How wide spread, detailed and reliable was knowledge of mass extermination among prisoners in Auschwitz?
I have systematically searched through more than 1000 (from more than 3500) protocols obtained by the Hungarian "National Committee for Attending Deportees" (DEGOB), which represent the testimony of 1449 Hungarian (and few Slovak) Jews returning from deportation. These testimonies were made early after the war mostly in June and July 1945, which is a crucial point as knowledge can be expected to change (in any direction) with increasing time after the event.
The vast majority of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, more than 93%, did not or only generically report on mass extermination in the camp. The rest was scarce in details or recollected false rumours circulating among the inmates. The studied testimonies do not remotely reach the level of knowledge and reliability displayed by former Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners or SS men in 1944-1946. The striking difference between the accounts of ordinary prisoners and insiders like the Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners and SS men is powerful confirmation of the veracity of mass extermination in Auschwitz.
About 30% of the deported people, who talked to the DEGOB staff, were not sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but left Hungary to other camps (most through the Austrian border in late 1944). One protocol reproduced on the site is illegible and was likewise ignored (number 351). Of the remaining 999 Auschwitz survivors, more than half (about 56%) did not mention extermination in Auschwitz. This figure can be considered to include those who did not hear about it, but also those who did not believe it as well as those who knew but did not take the opportunity to talk about it. There was obviously no default question from the DEGOB staff on the level of knowledge (see also general background of the protocols).
The average detention time in Auschwitz-Birkenau was about 3 months, but it varied as much as from few hours (for those directly sent to the main camp) to more than 2 years (for a Jewess deported from Slovakia). The proportion of people not reporting on extermination significantly increases with shorter detention time (to about 81% of those who stayed in Birkenau for less than 1 month). On the other hand, among deportees who were imprisoned in Birkenau for more than five months, the figure of those not reporting on extermination drops to about 22%. Not surprisingly, there is some correlation (but no strict relation) between the time experienced in Birkenau and ability to know or willingness and opportunities to talk about mass killings.
Of those who did report on extermination, the vast majority (about 82%) shared only generic knowledge, i.e. generalities such as that people were killed/gassed/burnt/sent to the crematorium or references to outdoor mass cremation. The remaining 18% provided further details of the killing facilities. About 1/3 of these somewhat more detailed testimonies are limited to few elements, such as a sign "desinfection" on a crematorium door or that the gas chambers were camouflaged as baths. The other 2/3 testimonies contain fundamentally false details of the killing and body disposal procedure as well as of the crematoria layout when checked against Jewish Sonderkommando and SS accounts.
More than half of those 6.5% of the people reporting details of mass extermination belonged to the so called Kanada detail, which took care of the belongings of the deported Jews. It's interesting to look at the knowledge of this specific group of prisoners seperately:
Only about 6% of the Kanada prisoners did not report about extermination, while more than half of them provided details beyond generic knowledge. This is partly because of their far above average detention time in Birkenau (7 months), but which does not entirely and sufficiently explain their better knowledge. Among non-Kanada prisoners, who stayed at least six months in Birkenau and who had the same average detention time of seven months, about 30% and 60% reported nothing or only generics on mass extermination respectively. The comparable high level of knowledge among prisoners from the Kanada detail is explained by their close proximity to crematoria 4 & 5. The Kanada complex was right next to the crematoria 4 site merely separated by a barbed wire and later a camouflage fence. Its workers were those Hungarian Jews in high number which were closest to extermination activities.
None of these 999 Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors - including the Kanada prisoners - was capable to provide a decently detailed and reliable description of the mass extermination sites. I also searched the remaining more than 2000 protocols containing references to "Sonderkommando". It seems fair to assume that most describing details of mass extermination would also mention its Sonderkommando by its proper name. Among these, there are three accounts with reliable and detailed descriptions, who were obviously all genuine eyewitnesses to the killing sites (two from prisoners assigned to the demolition detail taking down the crematoria, which will be worth a separate posting, the other is Miklos Nyiszli, who was assigned to Josef Mengele's section detail in crematorium 2).
The Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners working at the extermination sites were housed in their own isolated block or directly in the crematoria, camouflaged with a thick screen of trees and branches (as was the reactivated Bunker 2 extermination site). They were - with few exceptions - not transferred to other details but executed when no longer needed. It's not that other prisoners were free to move and speak in the camp, but the Sonderkommando was even more isolated from other groups of prisoners. Details of the killing sites were not published in the Birkenau News for everybody to look up or was announced at the next town hall, but had to be transmitted typically via a cascade of individuals secretly. In such a context, it is no surprise but expected that detailed knowledge was poor among ordinary prisoners.
But it might be too simple to explain this solely with the Sonderkommando isolation. Several Kanada workers claimed to have talked to the Sonderkommando guys face to face without being guarded. If true, there had been opportunities to pass on any single detail of the killing to them. This leads to another issue (beyond the scope of this posting), to what extent did the Sonderkommando prisoners want to talk to the Kanada girls about how exactly the poison gas was put into the gas chamber to murder innocent men, women and children. And to what extent did the Kanada girls want to chat about this with the Sonderkommando guys.
Along a similar line, the Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba claimed to have contacted Sonderkommando prisoner Filip Müller prior his escape to learn about the mass murder machinery [Vrba & Bestic, I Cannot Forgive, 1964, p. 175]. It's hard to see how the far above average but nevertheless seriously flawed description in the 1944 escape report by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler could be possibly based on a detailed discussion between somebody with good memory, which Vrba and Wetzler displayed throughout the report, on the one side and the most veteran Sonderkommando prisoner on the other side. This doesn't fit together. If Vrba talked to any Sonderkommando, then either did they not bother about details, odd enough if the escape was meant to inform the world about the mass murder machinery, or they were too short in time. In any case, the episode found in Müller's semi-fictional memoir that he "described the extermination procedure to them [Vrba & Wetzler] in all its details" (Sonderbehandlung, 1979, p. 193) cannot be historically true.
The Sonderkommando isolation was not perfect. Maintenance details could have gained access to the sites, which is how the Sonderkommando photographs of the crematorium 5 site were passed on. Supply details could have gained access to the sites as well, which is how the 15 years old Yehuda Bacon working in the roll cart detail became familiar with the details of the gas chamber of crematorium 3. Bacon captured the gas chamber well, but his knowledge did not spread very far in the Auschwitz complex. It did not reach any of the many hundreds Hungarian Jews reporting to DEGOB, who had never been at the site themselves. Hence, there was not only a limited flow of details from the extermination sites to ordinary prisoners, but this was also poorly processed and passed further on. And it could not compete with the false rumours spreading among the prisoners.
These false rumours were by no means limited to the Hungarian Jews. From a sample of 42 memoirs (from prisoners detained in the main camp, Monowitz and Birkenau) written between 1945 and 1960 mentioning mass murder in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 50% provided only generic descriptions and 33% were into false rumors. Four authors clearly used post-war sources in their accounts, which are thus no reliable measure of what the authors knew at the time. Only Albert Menasche (1945 - thanks to Andrew E. Mathis for providing me with the relevant text), Eddy de Wind (1946, who attached to his memoir the document USSR-008 quoting himself) and Alfred Fiderkiewicz (1956, who was previously Polish investigator of German war crimes and initiator of the Auschwitz State Museum and may have acquired significant post-war knowledge by the time) provided more or less decent descriptions of the mass killing sites.
One of the most common misconception was the distribution of towels & soap to the gassing victims. Andre Lettich too mentioned that "towels and soap were distributed" to the victims at some Bunker extermination site before the crematoria were operative (Lettich, Trente-quatre Mois dans les camps de concentration, p. 28). Lettich was assigned as doctor to treat Sonderkommando prisoners between January - March 1943. But none of the Sonderkommando prisoners serving at this or any other time has confirmed such practice (in Sonderkommando Filip Müller's book Sonderbehandlung, 1979, p. 128 it reads on a transport from Saloniki that "many had a towel on the arm and a piece of soap in their hand", but the book is demonstrable semi-fictional as well as partly plagarized nor does it say the towels and soap were provided by the crematoria staff).
