SS garrison Rudolf Höss, born in
Baden-Baden in 1901, was named the first commandant of Auschwitz when
Heinrich Himmler ordered on 27 April 1940 that the camp be established. Living with his wife and children in a two-story
stucco house near the commandant's and administration building, he served as commandant until 11 November 1943, with
Josef Kramer as his deputy. Succeeded as commandant by
Arthur Liebehenschel, Höss joined the SS
Business and Administration Head Office in Oranienburg as director of Amt DI, a post that made him deputy of the camps inspectorate.
Richard Baer became commandant of Auschwitz I on 11 May 1944 and
Fritz Hartjenstein of Auschwitz II from 22 November 1943, followed by Josef Kramer from 15 May 1944 until the camp's liquidation in January 1945.
Heinrich Schwarz was commandant of Auschwitz III from the point at which it became an autonomous camp in November 1943 until its liquidation. Höss returned to Auschwitz between 8 May and 29 July 1944 as the local SS garrison commander (
Standortältester) to oversee the arrival of Hungary's Jews, which made him the superior officer of all the commandants of the Auschwitz camps. According to
Aleksander Lasik, about 6,335 people (6,161 of them men) worked for the SS at Auschwitz over the course of the camp's existence; 4.2 percent were officers, 26.1 percent non-commissioned officers, and 69.7 percent rank and file. In March 1941, there were 700 SS guards; in June 1942, 2,000; and in August 1944, 3,342. At its peak in January 1945, 4,480 SS men and 71 SS women worked in Auschwitz; the higher number is probably attributable to the logistics of evacuating the camp. Female guards were known as SS supervisors (
SS-Aufseherinnen). Most of the staff were from Germany or Austria, but as the war progressed, increasing numbers of
Volksdeutsche from other countries, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states, joined the SS at Auschwitz. Not all were ethnically German. Guards were also recruited from Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Camp guards, around three quarters of the SS personnel, were members of the
SS-Totenkopfverbände (
death's head units). Other SS staff worked in the medical or political departments, or in the economic administration, which was responsible for clothing and other supplies, including the property of dead prisoners. The SS viewed Auschwitz as a comfortable posting; being there meant they had avoided the front and had access to the victims' property.
Functionaries and Sonderkommando Certain prisoners, at first non-Jewish Germans but later Jews and non-Jewish Poles, were assigned positions of authority as
Funktionshäftlinge (functionaries), which gave them access to better housing and food. The
Lagerprominenz (camp elite) included
Blockschreiber (barracks clerk),
Kapo (overseer),
Stubendienst (barracks orderly), and
Kommandierte (trusties). Wielding tremendous power over other prisoners, the functionaries developed a reputation as sadists. Very few were prosecuted after the war, because of the difficulty of determining which atrocities had been performed by order of the SS. Although the SS oversaw the murders at each gas chamber, the forced labor portion of the work was done by prisoners known from 1942 as the
Sonderkommando (special squad). These were mostly Jews but they included groups such as Soviet POWs. In 1940–1941 when there was one gas chamber, there were 20 such prisoners, in late 1943 there were 400, and by 1944 during the Holocaust in Hungary the number had risen to 874. The
Sonderkommando removed goods and corpses from the incoming trains, guided victims to the dressing rooms and gas chambers, removed their bodies afterwards, and took their jewelry, hair, dental work, and any precious metals from their teeth, all of which was sent to Germany. Once the bodies were stripped of anything valuable, the
Sonderkommando burned them in the crematoria. Because they were witnesses to the mass murder, the
Sonderkommando lived separately from the other prisoners, although this rule was not applied to the non-Jews among them. Their quality of life was further improved by their access to the property of new arrivals, which they traded within the camp, including with the SS. Nevertheless, their life expectancy was short; they were regularly murdered and replaced. About 100 survived to the camp's liquidation. They were forced on a death march and by train to the camp at
Mauthausen, where three days later they were asked to step forward during roll call. No one did, and because the SS did not have their records, several of them survived.
