The end of the gas chambers at Birkenau

At the end of November 1944 the erasing of traces began at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the largest German extermination camp. The gas chambers, in which some one million Jews had been murdered since 1942, had already ceased to operate. Now the SS began dismantling the equipment of Crematoria II and III, pulling down the ruins of Crematorium IV and filling in the pits of human ashes. The date of the decision is usually taken to be 26 November 1944. On that day Heinrich Himmler is said to have ordered the destruction of the gas chambers and crematoria of Birkenau. This is the date given, among others, by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

It is often said that on 26 November Himmler ordered the crematoria and gas chambers of Birkenau to be dismantled and blown up. Three qualifications are needed. First, no written order from Himmler on the matter has survived. His decisions – first to halt the gassing, then to destroy the installations – are known from post-war testimony, especially that of Rudolf Höss and Kurt Becher, and from the course of events in the camp. Second, mass gassing had ended several weeks earlier, at the turn of October and November. Third, in November the buildings were not blown up; their dismantling merely began. Crematoria II and III were not blown up until 20 January 1945, and Crematorium V on 26 January, the day before the Red Army arrived.

The last months of extermination

In the spring and summer of 1944 Birkenau reached the peak of its murderous efficiency. After the German occupation of Hungary, more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews were brought there between mid-May and early July. Most of them died in the gas chambers on the day they arrived. The crematoria could not keep up with burning the bodies, so the SS also burned them in open pits. In August tens of thousands of Jews from the liquidated Łódź Ghetto arrived at the camp. On the night of 2–3 August the SS murdered the last prisoners of the Gypsy camp. SS doctors took part in the selections on the ramp and in the camp hospital, among them Josef Mengele, who had come to Auschwitz in May 1943.

In the autumn there were fewer transports, but the gassing went on. Between the end of September and the end of October 1944 eleven transports arrived from Theresienstadt, carrying some 18,000 people in all. The last of them left Theresienstadt on 28 October and reached Birkenau on 30 October. According to the chronicle of events in the camp compiled by Danuta Czech, most of the deportees were murdered. It is usually regarded as the last transport subjected to a mass selection for death. At that time transports of Slovak Jews were also arriving at Auschwitz from the camp at Sereď; deportations from Slovakia had been resumed after the outbreak of the Slovak National Uprising. Some studies state that some of the people from a transport that arrived on 3 November still died in a gas chamber. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum states in general terms that the mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers ended in November 1944.

A decision without a document

The reasons for Himmler’s decision and its precise timing are disputed by historians. No written order has survived. There is nothing unusual in that: the most important decisions on extermination were usually passed on orally or in camouflaged language, and at the end of the war the SS systematically destroyed its own archives. The dates given in the literature therefore differ. Some authors write of an order to halt the gassing at the end of October or the beginning of November. Others point to 25 or 26 November as the day of the order to destroy the extermination installations.

The most important accounts come from men who after the war had reasons to present their own role in a favourable light. Kurt Becher, an SS-Standartenführer active in Hungary, testified to Allied investigators at Nuremberg in 1946 that it was he who had persuaded Himmler to issue a ban on any further killing of Jews. He dated this decision to the period from mid-September to mid-October 1944. Becher had earlier conducted talks on Himmler’s behalf with representatives of Jewish organisations, among others in Switzerland, about exchanging Jews for money and goods. Historians therefore treat his testimony with caution. Höss, who in 1944 worked at the concentration camp headquarters in the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, recalled in notes written in a Kraków prison that in the autumn of 1944 Himmler had ordered the extermination to stop. His account too is imprecise about dates.

From the testimony and the course of events, however, Himmler’s motives can be reconstructed. The Red Army stood on the Vistula and in the Baranów–Sandomierz bridgehead, less than 200 kilometres from Oświęcim. In July the Germans had left the gas chambers and crematorium almost intact in abandoned Majdanek. Photographs and reports from that camp went round the world, and Himmler did not want this to happen again. He was also seeking, increasingly on his own initiative, contact with the Western powers, and hoped that the Jews still in the hands of the SS might become a bargaining chip. There was also a practical factor. Most of the Jews of occupied Europe had already been murdered, and the Reich needed every pair of hands for work in the armaments industry.

The end of the gassing did not mean the end of the killing. In November 1944 columns of tens of thousands of Jews set out on foot from Budapest, driven towards the Austrian border to build fortifications. Their dispatch was organised by Adolf Eichmann. In the concentration camps deep inside the Reich prisoners continued to die in large numbers from hunger, disease, exhaustion and executions.

Erasing the traces

Erasing the traces of its crimes had a history in the SS. From 1942 Paul Blobel’s special commando, as part of the secret Aktion 1005, dug up mass graves in the occupied territories and burned the bodies. This was done at Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec and Babi Yar. In the autumn of 1942 the bodies of more than a hundred thousand people previously buried in pits near the makeshift gas chambers at Birkenau, the so-called bunkers, were exhumed and burned. At the end of 1944 it was the turn of the installations themselves, which were meant to ensure that no trace of the victims would remain.

