The "rehabilitation" of groups of people considered “unacceptable" by Hitler and Nazi ideology, groups such as political opponents, homosexuals, handicapped people and those deemed "unsociable", was established since 1933 in the National-Socialist concentration camps, where it quickly turned to extreme treatment (exhaustion by hunger, work, beatings, cold, total lack of care).
But even this was not sufficient to reach the Nazis' goal. In addition to the persecution of the Gipsyies, the greatest threat to the public, seen as responsible for everything going wrong was : "the Jew". After considering expulsion, the complete opposite was decided : the Reich's border were closed. European Jews were trapped, at the disposal of their tormenters. Various experimental approaches to "mass murder" were then rapidly established to solve the "Jewish question", which in fact meant: how can millions of human-beings be killed in the shortest possible time ?
The first step (seen on the Eastern front) of the technique chosen to make this decision a reality, were killings perpetrated by the SS and the Wehrmacht, with the possible help of volunteers (especially Ukrainians). The second step was to put in place killing centers sometimes called extermination camps, that is to say Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka and later Majdanek and Auschwitz. Thus, the process of "the trucks" (asphyxia by the exhaust fumes sent back inside the trucks in which the victims were locked) started beeing used in December 1941 in Chelmno, where a number of Jewish prisoners from the Lodz ghetto were sent and killed. In the "Aktion Reinhard" camps, gas chambers were built, and the carbon monoxide expelled from an engine was used to kill the victims. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, they used Zyklon gas. These camps became "Todesfabriken" (Ger.), "Tovarna na smart" (Cz.), or "death factories". It was necessary to find employees to work this unique role ; these employees were the Sonderkommandos (SK).
Upon their arrival at Auschwitz and Birkenau, the convoy deportees, exhausted by frequently painful journeys, were immediately "selected". This is to say, they were sorted into two groups, the first who would go immadiately to the gas chambers and then to the crematorium furnaces, and the second group who were initially spared. In the first group, SS doctors grouped all the physically weak (most of the women, children and elderly people). The second group (often only a small fraction) was then sorted into various work commandos, occasionally based on the deportees’ personal skills. Among the prisoners in this group, certain young and sturdy men were assigned to the Sonderkommandos, meaning "special commandos". The understated expressions used by the Nazis to hide their horrors are well known; in this way, the duty of “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung) was imposed on the “special commandos”, leading to the “final solution to the Jewish question” (die Endlösung der Judenfrage). Special, their place certainly was.
In Auschwitz, then in Birkenau, these men discovered with horror the crematoriums (consisting of the undressing room, the gas chambers and the furnaces) which would become their workplace. Frequently their first hours were unimaginably violent as they would be required to take their wives, sisters, various family members and friends from the gas chambers to incinerate them. None of the SK members should have survived : they were easily « liquidated » and replaced by a selection of the newcomers whose first job would be to eliminate the bodies of their predecessors. None should be allowed to survive as they knew too much. Their testimonies today are (or should be?) all the more precious as nobody else can retell what they saw and knew. But they were blamed for that which has been imposed on them.
How can you come back to life after the darkness of the camps ? How can you become a human being again in one’s own eyes and in someone else’s, especially if he holds you responsible for the terror that you have lived through, or even categorizes you among the extermination collaborators and torturers ? How to live with yourself with respect to what you had to do ? How to cope with the horrific images that will haunt you forever but that you are nevertheless ashamed to express ? These images that scream in your head and that nobody else can gather the courage to hear ? These images that you cannot find the strength to express and that you could not express as the words do not exist ?
This site is especially dedicated to these men. It focuses on Auschwitz, although many aspects are of course applicable to other extermination camps. It is built by gathering and connecting the scattered knowledge of the human and material aspects of dealing with the SK. In this way it limits itself to this aspect amongst the considerable body of knowledge and studies that cover all of the Holocaust. With this site I would like to hear everything that could be said and try to understand everything that can be understood, therefore laying my insignificant small stone on the grave and ash of all this suffering. To listen and hear.
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