Sonderkommando

Members of the camp Sonderkommandos were usually picked on arrival, with no warning of what their work would be. They removed bodies from the gas chambers, burned the corpses and sorted the victims' belongings; the killing itself was done by the SS. As witnesses to the crime they were periodically murdered and replaced. At Birkenau the squad numbered over 900 men in 1944. Prisoners buried manuscripts describing the killings near the crematoria, and on 7 October 1944 they revolted and set Crematorium IV on fire; about 450 of them were killed.

In its second sense a Sonderkommando was a German special-purpose unit, such as Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, which shot Jews at Babi Yar, or Sonderkommando 1005, which removed the traces of mass graves.