Extermination camp

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In the summer of 1942, a train arrived at Treblinka. Deportees stepped onto the platform under armed guard. Within hours, they were dead. Treblinka alone would account for an estimated 800,000 lives before it was shut down in October 1943. That figure comes from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which records a total of 2.7 million people murdered across six Nazi extermination camps during World War II. These were not conventional prisons. They were purpose-built factories for mass killing, hidden deep inside German-occupied Poland, kept secret even from most Germans. How did such places come to exist? What distinguished them from other Nazi camps? And how did the perpetrators attempt to erase all trace of what they had done?

• 2. Origins in Secrecy

  ›

  The idea of killing on an industrial scale did not arrive fully formed. It grew from an earlier programme the Nazis called Aktion T4, a secretive campaign to murder German, Austrian and Polish hospital patients with mental or physical disabilities. Hitler authorized the SS to eliminate those they designated as living a life "unworthy of life," a phrase rendered in German as Lebensunwertes Leben. The first mass killings used carbon monoxide pumped from cylinders, which the Nazis used to murder around 70,000 disabled people before the technology was adapted for a much larger purpose. The experience gained through T4 would prove directly transferable.

  By 1941, the Nazis had already confined Jews to ghettos and concentration camps across occupied Europe. Then, in June 1941, Germany launched its attack on the Soviet Union. The SS Einsatzgruppen followed the Wehrmacht eastward, carrying out mass shootings in occupied Soviet territory. Heinrich Himmler visited the outskirts of Minsk that year and watched one such shooting. The commanding officer on the ground told him the executions were proving psychologically damaging to the men pulling the triggers. Himmler concluded a different method was necessary.

  On the 13th of October 1941, Himmler gave an oral order to Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader stationed in Lublin, to begin construction of a killing centre at Bełżec. That order came three months before the Wannsee Conference, where Reinhard Heydrich chaired a meeting in January 1942 to formalize the principle that all Jews of Europe were to be exterminated. Adolf Eichmann was assigned responsibility for the logistics. The bureaucratic machinery was now in place, and the physical infrastructure was being built alongside it.

• 3. Six Camps, One Purpose

  ›

  Chełmno was the first camp to begin killing operations, in December 1941, under Sturmbannführer Herbert Lange. It used carbon monoxide vans and is estimated to have killed around 320,000 people. Bełżec opened in March 1942 and killed an estimated 600,000. Sobibór was ready in May 1942 under Hauptsturmführer Franz Stangl; around 250,000 people died there. Treblinka became operational in July 1942 under Obersturmführer Irmfried Eberl, a doctor who had worked in the T4 programme. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, gas chambers were fitted in March 1942; at Majdanek, in September 1942.

  All six camps were placed near branch lines connected to the Polish railway network. Their physical designs were strikingly similar: several hundred metres across in both length and width, with minimal staff housing and no facilities for the prisoners packed into the trains. The three Operation Reinhard camps, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, were built exclusively for rapid killing. Deportees at these sites were typically murdered within hours of arrival.

  Auschwitz and Majdanek also functioned as forced labour complexes, where some prisoners were selected for work. At those two camps, Zyklon B, a cyanide-based product manufactured by IG Farben under the brand name Zyklon B, was the primary killing agent. The idea of using Zyklon B on humans was first tested by Karl Fritzsch, Höss's deputy at Auschwitz, while Höss was away on an official journey in late August 1941. Fritzsch used Soviet POWs as the test subjects. When Höss returned and was briefed, he adopted the method as camp strategy.

  The three Reinhard camps used carbon monoxide produced by internal combustion engines rather than gas cylinders, which were seen as too costly to transport eastward. Each camp operated according to a slightly different procedure, but the shared aim was the same: to kill as many people as quickly as possible.

• 4. The Language of Concealment

  ›

  The Nazis made no effort to hide the existence of ordinary concentration camps. As early as 1933, those camps were publicised as a warning to anyone who might resist. The extermination camps were a different matter. They were kept in strict secrecy, and even internal SS correspondence referred to the mass murder only in euphemisms: "special treatment," "cleansing," "resettlement," "evacuation." The SS formally called the extermination camps by the same name as ordinary concentration camps to obscure the distinction.

  Victims were deceived right up to the end. Nazis told arriving deportees they were at a temporary transit stop and would soon continue to Arbeitslager, German work camps farther east. Gas chambers were disguised as shower rooms, fitted with non-working water nozzles and tiled walls. Sonderkommando prisoners, enslaved labourers drawn from the victim population itself, were forced to help maintain the deception. They talked to new arrivals about life in the camp, helped the elderly and very young undress, and accompanied people toward the gas chamber doors. They remained inside until the chamber was nearly sealed.

  Commandant Rudolf Höss of Auschwitz recorded in his memoir that some prisoners guessed what was about to happen but concealed their own terror in order to comfort the children around them. Some women broke down screaming. Others, at the threshold, betrayed the hiding places of fellow Jews in a desperate attempt to save themselves. Höss noted that when "difficult" prisoners were identified, those who might alert others, they were separated from the group and killed out of sight, to prevent panic among the deceived majority.

