Sonderkommando

Sonderkommandos (German: [ˈzɔndɐkɔˌmando], special unit) were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust.[1][2] The death-camp Sonderkommandos, who were always inmates, were unrelated to the SS-Sonderkommandos, which were ad hoc units formed from members of various SS offices between 1938 and 1945.

For other uses, see Sonderkommando (disambiguation).
Sonderkommando
Survivors of Sonderkommando 1005 posing next to a bone-crushing machine at the site of the Janowska concentration camp. Photograph taken following the liberation of the camp.
LocationGerman-occupied Europe
Date1942–1945
Incident typeRemoval of Holocaust evidence
PerpetratorsSchutzstaffel (SS)
ParticipantsArbeitsjuden
CampExtermination camps including Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka among others
SurvivorsFilip Müller, Henryk Tauber, Morris Venezia, Henryk Mandelbaum, Dario Gabbai, Antonio Boldrin

The German term was part of the vague and euphemistic language which the Nazis used to refer to aspects of the Final Solution (e.g., Einsatzkommando, "deployment units").

Death factory workers
Crematorium at Dachau, May 1945 (photo taken after liberation)

Sonderkommando members did not participate directly in killing; that responsibility was reserved for the SS, while the Sonderkommandos' primary duty[3] was disposing of the corpses.[4] In most cases, they were inducted immediately upon arrival at the camp and forced into the position under threat of death. They were not given any advance notice of the tasks they would have to perform. To their horror, sometimes the Sonderkommando inductees would discover members of their own family amid the bodies.[5] They had no way to refuse or resign other than by committing suicide.[6] In some places and environments, the Sonderkommandos might be euphemistically called Arbeitsjuden (Jews for work).[7] Other times, Sonderkommandos were called Hilflinge (helpers).[8] At Birkenau the Sonderkommandos numbered up to 400 people by 1943 and, when Hungarian Jews were deported there in 1944, their numbers swelled to more than 900 persons, in order to keep up with the increased rounds of murder and extermination.[9]

Because the Germans needed the Sonderkommandos to remain physically able, they were granted much less squalid living conditions than other inmates: they slept in their own barracks and were allowed to keep and use various goods such as food, medicines and cigarettes brought into camp by those who were sent to the gas chambers. Unlike ordinary inmates, they were not normally subject to arbitrary, random killing by guards. Their livelihood and utility was determined by how efficiently they could keep the Nazi death factory running.[10] As a result, Sonderkommando members survived marginally longer in the death camps than other prisoners — but few survived the war.

As they had intimate knowledge of the Nazis' policy of mass murder, the Sonderkommando were considered Geheimnisträger — bearers of secrets. As such, they were held in isolation away from prisoners being used as slave labor (see SS Main Economic and Administrative Office).[11] Every three months, according to SS policy, almost all the Sonderkommandos working in the death camps' killing areas would be gassed themselves and replaced with new arrivals to ensure secrecy. However, some inmates survived for up to a year or more because they possessed specialist skills.[12] Usually the task of a new Sonderkommando unit would be to dispose of the bodies of their predecessors. Research has calculated that from the creation of a death camp's first Sonderkommando to the liquidation of the camp, there were approximately 14 generations of Sonderkommando.[13]

Eyewitness testimony

Between 1943 and 1944, some members of the Sonderkommando were able to obtain writing materials and record some of their experiences and what they had witnessed in Birkenau. These documents were buried in the grounds of the crematoria and recovered after the war. Five men have been identified as the authors of these manuscripts: Zalman Gradowski, Zalman Lewental, Leib Langfus, Chaim Herman, and Marcel Nadjary. The first three wrote in Yiddish, Herman in French, and Nadjary in Greek. The manuscripts are kept primarily in the archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial Museum. Exceptions are Herman's letter (kept in the archives of the Amicale des déportés d’Auschwitz-Birkenau) and Gradowski's texts, one of which is held in the Russian Museum of Military Medicine in St. Petersburg, and another in Yad Vashem, Israel.[14][15] Some of the manuscripts were published as The Scrolls of Auschwitz, edited by Ber Mark.[16] The Auschwitz Museum published some others as Amidst a Nightmare of Crime.[17]

