Door into Bomb Shelter at Auschwitz
Door for bomb shelter
was cut in 1944
The photograph above, taken in 1998,
shows the entrance into the Krema I gas chamber at the Auschwitz
main camp. This door was added in the fall of 1944 when the gas
chamber was converted into an air raid shelter. When I visited
Auschwitz in 2005, this door was locked and the tourist entrance
was through the original door on the other side of the building,
which is shown in the photo below.
Original entrance into
the crematorium in the main Auschwitz camp
The photo below shows the air raid shelter
door, taken from the interior of the gas chamber in 2005. This
is a metal door, which has a peephole, but the glass in the peephole
is gone now. The peephole was for people on the inside to look
out; anyone looking through this peephole from the outside would
only be able to see the back wall of the tiny vestibule.
Air raid shelter door
that was added in 1944, 2005 photo
Inside the vestibule, a door on the left
opens into the gas chamber, as you can see in the 2005 photo
below. The black line on the wall is exposed electrical wiring.
Door into the gas chamber
after it was converted into a bomb shelter
Robert Jan van Pelt & Deborah Dwork
wrote that the routine gassing of humans was inaugurated at Auschwitz
I on September 16, 1941 when 900 Soviet Prisoners of War were
killed in the mortuary room of the crematorium which had just
been converted into a gas chamber. Shortly before that, the mortuary
room had been put into service as an execution chamber where
Polish political prisoners were shot because the "Black
Wall," formerly used for executions, proved to be too far
away from the crematorium for an efficient system.
Commandant Rudolf Höss described
the 1941 gassing of the Soviet Prisoners of War in the following
quote from his memoirs:
I have a clearer recollection of the
gassing of 900 Russians that took place shortly afterwards in
the old crematorium, since the use of block 11 for this purpose
caused too much trouble. While the transport was detraining,
holes were pierced in the earth and concrete ceiling of the mortuary.
The Russians were ordered to undress in an anteroom; they then
quietly entered the mortuary, for they had been told they were
to be deloused. The whole transport exactly filled the mortuary
to capacity. The doors were then sealed and the gas shaken down
through the holes in the roof. I do not know how long this killing
took. For a little while a humming sound could be heard. When
the powder was thrown in, there were cries of "Gas!"
then a great bellowing, and the trapped prisoners hurled themselves
against both doors. But the doors held. They were opened several
hours later so that the place might be aired.
Note that Höss describes the roof
of the gas chamber as being covered with "earth and concrete."
Today, the gas chamber building has a flat roof with no earth
covering it.
The "laying out"
room with door into the gas chamber in the background
Höss mentioned "both doors,"
but he was referring to either the door from the "laying
out" room into the gas chamber or the door from the wash
room into the gas chamber, and the door from the gas chamber
into the oven room. The vestibule shown in the photos at the
top of this page, through which tourists entered in 1998, was
not there until September 1944 when the gas chamber was converted
into an air raid shelter. The victims entered the gas chamber
by going through the "laying out" room and then through
the washroom, according to the Auschwitz Museum.
The two anterooms that the victims had
to enter before going into the gas chamber were not large enough
for 900 men to undress. Höss described the gas as a "powder,"
but today visitors are told that the gas was in the form of pellets.
The description of the "old crematorium"
given by Commandant Rudolf Höss, as quoted above, seems
to fit the gas chamber in the "mortuary" of Krema II
at Birkenau, which had an anteroom where the prisoners undressed.
Other witnesses described the roof of the gas chamber in the
mortuary of Krema II, as being covered by earth and concrete.
This page was last updated on August
31, 2007
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