It was also not mentioned by most of the SS men. An exception is Hans Münch, SS doctor at the Hygiene Institute in Raisko near the Birkenau camp, who wrote in a letter in 1995 (far too late to rule out external influences) that "they gave the victims soap and towels". At the time, the obviously senile 84 years old Münch was suffering from a poor memory as is apparent from an interview conducted by the Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf the same year. Furthermore, Münch admitted that he "cannot imagine how it was practically possible to give everyone a towel and a piece of cake" and he did, in fact, not remember to have seen it ("I cannot see that I have ever seen it...not with my consciousness...after 50 years I should still say if one has seen it or read it or if somebody...").
One of earliest reference to soap & towels was made in the report of the Auschwitz escapee Jerzy Tabeau (it was previously also mentioned in a resistance report from December 1942 or January 1943, Mattogno, TBOA, p. 53). He referred to the Bunker extermination sites that "everybody received a towel and soap" (London wurde informiert, p. 135). This procedure was also mentioned by another Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba, who testified in his section of the War Refugee Board report that "two attendants clad in white distribute a towel and a piece of soap to each" in the crematoria.
The false notion that the victims received towels & soap to trick them into the gas chambers was shared by many former prisoners, who provided details of the gassing procedure in the early years after the war:
Another recurring misconception was that the poison gas was introduced into the gas chambers via pipes and shower heads, whereas actually a carrier material soaked with hydrogen cyanide was thrown into the gas chambers manually via openings in the wall or roof (see also Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria):
I have systematically searched through more than 1000 (from more than 3500) protocols obtained by the Hungarian "National Committee for Attending Deportees" (DEGOB), which represent the testimony of 1449 Hungarian (and few Slovak) Jews returning from deportation. These testimonies were made early after the war mostly in June and July 1945, which is a crucial point as knowledge can be expected to change (in any direction) with increasing time after the event.
The vast majority of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, more than 93%, did not or only generically report on mass extermination in the camp. The rest was scarce in details or recollected false rumours circulating among the inmates. The studied testimonies do not remotely reach the level of knowledge and reliability displayed by former Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners or SS men in 1944-1946. The striking difference between the accounts of ordinary prisoners and insiders like the Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners and SS men is powerful confirmation of the veracity of mass extermination in Auschwitz.
About 30% of the deported people, who talked to the DEGOB staff, were not sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but left Hungary to other camps (most through the Austrian border in late 1944). One protocol reproduced on the site is illegible and was likewise ignored (number 351). Of the remaining 999 Auschwitz survivors, more than half (about 56%) did not mention extermination in Auschwitz. This figure can be considered to include those who did not hear about it, but also those who did not believe it as well as those who knew but did not take the opportunity to talk about it. There was obviously no default question from the DEGOB staff on the level of knowledge (see also general background of the protocols).
The average detention time in Auschwitz-Birkenau was about 3 months, but it varied as much as from few hours (for those directly sent to the main camp) to more than 2 years (for a Jewess deported from Slovakia). The proportion of people not reporting on extermination significantly increases with shorter detention time (to about 81% of those who stayed in Birkenau for less than 1 month). On the other hand, among deportees who were imprisoned in Birkenau for more than five months, the figure of those not reporting on extermination drops to about 22%. Not surprisingly, there is some correlation (but no strict relation) between the time experienced in Birkenau and ability to know or willingness and opportunities to talk about mass killings.
Of those who did report on extermination, the vast majority (about 82%) shared only generic knowledge, i.e. generalities such as that people were killed/gassed/burnt/sent to the crematorium or references to outdoor mass cremation. The remaining 18% provided further details of the killing facilities. About 1/3 of these somewhat more detailed testimonies are limited to few elements, such as a sign "desinfection" on a crematorium door or that the gas chambers were camouflaged as baths. The other 2/3 testimonies contain fundamentally false details of the killing and body disposal procedure as well as of the crematoria layout when checked against Jewish Sonderkommando and SS accounts.
 |
| Shared knowledge of mass extermination among 999 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau |
More than half of those 6.5% of the people reporting details of mass extermination belonged to the so called Kanada detail, which took care of the belongings of the deported Jews. It's interesting to look at the knowledge of this specific group of prisoners seperately:
 |
| Shared Knowledge of mass extermination among 80 Hungarian Jews employed in the Kanada detail |
Only about 6% of the Kanada prisoners did not report about extermination, while more than half of them provided details beyond generic knowledge. This is partly because of their far above average detention time in Birkenau (7 months), but which does not entirely and sufficiently explain their better knowledge. Among non-Kanada prisoners, who stayed at least six months in Birkenau and who had the same average detention time of seven months, about 30% and 60% reported nothing or only generics on mass extermination respectively. The comparable high level of knowledge among prisoners from the Kanada detail is explained by their close proximity to crematoria 4 & 5. The Kanada complex was right next to the crematoria 4 site merely separated by a barbed wire and later a camouflage fence. Its workers were those Hungarian Jews in high number which were closest to extermination activities.