The Scrolls of Auschwitz have been recognised as some of the most important testimony to be written about the Holocaust, as they include contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the workings of the gas chambers in Birkenau.[15]

The following note, which was found buried in an Auschwitz crematorium, was written by Zalman Gradowski, a member of the Sonderkommando who was killed in the revolt (see below) at Crematoria IV on 7 October 1944:

"Dear finder of these notes, I have one request of you, which is, in fact, the practical objective for my writing ... that my days of Hell, that my hopeless tomorrow will find a purpose in the future. I am transmitting only a part of what happened in the Birkenau-Auschwitz Hell. You will realize what reality looked like ... From all this you will have a picture of how our people perished."[18]

Fewer than 20 of several thousand members of the Sonderkommandos – who were forced to work in the Nazi death camps – are documented to have survived until liberation and were able to testify to the events (although some sources claim more[19]). Among them were Henryk (Tauber) Fuchsbrunner, Filip Müller, Daniel Behnnamias, Dario Gabbai, Morris Venezia, Shlomo Venezia, Antonio Boldrin, Alter Fajnzylberg, Samuel Willenberg, Abram Dragon, David Olère, Henryk Mandelbaum and Martin Gray. Another six or seven are confirmed to have survived, but they have not given witness (or at least, such testimony is not documented). Buried and hidden accounts by members of the Sonderkommando were later found at some camps.[20]

Revolts

Sonderkommando prisoners participated in uprisings on two occasions.

Treblinka

The first revolt occurred at Treblinka on 2 August 1943, when 100 prisoners succeeded in breaking out of the camp.[21] They stole 20–25 rifles, 20 hand grenades, and several pistols from the camp arsenal by using a duplicate key. At 3:45 p.m., 700 Jews launched an attack on the camp's SS guards and trawnikis that lasted for 30 minutes.[22] They set buildings ablaze and a fuel tanker. Armed Jews attacked the main gate, while others attempted to climb the fence. But, the well-armed guards concentrated their fire on the prisoners, creating a near-total slaughter. The prisoners had not cut the phone wires, [23] and the SS called in reinforcements from four different towns and set up roadblocks.[22] Although about 200 Jews[24][22] escaped from the camp,[lower-alpha 1] half of them were killed after being chased by the expanded numbers of SS forces in cars and on horses.

Partisans of the Armia Krajowa (Polish: Home Army) transported some of the surviving escaped prisoners across the Bug River,[25] while others were helped and fed by Polish villagers.[23] Of 700 Sonderkommando who took part in the revolt, 100 managed to survive the escape from the camp, and around 70 of these are known to have survived the war.[26] These include Richard Glazar, Chil Rajchman, Jankiel Wiernik, and Samuel Willenberg, who co-authored the Treblinka Memoirs.[27]

Auschwitz

In October 1944, the Sonderkommandos rebelled at Crematorium IV in Auschwitz II. For months, young Jewish women workers had been smuggling small packets of gunpowder out of the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke, a munitions factory in an industrial area between the Auschwitz I main camp and Auschwitz II. Eventually the gunpowder was passed along a smuggling chain to Sonderkommando in Crematorium IV. The plan was to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria before launching an uprising.[28]

But, on the morning of 7 October 1944, the camp resistance gave advanced warning to the Sonderkommando in Crematorium IV that they were due to be killed. The Sonderkommando attacked the SS and Kapos with two machine guns, axes, knives and grenades. The guards suffered 15 casualties, of whom 3 were killed and about 12 were injured.[29] Some of the Sonderkommando escaped from the camp, but most were recaptured later the same day.[13] Of those who did not die in the uprising itself, 200 were later forced to strip and lie face down before being shot in the back of the head. A total of 451 Sonderkommandos were killed on this day.[30][31][32]

