The Auschwitz Gas Chamber
1998 photo of the gas
chamber in the main Auschwitz camp
The gas chamber in the main Auschwitz
camp, shown in the photo above, is a reconstruction which was
done by the Soviet Union in 1947. The original gas chamber had
been converted by the Germans into an air raid shelter in September
1944; the room that visitors see today had been divided into
four small rooms and a wash room. In the photo above, taken in
September 1998, you can see the marks on the floor which show
where the walls of the small rooms were removed. A photo on this
web site shows what visitors saw in October
2007.
Original entrance into
Auschwitz gas chamber
The photo above, taken in 1998, shows
the original entrance door into the crematorium building at the
Auschwitz main camp. This is the door that tourists now enter
and it is the door that the victims entered. According to the
detailed construction plans for the air raid shelter, the windows
shown in the photo were added in 1944. A
close-up of the door is shown in the photo below.
Close-up of original
entrance door
Filip Müller, a prisoner who worked
in the crematorium in the main Auschwitz camp, testified at the
Auschwitz trial conducted by the German government at Frankfurt
in 1964. A few years later, he wrote the definitive book about
the Auschwitz gas chamber, entitled "Eyewitness Auschwitz,
Three Years in the Gas Chambers."
The door shown in the photo above was
described by Müller, who wrote that after the victims were
herded through this door, "two SS men slammed shut the heavy
iron-studded door which was fitted with a rubber seal and bolted
it."
In his book, Müller described how
Max Graebner, the head of the Political Department, a branch
office of the Gestapo, which was located next door to the gas
chamber building, stood on the flat roof of the building and
addressed the victims who had to assemble outside in the yard
in front of the door shown above. He would tell the Jews that
they had been brought to Auschwitz to work, but first they had
to remove their clothing and then enter the building to take
a shower, after which they would be given hot soup.
Max Graebner
At first, the victims were driven inside,
fully clothed, by SS guards wielding clubs and whips, according
to Müller, who was assigned in May 1942 to remove the clothing
of the victims after they were gassed in the main Auschwitz camp.
The victims had carried their luggage inside with them and Müller
described how he ate some of the cheese that he found in a suitcase
inside the gas chamber.
Entrance door as seen
from inside the building.
The door shown in the photo above opens
into a vestibule, which is about 6 x 8 feet in size. The photo
below shows the vestibule, as seen from the outside entrance
door.
Outside door of gas
chamber opens into this vestibule
From the vestibule, there is a door straight
ahead, shown in the photo above, which opens into the oven room,
and another door on the right, but out of camera range, that
opens into a small room which was a "laying out" room
when this building was used as a mortuary. When the building
was converted into an air raid shelter, the "laying out"
room became the "surgery" room; it has a floor drain
and was previously furnished with wash basins. According to the
Auschwitz Museum, the "laying out" room "was used
to store spare gratings" when the morgue was converted into
a gas chamber in September 1941.
The photo below shows the door from the
vestibule into the laying out room. Inside this room, you can
see the door that originally opened into another small room which
was used as a washroom. The wash room wall was removed during
the reconstruction and the door from the laying out room now
opens directly into the reconstructed gas chamber.
When the morgue room was used as a gas
chamber, the laying out room was not used as such and there was
no morgue to store the bodies of prisoners who had died from
disease or as a result of medical experiments which were done
in Block 10 of the main camp. The interior door into the wash
room from the laying out room is shown in the photo below.
Door into the gas chamber
was in the "laying out" room
The photo below shows part of the laying
out room in the background with the entrance door into the former
washroom in the foreground. When I tried to close this door to
take a picture, I found that the door did not swing freely, but
was scraping the floor, so I didn't try to move the door for
fear of breaking it.
2005 photo of entrance
door from the "laying out" room into the washroom
Original Blueprint
of crematorium and morgue in Auschwitz main camp
The photo above shows the original blueprint
for the Krema I building in the Auschwitz main camp. The morgue,
shown on the bottom right of the blueprint, has a door into the
oven room and another door into the washroom. The gas chamber
was in the same location as the morgue and it did not include
the area of the washroom. Note the door from the vestibule into
the washroom; this door no longer exists and the area of the
former wash room is included in the reconstructed gas chamber.
According to a guide book sold at the
Auschwitz Museum, the gas chamber in the main camp was only used
from September 1941 to March 1942 and after that, the gassing
of the Jews was done in "the little red house" and
"the little white house" just outside the Birkenau
camp. However, Danuta Czech wrote that the last victims were
members of the Sonderkommando, who were gassed in Krema I in
December 1942.
Filip Müller was among the first
Jews brought to Auschwitz; he arrived in April 1942 and began
working in the crematorium in the main camp in May 1942. Regarding
the gassing of prisoners in the main camp, he wrote that "From
the end of May 1942 one transport after another vanished in this
way into the crematorium of Auschwitz."
The following quote is from Müller's
book, "Eyewitness Auschwitz":
At the same time, the siting of the
crematorium in the immediate vicinity of the camp was fraught
with danger: there was the distinct possibility that The Secret
Matter of the Reich could not remain hushed up forever, notwithstanding
its top-secret classification. It was for this reason that the
columns of deported Jews were conducted to the 'showers' either
at daybreak when the camp inmates were still asleep, or late
at night after roll call. On these occasions a camp curfew was
declared. To break it meant to risk being shot. For that same
reason those of us prisoners who had been forced to participate
in preparations for the extermination of Jews as well as in covering
up all traces of the crimes were divided into two groups. This
was to prevent us from pooling our information and obtaining
detailed knowledge of the extermination methods. Prisoners of
the second working party, the crematorium stokers, turned up
only after we had swept and thoroughly cleaned the yard. By the
time they arrived the chamber had already been aired and the
gassed were lying there as if they had just fallen naked from
the sky.
This page was last updated on February
12, 2007
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