The extermination of European Jews and other categories of people considered as “unworthy of living” by Hitler, such as Tziganes, political opponents, homosexuals, handicapped people and those deemed « unsociable », was established in the national-socialist concentration camps through extreme treatment (exhaustion by hunger, work, beatings, cold, total lack of care).
This was not sufficient to achieve the Nazi goal. Various experimental approaches to « mass murder » were rapidly put in place to solve the following question : how to kill millions of human-beings and get rid of their bodies in the shortest possible time ? The results of these trials were transmitted to Himmler who was then establishing them in camps that were becoming extermination camps, i.e. Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek. Thus, the process of asphyxia by trucks exhaust fumes became operational in December 1941 in Chelmno where the Lodz ghetto was liquidated. These camps became « Todesfabriken » (All.), « Tovarna na smart » (Ch.), « death factories » ; it was necessary to find employees to work there ; these were the Sonderkommandos (SK).
Upon their arrival at the extermination camps, the convoy deportees, exhausted by frequently exhausting journeys, were immediately « selected ». That is to say, sorted into two groups, the first who would initially go to the gas chambers and then to the crematorium furnaces, and the second group who were initially spared. In the first group, SS doctors grouped all the physically weak (most of the women, children and elderly people). The second group (often only a small fraction) was then sorted into various work commandos, occasionally based on the deportees’ personal skills. Among the prisoners in this group, young and sturdy men were assigned to the Sonderkommandos, meaning "special commandos". The understated expressions used by the Nazis to hide their horrors are well known; in this way, the duty of “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung) was imposed on the “special commandos”, leading to the “final solution to the Jew issue” (die Endlösung der Judenfrage). Special, they certainly were.
In Auschwitz, then in Birkenau, these men discovered with horror the crematoriums (consisting of the undressing room, the gas chambers and the furnaces) which would become their workplace. Frequently their first hours were unimaginably violent as they would be required to take out their wives, sisters, various family members and friends from the gas chambers to incinerate them. None of the SK members should have survived : they were easily « liquidated » and replaced by a selection of the newcomers whose first job would be to eliminate the bodies of their predecessors. None should be allowed to survive as they knew too much. Their testimonies today are (or should be?) all the more precious as nobody else can tell what they knew. But they were blamed for that which has been imposed on them.
How to come back to life after the darkness of the camps ? How to become a human being again in one’s own eyes and in someone else’s, especially if he holds you responsible for the terror that you have lived through, or even categorizes you among the extermination collaborators and torturers ? How to live with yourself with respect to what you had to do ? How to cope with the horrific images that will haunt you forever and that you are however ashamed of formulating ? These images that scream in your head and that nobody else can gather the courage to hear ? These images that you cannot find the strength to express and that you could not express as the words do not exist ?
This site is especially dedicated to these men. It only studies Auschwitz, even if some aspects are of course applicable to other extermination camps. It is built by gathering and connecting the scattered knowledge of the human and material aspects of dealing with the SK. It is limited to this aspect amongst the considerable body of knowledge and studies that cover all of the Shoah. With this site I would like to hear everything that could be said and try to understand everything that can be understood, therefore laying my insignificant small stone on the grave and ash of all this suffering. Listen and hear.
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