Portrayals in literature and media

The earliest portrayals of the Sonderkommando were generally unflattering. Miklos Nyiszli, in Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, described the Sonderkommando as enjoying a virtual feast, complete with chandeliers and candlelight, as other prisoners died of starvation. Nyiszli, an admitted collaborator who assisted Josef Mengele in his medical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, would appear to have been in a good position to observe the Sonderkommando in action, as he had an office in Krematorium II. But some of his inaccurate physical descriptions of the crematoria diminishes his credibility in this regard. Historian Gideon Greif characterized Nyiszli's writings as among the “myths and other wrong and defamatory accounts” of the Sonderkommando, which flourished in the absence of first-hand testimony by surviving Sonderkommando members.[33]

Primo Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved, characterizes the Sonderkommando as being a step away from collaborators. But, he asked his readers to refrain from condemnation: “Therefore I ask that we meditate upon the story of ‘the crematorium ravens’ with pity and rigor, but that judgment of them be suspended.” [34] Levi, who was held at Camp III/Monowitz (also known as the Buna Werke) while imprisoned at Auschwitz, may not have directly encountered the Sonderkommando. Some critics have suggested he may have used Nyiszli's writing as the basis for his description.

Filip Müller was one of the few Sonderkommando members who survived the war, and was also unusual in that he served on the Sonderkommando far longer than most. He wrote of his experiences in his book Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (1979).[35] Among other incidents he related, Müller recounted how he tried to enter the gas chamber to die with a group of his countrymen, but was dissuaded from suicide by a girl who asked him to remain alive and bear witness.[36]

Since the late 20th century, several other more sympathetic accounts of the Sonderkommando have been published, beginning with Gideon Greif’s own book We Wept Without Tears (1999, 2005 in English), which consists of exhaustive, and sometimes grueling, interviews with former Sonderkommando members. Greif includes as his prologue the poem “And What Would You Have Done?” by Gunther Anders. It says that one who has not been in that situation has little right to judge the Sonderkommando: “Not you, not me! We were not put to that ordeal!” [37]

The first theatre play to portray the Sonderkommando revolt was written in 1947 by Ludovic Bruckstein (born 1920, in Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia - today in Ukraine, he was sent to the camps in May 1944, from Sighet). It was entitled Nacht-Shicht ("Night-Shift" in Yiddish), and performed with great success by the Romanian Yiddish theaters of Bucharest and Yasi, from 1948 till 1957.[38] It is available (in Yiddish) on the internet.

A theatre play that explores the moral dilemmas of the Sonderkommando was The Grey Zone, directed by Doug Hughes and produced in New York at MCC Theater in 1996.[39] The play was later adapted as a film of the same title by producer Tim Blake Nelson.[40] The film took its mood, as well as much of its plot, from Nyiszli, portraying members of the Sonderkommando as crossing the line from victim to perpetrator. Sonderkommando Hoffman (played by David Arquette) beats a man to death in the undressing room under the eyes of a smiling SS member. Nelson emphasizes that the subject of the film is that very moral ambiguity. “We can see each one of ourselves in that situation, perhaps acting in that way, because we are human. But we’re not sanctified victims.”[41]

A “novelized” memoir, A Damaged Mirror (2014), by Yael Shahar and Ovadya ben Malka, explores the lengths to which a former Sonderkommando will go to obtain forgiveness and closure: “The fact that good people can be forced to do wrong doesn’t make them less good,” the survivor says of himself, “but it also doesn’t make the wrong less wrong.”[42]

Son of Saul, a 2015 Hungarian film directed by László Nemes, and winner of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix, details the story of one Sonderkommando attempting to bury a dead child he takes for his son. Géza Röhrig, who starred in the film, reacted with anger to the suggestion, made by a journalist, that members of the Sonderkommando were “half-victim, half-hangman”.

“There has to be a clarification,” he said. “They are 100% victims. They have not spilled blood or been involved in any sort of killing. They were inducted on arrival under the threat of death. They had no control of their destinies. They were as victimised as any other prisoners in Auschwitz.”[43]

Main article: Sonderkommando photographs
Original photographs by “Alex” (Alberto Errera)
  • Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
    August 1944 (clandestine photo)
  • Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
    August 1944 (clandestine photo)
  • Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
    August 1944 (clandestine photo)
Close-ups of subject area (from above)
  • Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
    August 1944. Incineration of corpses
  • Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
    August 1944
  • Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
    August 1944. The march to "showers"
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See also

Notes
  1. Two hundred is the number accepted by Polish historians and the Treblinka camp museum; the Holocaust Encyclopedia lists 300, instead.

