How+were+the+gas+chambers+implemented+in+the+Holocaust?

The gas chambers made execution as easy as the press of a button. Herd the victims in there, make sure the door is closed, and flip a switch. Soon enough, they’re dead. It was quick and efficient, and so it was a logical choice for wartime Germany to use in its extermination camps. But how did the gas chambers come into being?

September 1st, 1939, Hitler sent out a secret memo that condoned the mass killings. It read: //“Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death.” At first, it seemed pretty logical because they took up space and resources. This was titled the Euthanasia Program, or Action T4. Hitler himself recommended to Brandt that carbon monoxide gas be used, which Brandt later described at a “major advance in medical history”// (Hitler, October 1939).

This new innovation became very popular and was instituted at several centers across Germany. Soon the decree expanded to include patient from mental institutions, nursing homes, and later prisoners transferred from concentration camps in Germany and Austria. These people were transferred to the killing centers in buses operated by SS teams wearing white coats – the universal symbol of medicine and healing.

They covered their tracks well. To prevent people from tracing down these soon-to-be victims, the SS often sent them to transit centers in major hospitals to be ‘assessed,’ and then they would be moved again to “special treatment” centers. Families were then sent letters saying that in owing to the wartime conditions, the patients would not be able to be visited. Unfortunately, most of these patients were killed within 24 hours of reaching the center, and their bodies would be cremated en masse. For every person that died, a death certificate was prepared. This gave a false, yet plausible cause of death. An urn of ashes was also sent to the family, though it would be impossible to tell if they were actually the dead person’s real remains.

In 1942, the systematic mass killing in stationary gas chambers began at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. This was done by using carbon monoxide generated by diesel engines. People were ordered into these “showers” with raised arms to allow as many people as possible to fit in with them. The tighter the gas chambers were packed, the more the victims suffocated.

That still wasn’t fast enough, however, and the Nazis continued to look for an even more efficient way to carry out their mass killings. They conducted experiments with Zyklon B, which was used for fumigation, but gassing approximately 600 Soviet POWs and 250 sick prisoners in September of 1941. These Zyklon B pellets were converted to lethal gas when exposed to the air, and provided the quickest gassing method for the impatient Nazis. These soon became the tools of choice for the murders at the camps.

Up to 6,000 Jews a day were gassed at Aushwitz.

Other concentration camps, like Stutthof and Mauthausen, had gas chambers. They were relatively small and used to kill the prisoners the Nazis deemed unfit to work. Again, Zyklon B was the weapon of choice.

To make this atrocity worse, numbers of prisoners were selected from each separate transport to support the main function of the camps: the killing of human beings. The members of these detachments, Arbeitsjuden (literally, “work Jews”) worked in the killing area. They were tasked with removing the bodies from the gas chambers. Initially, they were all buried in mass graves, but in late 1942 and 1943, the Jewish people had to exhume the buried bodies and burn them in giant trenches on makeshift ovens of rail track.

One of the work Jews actually helped with the proceses of execution. They would accompany the Jews into the gas chamber and would remain with them until the door closed. To psychologically maintain the calming effect of the delousing deception, an SS guard would stand at the door as if awaiting them. The work Jews would also try and have small talk with the soon-to-be victims.

That didn’t mean everybody was fooled, however. Some could guess what was about to happen, but most would continue to joke with children or encourage them, despite how scared they were. There were a few instances where some women would suddenly "give the most terrible shrieks while undressing, or tear their hair, or scream like maniacs"; the Sonderkommando immediately took them away for execution via shooting. Some people would give away their friends of the Jewish faith, hoping to be spared – they were not.

The gas chambers were dismantled or destroyed when Soviet troops got close. The gas chamber at Auschwitz I was reconstruction post-war as a memorial, but there was no door; the wall the separated the gas chamber from the washroom was also torn down.

The estimated total of deaths is 2,814,500, but experts beli eve that it is greater.

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