Ruins of Krema II
Ruins of Krema II gas
chamber, looking north towards International Monument
Krema II was a one-story brick building
with an attic and two underground rooms, located on the south
side of the main camp road in the Auschwitz II camp, aka Birkenau.
Krema III, located on the north side of the main camp road, was
a mirror image of Krema II. The gas chambers in both Krema II
and Krema III were in underground rooms situated in a north-south
direction. The ground-floor brick buildings which housed the
ovens in both Krema II and Krema III were situated in an east-west
direction, forming a T-shape.
In the photo above, the roof of the underground
gas chamber in Krema II can be seen in the foreground. The roof
of the undressing room, which is at right angles to the gas chamber,
can be seen on the left. The International Monument, built in
1965, is in the background. When the Birkenau camp was in operation,
the main camp road ran from east to west over the ground where
the monument now stands, and intersected another road which went
north to Krema IV and Krema V which had gas chambers, disguised
as shower rooms, on the ground floor.
Krema II was the site of the largest
mass murder in the history of mankind. It was here that over
500,000 Jews were gassed to death with Zyklon-B, an insecticide
that was also used to disinfect clothing in the camp. Robert
Jan Van Pelt, a noted Holocaust historian, called Krema II the
"Holy of Holies." It is a place that demands great
reverence and respect for the thousands of innocent victims who
perished here.
The photo above was taken with the camera
facing north. In the center of the photo is what appears to be
a hole in the concrete roof, made when the building was blown
up with dynamite on January 20, 1945.
The 210-square-meters underground gas
chamber room survived the blast and it is still partially intact.
It is possible to climb down into the southernmost quarter of
the Krema II gas chamber through a hole in the roof; a few people
have descended into the gas chamber without permission, including
two revisionists who have written unofficial and controversial reports about
the condition of the only remaining gas chamber at Birkenau.
Model of Krema II gas
chamber and crematorium
The photo above shows a model of the
Krema II gas chamber in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. On
the left is the underground room where the victims were forced
to undress. The gas chamber is shown on the right side of the
photo. A small elevator was used to lift the bodies up to the
ovens, which were on the ground floor of the building. The prisoners
who worked in the crematorium lived in the attic space above
the crematorium.
After descending into the undressing
room, the prisoners were instructed to take off all their clothes;
they were told that they were going to take a shower. Then the
naked victims, men, women and children all together, walked to
the end of the undressing room where there was a door into a
small vestibule, called the Vorraum. A door on the south wall
of the Vorraum led into the gas chamber, which was at right angles
to the undressing room. The gas chamber was disguised as a shower
room with fake shower heads, which are now gone. The victims
soon learned, to their horror, that they had been duped. The
shower room was actually a gas chamber where Zyklon-B gas pellets
were used to murder the victims.
There was an exterior entrance with a
staircase on the north side of the building which led to the
Vorraum of Krema II so that the SS men could enter Leichenkeller
1, the gas chamber, without going through Leichenkeller 2, which
was the undressing room. In case of emergency, the gas chamber
could be used as a bomb shelter for the SS men working in the
area, since it had a gas-tight air raid shelter door.
The Krema II and Krema III buildings
were originally planned to be built in the Auschwitz I main camp.
The original blueprints showed a corpse slide which was located
at the intersection of Leichenkeller I and Leichenkeller 2 so
that dead bodies could be rolled into the two corpse cellers.
When Krema II and Krema III were built at Birkenau instead, the
corpse slide was replaced by stairs on the side of the building
which faced the main camp road, which was the north side for
Krema II and the south side for Krema III. These stairs, facing
the main camp road, were for the use of the SS men; the gas chamber
victims used the stairs which went down into Leichenkeller 2;
these stairs faced the north-south road which intersected the
main camp road. This intersection no longer exists because the
International Monument was built on top of the main camp road
at the west end of the camp.
For maximum effectiveness, the manufacturer's
recommendation was that the Zyklon-B pellets, which were used
for gassing the prisoners, should be heated to 78.3 degrees and
that the poison gas should be circulated throughout the room
by the use of a blower, but Krema II had no device for heating
the pellets, nor for circulating the gas.
According to the testimony of survivors,
Krema II did have a ventilation system with vents on the roof
to air out the room after the gassing, since there was only one
door into the gas chamber and the room could not be properly
ventilated just by opening the door. The ventilation for both
the undressing room and the gas chamber at both Krema II and
Krema III was included on the blueprints and the ventilation
system was mentioned in other documents pertaining to these buildings.
According to a book entitled, "The
Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It?"
by Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, the gas chambers
in Krema II and Krema III were 99 feet long by 23 feet wide.
The undressing rooms in both buildings were 162 feet long by
26 feet wide. The long part of these T-shaped buildings, which
was above ground, was 99 feet long by 37 feet wide, and the overall
size of the long part of the buildings was 352 feet by 41 feet.
The Krema II gas chamber and the undressing
room were both about five feet underground, but not directly
underneath the brick one-story building which housed the cremation
ovens. Before Krema II and Krema III were blown up, the roof
of the gas chamber and the roof of the undressing room were covered
by three feet of dirt with a grass lawn on top. There were four
holes in the roof of the gas chamber in both Krema II and Krema
III; the roofs were made of reinforced concrete, six inches thick.
Through these four holes on the roof, an SS man, wearing a gas
mask, lowered an open can of Zyklon-B gas pellets down into four
wire-mesh columns inside the gas chamber. When the gassing was
finished, the pellets were retrieved and sent back to the Degesch
company so that they could be reused. Michael Kula, a survivor,
testified as an eye-witness to the use of wire-mesh columns for
the Zyklon-B pellets, but these columns are no longer in existence.
Steps down into the
undressing room in the center background
The photo above shows the steps that
led down into the undressing room, which was called Leichenkeller
2 (Corpse Cellar #2) on the blueprint of the building. The gas
chamber was called Leichenkeller I (Corpse Cellar #1) on the
blueprint. In the background is the grove of trees that marks
the western boundary of the Birkenau camp, with a guard tower
in the right hand corner of the photo. To access the undressing
room at Krema II, the prisoners walked down the main camp road
and then turned south on a road that intersected the main camp
road.
On the far right in the photo above,
you can see the steps of the International Monument which are
only three or four feet from the entrance to the undressing room
where 500,000 Jews descended to their death. In the foreground
of the photo above is the remains of the ground-floor furnace
room.
The photo below shows another view of
the steps down into the undressing room, which was a bit larger
than the gas chamber. An orchestra, composed of prisoners, played
light classical music as the victims descended down the steps.
Note that the undressing room does not appear deep enough to
be an underground room. The concrete roof of this room was 3
feet above ground and covered with dirt.
Steps down into the
undressing room for Krema II gas chamber
The gassing of the Jews at Birkenau stopped
on the first of November 1944, on the orders of Reichsführer-SS
Heinrich Himmler, the head of all the concentration camps. The
roof of the Krema II brick building was taken off and the cremation
ovens were lifted out with cranes. The fake shower fixtures on
the ceiling of the gas chamber were removed and all traces of
them are now gone. Then the wire-mesh columns inside Krema II,
into which the poison gas pellets had been poured, were removed
and the holes in the roof were closed up and cemented over so
skillfully that no trace of them can be seen today.
This page was last updated on June 30,
2008
|