References

Footnotes
  1. Friedländer 2009, pp. 355–356.
  2. Shirer 1990, p. 970.
  3. Langbein, Hermann (2005-12-15). People in Auschwitz. Univ of North Carolina Press. p. 193. ISBN 978-0-8078-6363-3.
  4. Sofsky 2013, p. 267.
  5. Sofsky 2013, p. 269.
  6. Sofsky 2013, p. 271.
  7. Sofsky 2013, p. 283.
  8. Michael & Doerr 2002, p. 209.
  9. Caplan & Wachsmann 2010, p. 73.
  10. Sofsky 2013, pp. 271–273.
  11. Greif 2005, p. 4.
  12. Greif 2005, p. 327.
  13. Nyiszli, Miklós (1993). Auschwitz : a doctor's eyewitness account. New York Boston: Arcade Pub. Distributed by Little, Brown, and Co. ISBN 1-55970-202-8. OCLC 28257456.
  14. Chare, Nicholas (15 February 2011). Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation. London: I. B. Tauri. ISBN 978-1-84885-591-5.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  15. Stone, Dan (19 September 2013). "The Harmony of Barbarism: Locating the Scrolls of Auschwitz in Holocaust Historiography". In Chare, Nicholas; Williams, Dominic (eds.). Representing Auschwitz: At the Margins of Testimony. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 11–32. ISBN 978-1-137-29769-3.
  16. Mark, Bernard (1985). The Scrolls of Auschwitz. Translated by Neemani, Sharon. Tel Aviv: Am ʻOved Pub. House. ISBN 978-965-13-0252-7. OCLC 13621285.
  17. Bezwińska, Jadwiga; Czech, Danuta (1973). Amidst a nightmare of crime: Manuscripts of members of Sonderkommando ; Selection and elaboration of manuscripts. Translated by Michalik, Krystyna. Oświęcim: Publications of Statue Museum at Oświecim Państwowe Muzeum.
  18. Rutta, Matt (23 March 2006). "Yad Vashem". Rabbinic Rambling. Retrieved 30 April 2007.
  19. "Auschwitz - Sonderkommando". Hagalil.com. 2 May 2000. Retrieved 30 April 2010.
  20. Peter, Laurence (1 December 2017). "Auschwitz inmate's notes from hell finally revealed". BBC News. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
  21. Chrostowski, Witold (2004). Extermination camp Treblinka. London Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell. p. 94. ISBN 0-85303-457-5. OCLC 51810769.
  22. Kopówka & Rytel-Andrianik 2011, p. 110.
  23. Smith 2010.
  24. Weinfeld 2013, p. 43.
  25. Śląski, Jerzy (1990). VII. Pod Gwiazdą Dawida [Under the Star of David] (PDF). Polska Walcząca, Vol. IV: Solidarni (in Polish). PAX, Warsaw. pp. 8–9. ISBN 83-01-04946-4. Retrieved 15 August 2013.
  26. Easton, Adam (4 August 2013), Treblinka survivor recalls suffering and resistance, BBC News, Treblinka, Poland
  27. Archer, Noah S.; et al. (2010). "Alphabetical Listing of [better known] Treblinka Survivors and Victims". Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team H.E.A.R.T. Retrieved 30 August 2013. Also in: "The list of Treblinka survivors, with expert commentary in Polish". Muzeum Walki i Męczeństwa w Treblince. Source of data: Donat (1979), The death camp Treblinka. New York, pp. 279–291. ISBN 0896040097. Archived from the original on 22 September 2013.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
  28. "Auschwitz Revolt (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)". Ushmm.org. Retrieved 2016-02-08.
  29. Rees, Laurence (2012). Auschwitz: The Nazis and the "Final Solution". Random House. p. 324.
  30. Wacław Długoborski; Franciszek Piper (2000). Auschwitz 1940–1945: Mass murder. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. ISBN 978-83-85047-87-2.
  31. Yisrael Gutman; Michael Berenbaum; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1998). Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Indiana University Press. p. 501. ISBN 0-253-20884-X.
  32. Gideon Greif (2005). We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz. Yale University Press. p. 44. ISBN 978-0-300-13198-7.
  33. Greif, Gideon; Kilian, Andreas (25 September 2011). "Forschung: Significance, responsibility, challenge: Interviewing the Sonderkommando survivors". sonderkommando-studien.de. Archived from the original on 25 September 2011. Retrieved 31 March 2020.
  34. Levi, Primo (1989). The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage International. p. 60. ISBN 978-0-679-72186-4.
  35. Müller 1999, p. 180.
  36. Müller 1999, p. 113.
  37. http://websrv-cluster-ip8.its.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/greif_wept.pdf%5B%5D
  38. Petrescu, Corina L. (2011). ""The People of Israel Lives!" Performing the Shoah on Post-War Bucharest's Yiddish Stages.". In Glajar, Valentina; Teodorescu, Jeanine (eds.). Local history, transnational memory in the Romanian Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 209–223. ISBN 978-0-230-11841-6. OCLC 712039548.
  39. Hohenadel, Kristin (7 January 2001). "FILM; A Holocaust Horror Story Without A Schindler". The New York Times.
  40. Henry, Patrick (2009). "The Gray Zone". Philosophy and Literature. Project Muse. 33 (1): 150–166. doi:10.1353/phl.0.0045. ISSN 1086-329X.
  41. ""This Is Not a Movie About the Holocaust"". AboutFilm.Com. November 2002. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
  42. Shahar, Yael; ben Malka, Ovadya (2015). A Damaged Mirror: A story of memory and redemption. Kasva Press. ISBN 978-0-9910584-0-2.
  43. Shoard, Catherine (15 May 2015). "Son of Saul's astonishing recreation of Auschwitz renews Holocaust debate". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 December 2017.