None of these 999 Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors - including the Kanada prisoners - was capable to provide a decently detailed and reliable description of the mass extermination sites. I also searched the remaining more than 2000 protocols containing references to "Sonderkommando". It seems fair to assume that most describing details of mass extermination would also mention its Sonderkommando by its proper name. Among these, there are three accounts with reliable and detailed descriptions, who were obviously all genuine eyewitnesses to the killing sites (two from prisoners assigned to the demolition detail taking down the crematoria, which will be worth a separate posting, the other is Miklos Nyiszli, who was assigned to Josef Mengele's section detail in crematorium 2).
The Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners working at the extermination sites were housed in their own isolated block or directly in the crematoria, camouflaged with a thick screen of trees and branches (as was the reactivated Bunker 2 extermination site). They were - with few exceptions - not transferred to other details but executed when no longer needed. It's not that other prisoners were free to move and speak in the camp, but the Sonderkommando was even more isolated from other groups of prisoners. Details of the killing sites were not published in the Birkenau News for everybody to look up or was announced at the next town hall, but had to be transmitted typically via a cascade of individuals secretly. In such a context, it is no surprise but expected that detailed knowledge was poor among ordinary prisoners.
But it might be too simple to explain this solely with the Sonderkommando isolation. Several Kanada workers claimed to have talked to the Sonderkommando guys face to face without being guarded. If true, there had been opportunities to pass on any single detail of the killing to them. This leads to another issue (beyond the scope of this posting), to what extent did the Sonderkommando prisoners want to talk to the Kanada girls about how exactly the poison gas was put into the gas chamber to murder innocent men, women and children. And to what extent did the Kanada girls want to chat about this with the Sonderkommando guys.
Along a similar line, the Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba claimed to have contacted Sonderkommando prisoner Filip Müller prior his escape to learn about the mass murder machinery [Vrba & Bestic, I Cannot Forgive, 1964, p. 175]. It's hard to see how the far above average but nevertheless seriously flawed description in the 1944 escape report by Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler could be possibly based on a detailed discussion between somebody with good memory, which Vrba and Wetzler displayed throughout the report, on the one side and the most veteran Sonderkommando prisoner on the other side. This doesn't fit together. If Vrba talked to any Sonderkommando, then either did they not bother about details, odd enough if the escape was meant to inform the world about the mass murder machinery, or they were too short in time. In any case, the episode found in Müller's semi-fictional memoir that he "described the extermination procedure to them [Vrba & Wetzler] in all its details" (Sonderbehandlung, 1979, p. 193) cannot be historically true.
The Sonderkommando isolation was not perfect. Maintenance details could have gained access to the sites, which is how the Sonderkommando photographs of the crematorium 5 site were passed on. Supply details could have gained access to the sites as well, which is how the 15 years old Yehuda Bacon working in the roll cart detail became familiar with the details of the gas chamber of crematorium 3. Bacon captured the gas chamber well, but his knowledge did not spread very far in the Auschwitz complex. It did not reach any of the many hundreds Hungarian Jews reporting to DEGOB, who had never been at the site themselves. Hence, there was not only a limited flow of details from the extermination sites to ordinary prisoners, but this was also poorly processed and passed further on. And it could not compete with the false rumours spreading among the prisoners.
