Hitler's Last Days (27 page)

There were five crematoriums at Auschwitz. Each had a room for gassing victims and ovens for burning the bodies. When the number of bodies became too much for the ovens to handle, the bodies were burned outdoors. A large pit behind Krema V served this purpose.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was built on top of a swamp, so conditions in the cramped barracks were always damp. Railroad tracks ran into the center of the camp, delivering new prisoners several times each day. Once the cars stopped at the unloading ramp, prisoners were ordered to leave their belongings behind and to line up for processing. For most of the war, women with children, as well as the elderly, were designated for immediate extermination. After October 1944, thousands of Auschwitz prisoners were transferred to other camps as the Germans began destroying evidence of the atrocity.

Train tracks lead through the gates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

The gates to Auschwitz include the phrase “Work makes you free.” Before it was an extermination camp, Auschwitz was a work camp.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

In all, 80 percent of those who survived the horrible journey from their homes to Auschwitz were sent straight to the gas chambers; only those deemed capable of working as slave labor were allowed to live.

Jewish people arrive at Auschwitz. They are divided into two lines: one for the elderly, women, and children; the other for men.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

Those chosen to live were given a uniform to wear night and day—smocks for the women, pants and shirts for the men. Normal footwear was replaced by clogs made of wood or leather, but no socks, causing many prisoners to get blisters, which eventually led to infection. This frequently ended in a slow and agonizing death from gangrene.

Women and children are liberated by Soviet troops from Auschwitz in 1945. Prisoners were required to wear thin, striped uniforms; they wore whatever other clothes they could underneath for warmth.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

There was no good job to have in a concentration camp. Some prisoners were chosen to serve as
kapos
—leaders of the other prisoners. Kapos got extra rations but had to live with the knowledge that they were collaborating with the Nazis by spying on their fellow prisoners, effectively ordering death sentences for those who stepped out of line.

The worst job of all went to the prisoners who looked fit and strong enough to serve as
Sonderkommandos
. They would work the ovens, obeying the SS officer as he gave the order to fill the gas chambers with Zyklon B. Afterward, they had to carry dead bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoriums for burning. Each day they would grow weaker, thanks to the meager Auschwitz rations. And once they could no longer work, they themselves would be led into the gas chamber one final time.

Hundreds of barracks housed the brutalized prisoners. There were skylights but no windows. The floors were bare earth, and inmates slept on wooden bunks stacked three tiers high, covered with nothing more than rags. Rats were everywhere. The captives scratched constantly at the lice infesting their clothes and hair.

Food was precious—and hoarded. Breakfast was just a cup of imitation coffee or tea. Lunch was a cup of thin soup. And dinner was a piece of black bread and a sliver of sausage. It was common practice to take a bite of bread, then hide the rest in the lining of clothes until morning. When a prisoner died in the night, the body was quickly searched for any hidden bread.

The entire Auschwitz complex was ringed by barbed wire and overseen by armed SS guards standing in almost three dozen watchtowers. The Birkenau section backed up to a forest, and any inmate who could find a way through the wire to make a run for it was shot on sight.

Beginning in 1934, Hitler's SS was put in charge of the concentration camps that would systematically murder millions of Jews, homosexuals, Roma (gypsies), handicapped individuals, and political prisoners. The barbaric behavior of the SS was documented for all the world to see when the camps were liberated. The images from those days and the testimony of men and women who survived were used at the Nuremberg trials as evidence of the very worst of human behavior.

A barrack at Bergen-Belsen, decorated with a wall-size image of Hitler, burns after it was liberated and all the prisoners moved.
[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Charles Rennie]

The wire perimeter fence at Auschwitz.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

THE NUREMBERG TRIALS

O
N
N
OVEMBER
20, 1945,
IN
C
OURTROOM
600 of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, the first of the Nuremberg war crimes trials began. Twenty-one of Nazi Germany's most brutal leaders sat in the dock under a bank of hot floodlights so bright that each of the prisoners had been given sunglasses. Behind them, a row of white-helmeted American military police stood at crisp attention. The eight judges—one plus an alternate from the United States, Britain, Russia, and France—took their seats at the front of the room. The proceedings started with a reading of the 24,000-word document listing the crimes for which the first group of men was being tried, including the murder of 172,000 Russians at Leningrad, the death of 780 Catholic priests at the Mauthausen concentration camp, the execution of fifty British POWs who were recaptured after their Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, the killing of soldiers in the act of surrendering, and conducting deliberate and systematic genocide, particularly against Jews, Poles, Roma, and others.

Defendants at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, listen to a German translation of the proceedings through headphones. Military police guard the rear of the defendants' box.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

*   *   *

The charges were gathered in four indictments. Many men faced more than one count:

Count One, “conspiracy to wage aggressive war,” described actions committed before the war began that showed a plan to commit crimes during the war.