Bibliography
  1. Pressac, Jean-Claude (1989). "The deposition made on 24th May 1945 by Henryk TAUBER, former member of the Sonderkommando of Krematorien I, II, IV and V.". Auschwitz : technique and operation of the gas chambers. Translated by Moss, Peter. New York: The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. pp. 481–502. OCLC 947814539. Archived from the original on 29 June 2007.CS1 maint: unfit url (link)
  2. Müller, Filip (1999) [1979]. Eyewitness Auschwitz : three years in the gas chambers. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 1-56663-271-4. OCLC 41431677.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  3. Greif, Gideon (2005). We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-13198-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  4. Fromer, Rebecca (1993). The Holocaust odyssey of Daniel Bennahmias, Sonderkommando. Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press. ISBN 0-8173-5041-1. OCLC 45730004.
  5. Nyiszli, Miklós (1993). Auschwitz : a doctor's eyewitness account. Translated by Kramer, Tibere; Seaver, Richard. New York Boston: Arcade Pub. Distributed by Little, Brown, and Co. ISBN 1-55970-202-8. OCLC 28257456.. A play and subsequent film about the Sonderkommandos, The Grey Zone (2001) directed by Tim Blake Nelson, was based on this book.
  6. Dario Gabbai (Interview Code 142, conducted in English) video testimony, interview conducted in November 1996, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, USC Shoah Foundation Institute, University of Southern California.
  7. Venezia, Shlomo (2007). Sonderkommando Auschwitz. La verità sulle camere a gas. Una testimonianza unica (in Italian). Milano: Rizzoli. ISBN 88-17-01778-7. OCLC 799776574.
  8. Południak, Jan (2008). Sonder : an interview with Sonderkommando member Henryk Mandelbaum. Oświęcim: Poligrafia Salezjańska. ISBN 978-83-921567-3-4. OCLC 769819192.
  9. Boldrin, Antonio (April 2013). "testimone". Memoro (in Italian).
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