  The Nazis took the language of concealment a step further through a programme they called Sonderaktion 1005. After killing operations concluded at Operation Reinhard camps, the bodies originally buried in mass graves were exhumed and incinerated on open-air pyres. Records were destroyed. The camps themselves were dismantled by commandos of condemned prisoners. Majdanek was the exception: the rapid Soviet advance during Operation Bagration meant the camp was captured nearly intact.

• 5. Inside the Gas Chambers

  ›

  SS Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein, an officer attached to the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS, told a Swedish diplomat about what he witnessed at Bełżec on the 19th of August 1942. He described arriving to find 45 train cars unloaded, carrying 6,700 Jews, many of whom were already dead on the platform. The survivors were marched naked toward the gas chambers. Then the diesel engine that was supposed to produce the killing fumes failed to start. In his account, Gerstein recorded the wait with a stopwatch. After 2 hours and 49 minutes the engine finally started. Those locked inside the four chambers, each holding 750 people in 45 cubic metres of space, were still alive at that point. After 28 more minutes, only a few remained alive. After 32 minutes, all were dead. Gerstein reported that Captain Wirth then showed him a large can filled with extracted gold teeth, describing it as only one or two days' yield.

  At Auschwitz, once the chamber door was sealed, Zyklon B pellets were dropped through holes in the roof. Camp physicians recorded that victims showed no convulsions, attributing this to what they described as a paralyzing effect on the lungs. Corpses were found half-crouching, with discoloured skin and, in some cases, foam at the mouth or blood from the ears, worsened by the crowding. An SS anatomist named Johann Kremer witnessed a gassing at Birkenau and wrote in his diary on the 2nd of September 1942 that even Dante's Inferno seemed, by comparison, almost a comedy.

  After each gassing, Sonderkommando workers removed the bodies, extracted gold teeth, and transported the corpses for disposal. At Auschwitz, three specialist crematoria buildings were constructed by the firm J. A. Topf and Söhne. These facilities burned bodies around the clock, yet the volume of killing at times exceeded their capacity, and open-air pits were also used. Höss wrote in his memoir, composed while in Polish custody, about Sonderkommando workers who occasionally encountered the body of a relative among the dead but continued their assigned work without incident, because any outward reaction would have meant their own immediate death.

• 6. Who Was Killed

  ›

  Jews were the primary target, accounting for over 90 percent of extermination camp victims. The genocide of European Jews was the programme the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." The three Operation Reinhard camps were built specifically to destroy the Jewish communities trapped in the ghettos of occupied Poland, which held the largest Jewish population in Nazi-controlled Europe.

  Other groups were also murdered in the camps and in broader Nazi killing operations. Roma were interned and killed alongside Jews in concentration and extermination camp facilities. Soviet prisoners of war were targeted early and were among the first victims of Zyklon B testing at Auschwitz. Millions of civilians from across occupied Europe were also abducted for slave labour in various camp types; the source records that prisoners constituted roughly a quarter of the total workforce of the Reich, with mortality rates in those labour camps exceeding 75 percent from starvation, disease, exhaustion, and violence.

  Outside the six extermination camps, mass murder also took place at sites across occupied Poland through what became known as the Holocaust by Bullets, where people were lined up at ravines and shot. Named sites included Bronna Góra, Ponary, and Rumbula. Beyond German-operated facilities, camps run by Nazi allies were also identified by historians as extermination sites; the Jasenovac concentration camp in the Independent State of Croatia is the most prominent example.

  At the Nuremberg trials after the war, Dieter Wisliceny, a deputy to Adolf Eichmann, was asked directly to name the extermination camps. He identified Auschwitz and Majdanek. When asked how he classified Mauthausen, Dachau, and Buchenwald, he replied that from the perspective of Eichmann's department, those were normal concentration camps.

• 7. Memory and Denial

  ›

  After the war, the government of the People's Republic of Poland created monuments at the extermination camp sites. Those early memorials contained no references to the ethnic, religious, or national identities of the Nazi victims. In the early 1990s, Jewish Holocaust organisations and Polish Catholic groups debated what religious symbols were appropriate for memorial sites at Auschwitz. The dispute centred on Christian memorials near Auschwitz I, where the victim population had been predominantly Polish, while most Jewish victims had been killed at Auschwitz II Birkenau.

  The March of the Living has been held annually in Poland since 1988, drawing participants from countries as far apart as Estonia, New Zealand, Panama, and Turkey. These gatherings take place at the sites where the killing occurred.

  Holocaust denial persists in the face of an extensive body of evidence. Deniers have claimed the extermination camps were transit points from which Jews were deported further east. That claim is contradicted by surviving German administrative documents, the testimony of camp survivors, the testimony of perpetrators, photographs and films taken by the Nazis themselves, and the physical remains of the camps. Research into the extermination camps is complicated by the scale of the SS effort to destroy evidence, but the weight of that surviving evidence is unambiguous.

  Surveys conducted in recent decades have documented serious gaps in public knowledge. A 2017 survey by the Körber Foundation found that 40 percent of 14-year-olds in Germany did not know what Auschwitz was. A 2018 survey in the United States, organised by the Claims Conference and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum among others, found that 66 percent of American millennials surveyed did not know. A 2019 Canadian survey of 1,100 people found that 49 percent could not name any of the Nazi camps at all. Those numbers speak to the stakes of commemoration, at a time when the last survivors are no longer alive to give firsthand testimony.