Ruins of Krema III
Ruins of the entrance
to the crematorium on the ground floor
The photo above shows the entrance to
the ground floor oven room in the Krema III gas chamber building
at Auschwitz Birkenau. The photo below shows the other side of
the ruins of the oven room. The gassing of the Jews stopped at
the end of October 1944 and the cremation ovens were removed
in November 1944, but the building was not blown up by dynamite
until January 20, 1945, two days after the Germans had abandoned
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The ruins of Krema
III, one of four gas chamber buildings at Birkenau
On the right is the
SS entrance to the underground rooms of Krema III
The photo above shows the steps down
into the basement entrance for the SS men, on the right-hand
side. In the foreground is the ruins of the anteroom where the
SS men entered. From this room, there was a door into the vestibule
or the Vorraum which the victims entered from the undressing
room and then proceeded into the gas chamber. A peephole in the
door of the gas chamber allowed the SS men to stand in the Vorraum
and watch the victims die.
Early morning shot
of the front steps to the building
Tour group gathered
at the ruins in October 2005
View of the back side
of the building
The gas chambers at Birkenau were not
a secret; all the prisoners were aware of what was going on.
According to Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish political prisoner at
Birkenau who wrote a book entitled "This Way for the Gas,
Ladies and Gentlemen," a soccer field was built at Birkenau
in the Spring of 1944 "on the broad clearing behind the
hospital barracks." By this time, the railroad tracks had
been extended all the way to the gas chambers at the western
end of the camp, and the men playing soccer were able to see
the victims arrive on the trains and then walk to their death
in Krema III, which was "right by the fence" that separated
the gas chambers from the barracks in the camp. Borowski wrote
that he was the goalkeeper in a game on a beautiful Sunday afternoon
and "Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind
my back, three thousand people had been put to death."
Three thousand was the number of Jews
that arrived on each transport; during the extermination of the
Hungarian Jews in 1944, an entire transport would be gassed without
going through a selection process, in spite of the fact that
the Nazis were desperate for workers in their munitions factories.
The photo below shows the Birkenau camp
in the background on the right. The soccer field, which overlooked
Krema III, was inside the camp and separated from the gas chambers
by a barbed wire fence.
Location of soccer
field on the right in the background
This page was last updated on January
17, 2008
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