The most famous Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, officially opened this week (June 14) in 1940, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1943 that Auschwitz (and its sister camp, Birkenau/Auschwitz II), became the killing machine that has made it so famous today. That is when the first five crematoria were installed, so by late summer of 1943, these crematoria, which quickly turned the dead victims of Auschwitz’s gas chambers into ashes, were fully operational. That meant the Nazis had finally devised a way to get rid of dead bodies as efficiently as its gas chambers were producing them.
Of course, along the way, there were some design improvements, both minor and major, that increased the efficiency of this murder machinery. One minor change — call it a “Duh” moment — was to design the gas chamber doors so they opened outwards, rather than inwards, because the many dead bodies inside the gas chambers blocked the door’s entrance, making it difficult to push the door inwards.
One major design change resulted in locating the gas chambers and the crematoria on the same floor. Previously, the gas chambers had been located in the basement, with the crematoria located on the first floor, necessitating a time-consuming and inefficient transportation of the dead from floor to floor. Putting them on the same floor streamlined the process.
As a result, by the fall of 1943, Auschwitz and Auschwitz II were murdering nearly 4,500 people a day. They were mostly Jews, but also were prisoners of war from the many nations, especially the Soviet Union, that Germany was fighting. That meant the camps were murdering more than 120,000 people a month. It was, as one historian described it, “extermination on an industrial scale.” And equally heinous, it was not motivated by anger or revenge, or really any emotions at all. This was dispassionate, systematic, efficient and large-scale murder.
And Auschwitz solved another dilemma that had bedeviled the Nazi high command. Of all the arguments among the Nazi leaders over the fate of the Jews, the true measure of their evil was that their longest-running disagreement was not over whether or not to murder the Jews, but whether to murder them right away, or work them to near death and then kill them. Before Auschwitz there were camps that specialized in working the inmates to near death — and then killing them — and camps that exterminated inmates upon arrival. Auschwitz could do both. It had sub camps that productively worked the Jews until they were near death, and it had gas chambers to finish the job.
Meaning that, of the 6 million Jews murdered in the numerous Nazi death camps, Auschwitz alone accounted for approximately 1.4 million of them.