Tattoos and triangles Uniquely at Auschwitz, prisoners were tattooed with a serial number, on their left breast for Soviet prisoners of war and on the left arm for civilians. Categories of prisoner were distinguishable by triangular pieces of cloth (German:
Winkel) sewn onto on their jackets below their prisoner number. Political prisoners
(Schutzhäftlinge or Sch), mostly Poles, had a red triangle, while criminals (
Berufsverbrecher or BV) were mostly German and wore green. Asocial prisoners (
Asoziale or Aso), which included vagrants, prostitutes and the Roma, wore black. Purple was for Jehovah's Witnesses (
Internationale Bibelforscher-Vereinigung or IBV)'s and pink for gay men, who were mostly German. An estimated 5,000–15,000 gay men prosecuted under German Penal Code Section 175 (proscribing sexual acts between men) were detained in concentration camps, of whom an unknown number were sent to Auschwitz. Jews wore a
yellow badge, the shape of the
Star of David, overlaid by a second triangle if they also belonged to a second category. The nationality of the inmate was indicated by a letter stitched onto the cloth. A racial hierarchy existed, with German prisoners at the top. Next were non-Jewish prisoners from other countries. Jewish prisoners were at the bottom.
Transports inside Auschwitz II-Birkenau, near the gatehouse, used to transport deportees, 2014 Deportees were brought to Auschwitz crammed in wretched conditions into goods or cattle wagons, arriving near a railway station or at one of several dedicated trackside ramps, including one next to Auschwitz I. The
Altejudenrampe (old Jewish ramp), part of the Oświęcim freight railway station, was used from 1942 to 1944 for Jewish transports. Lunch was three-quarters of a litre of watery soup at midday, reportedly foul-tasting, with meat in the soup four times a week and vegetables (mostly potatoes and
rutabaga) three times. The evening meal was 300 grams of bread, often moldy, part of which the inmates were expected to keep for breakfast the next day, with a tablespoon of cheese or marmalade, or 25 grams of margarine or sausage. Prisoners engaged in hard labour were given extra rations. A second roll call took place at seven in the evening, in the course of which prisoners might be hanged or flogged. If a prisoner was missing, the others had to remain standing until the absentee was found or the reason for the absence discovered, even if it took hours. On 6 July 1940, roll call lasted 19 hours because a Polish prisoner,
Tadeusz Wiejowski, had escaped; following an escape in 1941, a group of prisoners was picked out from the escapee's barracks and sent to block 11 to be starved to death. After roll call, prisoners retired to their blocks for the night and received their bread rations. Then they had some free time to use the washrooms and receive their mail, unless they were Jews: Jews were not allowed to receive mail. Curfew ("nighttime quiet") was marked by a gong at nine o'clock. Inmates slept in long rows of brick or wooden bunks, or on the floor, lying in and on their clothes and shoes to prevent them from being stolen. The wooden bunks had blankets and paper mattresses filled with wood shavings; in the brick barracks, inmates lay on straw. According to
Miklós Nyiszli: Sunday was not a workday, but prisoners had to clean the barracks and take their weekly shower, and were allowed to write (in German) to their families, although the SS censored the mail. Inmates who did not speak German would trade bread for help.
Observant Jews tried to keep track of the
Hebrew calendar and
Jewish holidays, including
Shabbat, and the
weekly Torah portion. No watches, calendars, or clocks were permitted in the camp. Only two Jewish calendars made in Auschwitz survived to the end of the war. Prisoners kept track of the days in other ways, such as obtaining information from newcomers.
