What do gas chambers look like

At eleven o'clock in the morning, witness went on, the chief of the political bureau would arrive on his motor-cycle to say that a new batch of prisoners had arrived.

There would be between and 1, of them, some on foot and others, usually too ill to walk, in tip-up trucks, from which, to the amusement of the drivers, they were spilled out without warning.

They were taken into the courtyard or, in winter, to a large hall of the crematorium and required to undress under the pretext that they were to take a bath followed by hot coffee. Then came a wait for the gas to arrive, said the witness.

Raising his voice, he exclaimed that for a doctor the greatest insult was to have the cylinders delivered in a Red Cross ambulance in which, on occasion, he had seen the prisoner Klein. Blows at victims Then the doors of the two-roofed gas chambers would be opened and the victims, who by this time realised that they were going to their death, herded in with blows from whips and sticks.

Finally the guards would succeed in locking the doors. This goes on for two minutes-then complete silence, nothing more. Bendel, the main task of the special Kommando began. With the opening of the doors the bodies, tightly jammed inside, would fall out.

In crematorium I, they undressed either in the yard surrounded by a wall or in the antechamber. Wooden barracks were erected for this purpose at bunkers 1 and 2. There were special undressing rooms at crematoria II-V. When large numbers of transports were arriving in , the people assigned to death in the gas chamber in crematorium V also disrobed in the open air.

After the Sonderkommando was quartered in the undressing room in crematorium IV, the people sent to die there undressed in a specially constructed barracks. The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware of what awaited them. It was put back into use in the spring of , at the time of the extermination of the Hungarian Jews. The construction of 4 large gas chambers and crematoria began in Birkenau in They went into operation between March 22 and June , The gas chambers at crematoria II and III, like the undressing rooms, were located underground, while those at crematoria IV and V stood at ground level.

About 2 thousand people at a time could be put to death in each of them. According to calculations made by the Zentralbauleitung on June 28, , the crematoria could burn 4, corpses per day—1, each in crematoria II and III, and each in crematoria IV and V. This meant that the crematoria could burn over 1.

Prisoners assigned to do the burning stated that the daily capacity of the four crematoria in Birkenau was higher—about 8 thousand corpses. The construction of another facility according to a new design, crematorium VI, never progressed beyond the planning stage. In principle, all Jews classified because of their age or physical condition as unfit for labor were subject to immediate extermination directly after their arrival in the camp, without being registered or assigned a number.

In addition to the Jews, a certain number of Soviet POWs, estimated by witnesses as several thousand men, were killed with gas. A certain number of Poles were also killed in the gas chamber.