This is how long the average prisoner live once he arrived in Auschwitz before taking them to the gas chamber

Auschwitz was large but not the worst of the camps; it most probably was the most well known

It was a labor camp. Prisoners were worked to death. Those arriving WERE sorted into those groups that could be used for work and those who were considered worthless: children, the old and sick. These were sent immediately to the gas chambers to be liquidated. So they were there maybe an hour before being killed.

In 1941-1942 the extermination camps in Poland, Sorbibor, Chelmo, Treblinka, Belzec were used to empty the Polish Jewish ghettos. Understand that the word “concentration” meant where the Jews and undesirables were gathered or concentrated for subsequent elimination.

There was a vast dislocation of people in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union. Millions of Jews were concentrated in sections, ghettos of cities and then were rounded up and ship to extermination camps.

These camps were constructed away from major cities and from the time a train arrived with a load of victims it was no less than an hour before they were all dead.

They would arrive, be stripped of luggage. Sent to buildings where personal effects were taken and they were forced to undress. Attractive women might be segregated out and sent to separate buildings where they might be raped or simply held for use in the Camp Brothel by the Ukrainian and Jewish camp workers. There was a camp currency script for conducting that bit of commerce. These women would be used until they too joined others in the gas chambers to make way for new arrivals in the brothel.

From the stripping sheds they were driven by whips down the “tube” a narrow corridor topped with barbed wire and directly into the gassing chambers. At this time in the war, Zyclon B cyanide gas had not been invented. So diesel engines removed from captured Russian tanks provided carbon monoxide as the killing agent. The chambers were made in such a way that one whole side of the building could be hinged up to remove the corpses from the interior.

Since these were temporary camps, large pits had been dug over which steel railroad rails had been place upon supports. Corpses were stacked and burned in the open air like firewood. Since these people had not been starved there was plenty of human fat to keep the fires burning.

Years later when exhuming the cremation pits it was reported that a layer of human fat was found in the pits several feet thick.

By 1943 the Germans had destroyed and tried to erase the sites of the extermination camps. They dug up the pits scattered the bone and ash fragments and over planted the areas with forest. If not for an escape from Sorbibor of some inmates and their survival and return to show where the camps had been, it is likely these extermination camps would have gone undetected.

The labor and concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, the prisoners were starve and worked to death. Those who arrived and were unable to work were gassed immediately. By this time the camps had taken on an industrial scale. Zyclon B was used as the death gas and permanent crematoriums had been built.

Camps such a Dachau were an exception. Dachau was much smaller and used to deal with political prisoners, dissidents, homosexuals and others. It was not a large scale work or extermination camp. I went to school in Munich and visited the place at least three times. Medical experiments were conducted on prisoners.

To be honest there has been such an amalgamation and homogenization of memories of the Holocaust it actually mutes the true horror of what happened. I’ve been to a half dozen Holocaust museums and NONE of them really impresses on you the scale of the horror that took place.

They really need to impress on the visitors the organization and phases that went into the Final Solution plans. The relocations, the concentration of people, then the extermination years, where the killing went on as fast as it could day in and day out. Until Operation Reinhard got organized the killing was by shooting and cruelty. A director was put in charge and soon introduced gassing and organized killing ensued.

Before the camps came into being mobile vans were used and obviously were not up to the task, nor were mass shootings.

The sheer scale is mind boggling. Reduced to numbers if the average person weights 140 pounds and 50,000 people are being killed a month per camp, that is 7.000.000 pounds of corpses. Or 3500 tons of dead meat and bone you have to get rid of. Reduced to those hard facts it numbs the conscience and the emotions. When Stalin murdered 20 million kulaks (middle class farm land owners and their families) it was said he responded, “A single death is a tragedy, but millions of dead are a mere statistic.” This man went to seminary to be an orthodox priest. You wonder when and where he lost his conscience and any sense of morality.

If you aren’t numb already, when you reach the point of the concentration, labor and death camps, you won’t see them as quite so horrible. At least those capable of work were left to live for a while. Because of that, many survived the war. None who were sent to the extermination camps did except for the few intrepid souls who escaped.

I really think one of the museums needs to offer an adults only exhibition that shows in Madam Tussaud wax museum-like walk through exhibits what it was like for a family of Jews. The arrest, the transport by train, the ghetto living, the random roundups in the streets of those sent to be exterminated. Transport to the camp, the arrival, the stripping and driving to the chambers, the death by asphyxiation, the unloading and cremation.

Then it might actually sink home the horror of what went on. Right now it is just the sterile old photos, the same ones you see at every museum in every exhibit. It makes no more impression in most people than an exhibit on the Ancient Greeks or Romans.

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