Women's camp About 30 percent of the registered inmates were female. The first mass transport of women, 999 non-Jewish German women from the
Ravensbrück concentration camp, arrived on 26 March 1942. Classified as criminal, asocial and political, they were brought to Auschwitz as founder functionaries of the women's camp. Rudolf Höss wrote of them: "It was easy to predict that these beasts would mistreat the women over whom they exercised power ... Spiritual suffering was completely alien to them." They were given serial numbers 1–999. The women's guard from Ravensbrück,
Johanna Langefeld, became the first Auschwitz women's camp
Lagerführerin. A second mass transport of women, 999 Jews from
Poprad, Slovakia, arrived on the same day. According to
Danuta Czech, this was the first registered transport sent to Auschwitz by the
Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) office IV B4, known as the Jewish Office, led by SS
Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann. (Office IV was the
Gestapo.) A third transport of 798 Jewish women from
Bratislava, Slovakia, followed on 28 March. Women were at first held in blocks 1–10 of Auschwitz I, but from 6 August 1942, 13,000 inmates were transferred to a new women's camp (
Frauenkonzentrationslager or FKL) in Auschwitz II. This consisted at first of 15 brick and 15 wooden barracks in sector (
Bauabschnitt) BIa; it was later extended into BIb, and by October 1943 it held 32,066 women. In 1943–1944, about 11,000 women were also housed in the
Gypsy family camp, as were several thousand in the
Theresienstadt family camp. Conditions in the women's camp were so poor that when a group of male prisoners arrived to set up an infirmary in October 1942, their first task, according to researchers from the Auschwitz Museum, was to distinguish the corpses from the women who were still alive.
Gisella Perl, a Romanian-Jewish gynecologist and inmate of the women's camp, wrote in 1948: Langefeld was succeeded as
Lagerführerin in October 1942 by SS
Oberaufseherin Maria Mandl, who developed a reputation for cruelty. Höss hired men to oversee the female supervisors, first SS
Obersturmführer Paul Müller, then SS
Hauptsturmführer Franz Hössler. Mandl and Hössler were executed after the war. Sterilisation experiments were carried out in barracks 30 by a German gynecologist,
Carl Clauberg, and another German doctor,
Horst Schumann.
Medical experiments, block 10 , Auschwitz I, where medical experiments were performed on women German doctors performed a variety of experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. SS doctors tested the efficacy of
X-rays as a
sterilization device by administering large doses to female prisoners.
Carl Clauberg injected chemicals into women's
uteruses in an effort to glue them shut. Prisoners were infected with spotted fever for vaccination research and exposed to toxic substances to study the effects. In one experiment,
Bayer—then part of
IG Farben—paid RM 150 each for 150 female inmates from Auschwitz (the camp had asked for RM 200 per woman), who were transferred to a Bayer facility to test an anesthetic. A Bayer employee wrote to Rudolf Höss: "The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price." The Bayer research was led at Auschwitz by
Helmuth Vetter of Bayer/IG Farben, who was also an Auschwitz physician and SS captain, and by Auschwitz physicians
Friedrich Entress and
Eduard Wirths. , Nuremberg, 1946–1947 The most infamous doctor at Auschwitz was
Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death", who worked in Auschwitz II from 30 May 1943, at first in the
gypsy family camp. Interested in performing research on
identical twins,
dwarfs, and those with hereditary disease, Mengele set up a kindergarten in barracks 29 and 31 for children he was experimenting on, and for all Romani children under six, where they were given better food rations. From May 1944, he would select twins and dwarfs from among the new arrivals during "selection", reportedly calling for twins with "
Zwillinge heraus!" ("twins step forward!"). He and other doctors (the latter prisoners) would measure the twins' body parts, photograph them, and subject them to dental, sight and hearing tests, x-rays, blood tests, surgery, and blood transfusions between them. Then he would have them killed and dissected.
Kurt Heissmeyer, another German doctor and SS officer, took 20 Polish Jewish children from Auschwitz to use in
pseudoscientific experiments at the
Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, where he injected them with the
tuberculosis bacilli to test a cure for tuberculosis. In April 1945, the children were murdered by hanging to conceal the project. A
Jewish skeleton collection was obtained from among a pool of 115 Jewish inmates, chosen for their perceived stereotypical racial characteristics.