The work proceeded on several fronts. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in November and December 1944 the Germans dismantled the technical equipment of the gas chambers and furnace halls of Crematoria II and III. Most of it was shipped deeper into the Reich – according to historians’ findings, to the camps of Gross-Rosen and Mauthausen, among others. The ventilation systems and part of the roofs were also removed, and the walls were prepared for demolition. The ruins of Crematorium IV, burned down on 7 October during the Sonderkommando revolt, were razed to the foundations by the end of the year. In the autumn the second of the bunkers, the so-called little white house, which had still been used in the summer to gas Hungarian Jews, was also pulled down. Prisoners filled in the pits of ashes and unburned remains, and the ground was levelled and sown with grass. For the demolition the SS used a commando made up mainly of women prisoners and of the last members of the Sonderkommando. In the offices card indexes, transport lists and other documents were burned. Among them went up in flames the lists of names of Jews deported to Auschwitz to their deaths.

One crematorium was kept in operation. Crematorium V, with its gas chambers, worked until the second half of January 1945. It was used to burn the bodies of prisoners who had died in the camp or been shot at the execution site. Some accounts state that the gas chamber was used for the last time as late as 28 November. The Museum gives no such date.

The end of November also brought an administrative reorganisation of the complex. On 25 November 1944 Birkenau ceased to be a separate camp and was merged again with the main camp under the name KL Auschwitz, while the camp at Monowitz became the independent KL Monowitz. The previous commandant of Birkenau, Josef Kramer, took command of Bergen-Belsen in December. The whole was run by Richard Baer, commandant of the main camp since May 1944.

Evacuation and death marches

The removal of prisoners also began. From August 1944 the SS gradually transferred them to camps deeper inside the Reich, especially Poles, Russians and Czechs fit for work. According to the Museum, some 65,000 people had been moved in this way by mid-January 1945. Several tens of thousands of prisoners nevertheless still remained in the Auschwitz complex, and work went on until the last days on the demolition, in the industrial sub-camps and in the armaments plants of Upper Silesia.

On 12 January 1945 the Red Army launched the Vistula–Oder offensive. On 17 January the last roll call was held at Auschwitz, at which 67,012 prisoners were counted. Over the following days the SS marched some 56,000 people out of the main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz and the sub-camps. They went on foot, in frost and snow, mainly to Wodzisław Śląski and Gliwice, from where they were taken in open goods wagons to camps in the Reich. Stragglers and those too weak to walk were shot on the spot by the SS men. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum estimates that between 9,000 and 15,000 prisoners died during these death marches and transports. Some members of the Sonderkommando managed to hide among the other prisoners in the columns and survived. Among them was Henryk Mandelbaum.

The SS intended to kill the sick and exhausted who had been left behind, more than 9,000 people, but in the haste of the retreat it did not manage to do so. From 18 January records were burned. On 20 January Crematoria II and III were blown up, and on 23 January the warehouses of looted property, the so-called Kanada, were set on fire. Crematorium V was blown up on 26 January. On 27 January 1945 soldiers of the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered Oświęcim. In the main camp, Birkenau and Monowitz they found some 7,000 prisoners. Despite medical care, many of them died in the weeks that followed.

Place in the history of the war

The destruction of the gas chambers of Birkenau closes the most criminal chapter of German policy towards the Jews. The murder of all the Jews of Europe had been decided upon, and its implementation coordinated at the Wannsee Conference. Auschwitz, which in the spring of 1941 Himmler had ordered to be expanded as a forced-labour camp, became the main site of this crime in 1942–1944. According to the findings of Franciszek Piper of the Auschwitz Museum, at least 1.3 million people were deported to the camp and at least 1.1 million died there. About a million of those murdered were Jews. Besides them some 70,000–75,000 Poles, some 21,000 Roma and Sinti, some 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war and over ten thousand prisoners of other nationalities perished. By the time the SS began pulling down the crematoria, all that was left of European Jewry was the part that had survived in hiding, in labour camps and in territories already liberated.

The attempt to erase the traces failed. In the ruins of the crematoria the foundations, stairs and roofs of the gas chambers remained recognisable. Manuscripts buried by Sonderkommando prisoners survived in the ground. Witnesses and surviving prisoners remained alive, and perpetrators also fell into Allied hands. Parts of the camp’s construction records, together with orders placed with firms supplying the furnaces and Zyklon B, survived in the archives and became evidence in post-war trials. Rudolf Höss was tried by the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw and hanged on 16 April 1947 on the grounds of the main camp. Himmler committed suicide in British captivity on 23 May 1945. Kurt Becher never stood trial. After the war he became a wealthy businessman in Bremen.

In 1947 the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim was established on the site of the camp. The ruins of Crematoria II and III were not rebuilt. They were left in the state in which the Germans had left them, as evidence of the crime and as a place of remembrance. In 2005 the UN proclaimed the day of the camp’s liberation, 27 January, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.