunlight, he saw something that still haunts him to this day. "There was a woman in her 20s, pretty, who got off the train," he said "I'll never forget her because she wore high-heeled shoes." The woman was carrying an infant in her arms. A Nazi soldier ripped the baby from her and smashed its head onto the pavement. As the mother lunged for the child, screaming and crying, the soldier shoved a bayonet into her stomach. "There was just blood, all over, blood," said Riteman. With no time to process what he just witnessed, Riteman was put in a line to be separated. Although only 14, Riteman lied about his age and told the Nazis he was 17. Riteman - along with other men and young, fit boys - were separated into one group, while women, children, the elderly and infirm went into another. Labourers were sent into the camp for processing, while the rest - including Riteman's parents, grandparents, five brothers, two sisters, nine aunts and uncles and numerous cousins - were sent to the gas chambers. Riteman's story is not unique. Numerous Auschwitz survivors were saved from the gas chamber by lying about their age and there were many witnesses who saw the notoriously undisciplined "Nazi soldiers" bash a baby's head against the nearest tree or on the ground, while no one intervened. Auschwitz personnel on holiday at Solahuette The photo above shows Auschwitz staff members in the summer of 1944 cavorting with women auxiliaries, aka Helferinnen, while on holiday at the SS retreat at Solahuette, 20 miles from the camp. The SS men were enjoying themselves, without a care in the world, while 3,000 Jews per day were being gassed and burned at Birkenau. Continue Auschwitz III - aka Monowitz Monowitz gas chamber? Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors of Birkenau camp Death Statistics History of Auschwitz Auschwitz II - aka Birkenau Home This page was last updated on June 13, 2008