Rudolf Brandt and
Wolfram Sievers, general manager of the
Ahnenerbe (a Nazi research institute), delivered the skeletons to the collection of the Anatomy Institute at the
Reichsuniversität Straßburg in
Alsace-Lorraine. The collection was sanctioned by
Heinrich Himmler and under the direction of
August Hirt. Ultimately 87 of the inmates were shipped to
Natzweiler-Struthof and murdered in August 1943. Brandt and Sievers were executed in 1948 after being convicted during the
Doctors' trial, part of the
Subsequent Nuremberg trials.
Punishment, block 11 and the "death wall"
(left), Auschwitz I, 2000 Prisoners could be beaten and killed by guards and
kapos for the slightest infraction of the rules. Polish historian Irena Strzelecka writes that
kapos were given nicknames that reflected their sadism: "Bloody", "Iron", "The Strangler", "The Boxer". Based on the 275 extant reports of punishment in the Auschwitz archives, Strzelecka lists common infractions: returning a second time for food at mealtimes, removing one's gold teeth to buy bread, breaking into the pigsty to steal the pigs' food, putting one's hands into one's pockets. Flogging during rollcall was common. A flogging table called "the goat" immobilised prisoners' feet in a box, while they stretched themselves across the table. Prisoners had to count out the lashes—"25 mit besten Dank habe ich erhalten" ("25 received with many thanks")— and if they got the figure wrong, the flogging resumed from the beginning. Punishment by "the post" involved tying prisoners' hands behind their backs with chains attached to hooks, then raising the chains so the prisoners were left dangling by the wrists. If their shoulders were too damaged afterwards to work, they might be sent to the gas chamber. Prisoners were subjected to the post for helping a prisoner who had been beaten, and for picking up a cigarette butt. To extract information from inmates, guards would force their heads onto the stove, and hold them there, burning their faces and eyes. Known as block 13 until 1941, block 11 of Auschwitz I was the prison within the prison, reserved for inmates suspected of resistance activities. Cell 22 in block 11 was a windowless
standing cell (
Stehbunker). Split into four sections, each section measured less than and held four prisoners, who entered it through a hatch near the floor. There was a vent for air, covered by a perforated sheet. Strzelecka writes that prisoners might have to spend several nights in cell 22; Wiesław Kielar spent four weeks in it for breaking a pipe. Several rooms in block 11 were deemed the
Polizei-Ersatz-Gefängnis Myslowitz in Auschwitz (Auschwitz branch of the police station at
Mysłowice). There were also
Sonderbehandlung cases ("special treatment") for Poles and others regarded as dangerous to Nazi Germany.
Death wall The courtyard between blocks 10 and 11, known as the "death wall", served as an execution area, including for Poles in the General Government area who had been sentenced to death by a criminal court. The first executions, by shooting inmates in the back of the head, took place at the death wall on 11 November 1941, Poland's
National Independence Day. The 151 accused were led to the wall one at a time, stripped naked and with their hands tied behind their backs.
Danuta Czech noted that a "clandestine
Catholic mass" was said the following Sunday on the second floor of Block 4 in Auschwitz I, in a narrow space between bunks. An estimated 4,500 Polish political prisoners were executed at the death wall, including members of the camp resistance. An additional 10,000 Poles were brought to the camp to be executed without being registered. About 1,000 Soviet prisoners of war died by execution, although this is a rough estimate. A Polish government-in-exile report stated that 11,274 prisoners and 6,314 prisoners of war had been executed. Rudolf Höss wrote that "execution orders arrived in an unbroken stream". According to SS officer
Perry Broad, "[s]ome of these walking skeletons had spent months in the stinking cells, where not even animals would be kept, and they could barely manage to stand straight. And yet, at that last moment, many of them shouted 'Long live Poland', or 'Long live freedom'." The dead included Colonel
Jan Karcz and Major
Edward Gött-Getyński, executed on 25 January 1943 with 51 others suspected of resistance activities.