These false rumours were by no means limited to the Hungarian Jews. From a sample of 42 memoirs (from prisoners detained in the main camp, Monowitz and Birkenau) written between 1945 and 1960 mentioning mass murder in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 50% provided only generic descriptions and 33% were into false rumors. Four authors clearly used post-war sources in their accounts, which are thus no reliable measure of what the authors knew at the time. Only Albert Menasche (1945 - thanks to Andrew E. Mathis for providing me with the relevant text), Eddy de Wind (1946, who attached to his memoir the document USSR-008 quoting himself) and Alfred Fiderkiewicz (1956, who was previously Polish investigator of German war crimes and initiator of the Auschwitz State Museum and may have acquired significant post-war knowledge by the time) provided more or less decent descriptions of the mass killing sites.
One of the most common misconception was the distribution of towels & soap to the gassing victims. Andre Lettich too mentioned that "towels and soap were distributed" to the victims at some Bunker extermination site before the crematoria were operative (Lettich, Trente-quatre Mois dans les camps de concentration, p. 28). Lettich was assigned as doctor to treat Sonderkommando prisoners between January - March 1943. But none of the Sonderkommando prisoners serving at this or any other time has confirmed such practice (in Sonderkommando Filip Müller's book Sonderbehandlung, 1979, p. 128 it reads on a transport from Saloniki that "many had a towel on the arm and a piece of soap in their hand", but the book is demonstrable semi-fictional as well as partly plagarized nor does it say the towels and soap were provided by the crematoria staff).
It was also not mentioned by most of the SS men. An exception is Hans Münch, SS doctor at the Hygiene Institute in Raisko near the Birkenau camp, who wrote in a letter in 1995 (far too late to rule out external influences) that "they gave the victims soap and towels". At the time, the obviously senile 84 years old Münch was suffering from a poor memory as is apparent from an interview conducted by the Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf the same year. Furthermore, Münch admitted that he "cannot imagine how it was practically possible to give everyone a towel and a piece of cake" and he did, in fact, not remember to have seen it ("I cannot see that I have ever seen it...not with my consciousness...after 50 years I should still say if one has seen it or read it or if somebody...").
One of earliest reference to soap & towels was made in the report of the Auschwitz escapee Jerzy Tabeau (it was previously also mentioned in a resistance report from December 1942 or January 1943, Mattogno, TBOA, p. 53). He referred to the Bunker extermination sites that "everybody received a towel and soap" (London wurde informiert, p. 135). This procedure was also mentioned by another Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba, who testified in his section of the War Refugee Board report that "two attendants clad in white distribute a towel and a piece of soap to each" in the crematoria.
The false notion that the victims received towels & soap to trick them into the gas chambers was shared by many former prisoners, who provided details of the gassing procedure in the early years after the war:
Another recurring misconception was that the poison gas was introduced into the gas chambers via pipes and shower heads, whereas actually a carrier material soaked with hydrogen cyanide was thrown into the gas chambers manually via openings in the wall or roof (see also Rebuttal of Mattogno on Auschwitz, Part 2: Gas Introduction at the Crematoria):
The third most common false rumour concerns how the corpses were transported from the gas chamber to the ovens - via a conveyor belt, an underground passage below the gas chamber or in its most fancy variant by tilting the gas chamber's floor:
In conclusion, reliable details of the mass extermination sites were not common knowledge among prisoners in Auschwitz. Most Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 had no or only generic or superficial knowledge on what was going on beyond the camouflage fences. Those who went into more details were mixing it up with false rumours. Only very few Hungarian Jewish prisoners, who gained access to the high security sites as members of the section and demolition detail, could accurately describe the sites and their operation without resorting to false rumours. Although the Hungarian Jews were living and working only up to few to few hundreds of meters from the crematoria, detailed and reliable knowledge on the extermination sites, which reached them was scarce and distorted. The most common false rumours were the distribution of soap & towels, the injection of poison gas through showers - both obviously inferred from the fact that he gas chambers were disguised as shower rooms - and the tilting of the gas chamber's floor to remove the the corpses.
Unfortunately for Holocaust deniers, this result is boosting the credibility of the early Sonderkommando witnesses - the authors of the Sonderkommando handwritings, Henryk Tauber (or Shlomo Dragon or Stanislaw Jankowski), Miklos Nyiszli, Charles Bendel and David Olere - as well as the early SS witnesses such as Pery Broad and Hans Aumeier. If rumours on details of mass extermination were so scarce and different to what they reported, then their independent but reliable and consistent accounts cannot be satisfactorily explained by rumour propagation, but only by first hand experience.