Józef Noji, the Polish long-distance runner, was executed on 15 February that year. In October 1944, 200
Sonderkommando were executed for their part in the
Sonderkommando revolt.
Family camps Gypsy family camp children,
Mulfingen, Germany, 1943; the children were studied by
Eva Justin and later sent to Auschwitz. A separate camp for the
Roma, the
Zigeunerfamilienlager ("Gypsy family camp"), was set up in the BIIe sector of Auschwitz II-Birkenau in February 1943. For unknown reasons, they were not subject to selection and families were allowed to stay together. The first transport of
German Roma arrived on 26 February that year. There had been a small number of Romani inmates before that; two Czech Romani prisoners, Ignatz and Frank Denhel, tried to escape in December 1942, the latter successfully, and a Polish Romani woman, Stefania Ciuron, arrived on 12 February 1943 and escaped in April.
Josef Mengele,
the Holocaust's most infamous physician, worked in the gypsy family camp from 30 May 1943 when he began his work in Auschwitz. The Auschwitz registry (
Hauptbücher) shows that 20,946 Roma were registered prisoners, and another 3,000 are thought to have entered unregistered. On 22 March 1943, one transport of 1,700
Polish Sinti and Roma was gassed on arrival because of illness, as was a second group of 1,035 on 25 May 1943. The SS tried to liquidate the camp on 16 May 1944, but the Roma fought them, armed with knives and iron pipes, and the SS retreated. Shortly after this, the SS removed nearly 2,908 from the family camp to work, and on 2 August 1944 gassed the other 2,897. Ten thousand remain unaccounted for.
Theresienstadt family camp The SS deported around 18,000 Jews to Auschwitz from the
Theresienstadt Ghetto in
Terezín,
Czechoslovakia, beginning on 8 September 1943 with a transport of 2,293 male and 2,713 female prisoners. Placed in sector BIIb as a "family camp", they were allowed to keep their belongings, wear their own clothes, and write letters to family; they did not have their hair shaved and were not subjected to selection. Correspondence between
Adolf Eichmann's office and the
International Red Cross suggests that the Germans set up the camp to cast doubt on reports, in time for a planned Red Cross visit to Auschwitz, that mass murder was taking place there. The women and girls were placed in odd-numbered barracks and the men and boys in even-numbered. An infirmary was set up in barracks 30 and 32, and barracks 31 became a school and kindergarten. The somewhat better living conditions were nevertheless inadequate; 1,000 members of the family camp were dead within six months. Two other groups of 2,491 and 2,473 Jews arrived from Theresienstadt in the family camp on 16 and 20 December 1943. On 8 March 1944, 3,791 of the prisoners (men, women and children) were sent to the gas chambers; the men were taken to crematorium III and the women later to crematorium II. Some of the groups were reported to have sung
Hatikvah and the Czech national anthem on the way. Before they were murdered, they had been asked to write postcards to relatives, postdated to 25–27 March. Several twins were held back for medical experiments. The
Czechoslovak government-in-exile initiated diplomatic manoeuvers to save the remaining Czech Jews after its representative in Bern received the
Vrba-Wetzler report, written by two escaped prisoners,
Rudolf Vrba and
Alfred Wetzler, which warned that the remaining family-camp inmates would be gassed soon. The BBC also became aware of the report; its German service broadcast news of the family-camp murders during its women's programme on 16 June 1944, warning: "All those responsible for such massacres from top downwards will be called to account." The Red Cross
visited Theresienstadt in June 1944 and were persuaded by the SS that no one was being deported from there. The following month, about 2,000 women from the family camp were selected to be moved to other camps and 80 boys were moved to the men's camp; the remaining 7,000 were gassed between 10 and 12 July. ==Selection and extermination process==