The Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz

In the early afternoon of Saturday 7 October 1944, in the yard of Crematorium IV at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, prisoners of the Sonderkommando fell upon the SS men who had come to select another group of them for death, attacking them with hammers, axes and stones. The men the Germans had forced to operate the gas chambers and crematoria – almost all of them Jews – set fire to the building in which they worked, and the crew of the nearby Crematorium II cut through the wire and fled the camp. Within a few hours the SS had regained control. The Sonderkommando revolt was the largest armed action by prisoners in the history of Auschwitz and – after the revolt at Treblinka in August 1943 and the Sobibór uprising in October 1943 – the third Jewish uprising in a German killing centre.

It is often said that more than 450 prisoners were killed in the suppression of the revolt, as well as many others who escaped from the camp in the confusion. This needs qualifying. According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the direct result of the revolt was the death of about 450 Sonderkommando prisoners – those killed in the fighting, those shot after it had been put down and those gunned down during the pursuit – and of three SS men. The escapees are therefore not a separate, additional group of victims but part of that figure, and no one managed to escape from the camp for good: the SS caught and killed everyone who got beyond the wire while they were still within the zone around the camp.

The Sonderkommando

The Sonderkommando (“special detachment”) was the most tragic group of prisoners in the entire camp system. Its members – chosen by the SS from among the young, strong men in the incoming Jewish transports – had to lead people into the undressing rooms, drag the bodies out of the gas chambers, pull out gold teeth, cut off the women’s hair and burn the corpses in the crematorium ovens or in pits. Refusal meant immediate death. They lived in isolation from the rest of the camp, at first in a separate block in section BIId and from the summer of 1944 in the lofts and rooms of the crematoria themselves; they received better food and could keep some of the belongings of the murdered. For all this they paid with the knowledge that they were the bearers of a secret the Germans did not intend to leave alive.

From time to time the SS murdered part of the detachment and replaced it with new prisoners. The four large crematoria with gas chambers (numbered II–V), which had come into operation in the spring of 1943, were run from 1944 by SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, while the two largest were managed day to day by SS-Oberscharführer Erich Muhsfeldt (PL). The commandant of Birkenau at that time was SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer.

Summer 1944: Hungary and Łódź

In the spring and summer of 1944 the Sonderkommando grew to its largest size in the camp’s history. After the German occupation of Hungary, more than 430,000 Jews were deported from there to Auschwitz between mid-May and early July, most of them murdered on the day they arrived. The operation was directed by Rudolf Höss, who had been brought back to the camp; a new railway siding was laid into Birkenau right up to the crematoria, and because the ovens could not keep pace, bodies were also burned in open-air pits. The detachment then numbered more than 900 men. In August came transports from the Łódź Ghetto, which was being liquidated; during the night of 2–3 August the SS murdered the last prisoners of the Gypsy family camp, and in the autumn transports from Theresienstadt and Slovakia were still being sent to the gas chambers.

The members of the Sonderkommando knew well what had happened to their predecessors. They also knew that when the transports dwindled, the SS would begin to get rid of them. And so it happened: according to the Auschwitz Museum, at the end of September 1944 the SS selected about 200 prisoners of the detachment on the pretext of a transfer to another camp and murdered them. There could no longer be any doubt that the rest would share their fate.

The conspiracy and the gunpowder from the Union factory

A resistance network had long existed within the Sonderkommando. Its leaders included the kapo Jakub Kamiński; Zalmen Gradowski from Suwałki; Leib Langfus, a former dayan (rabbinical judge) from Maków Mazowiecki; Zalmen Lewental from Ciechanów; Yankiel Handelsman; and a group of Greek Jews. It was in contact with the camp resistance movement – the international Auschwitz Combat Group (Kampfgruppe Auschwitz), whose leadership included Poles and Austrian communists. A joint uprising of the whole camp was planned, combined with the destruction of the crematoria and a mass escape; the date was postponed several times, and in the end the leadership of the Combat Group, bearing in mind the proximity of the front and fearing a massacre of tens of thousands of prisoners, abandoned the plan. In the view of the Auschwitz Museum’s historians, it was precisely this divergence of interests – the Sonderkommando prisoners had no time to wait – that led them to act alone in October.

Their weapons were to be simple grenades and explosive charges. The explosive was obtained thanks to young Jewish women working at the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke armaments plant in Oświęcim, which made fuses. For many months they smuggled small quantities of black powder out of the powder room, hidden in knotted headscarves, in the folds of their clothing and in bowls with false bottoms. The powder passed through several hands – women prisoners from the women’s camp and go-betweens – before it reached the crematoria. The central figure in this network was Róża Robota from Ciechanów, who worked in the clothes-sorting detachment by the crematoria; among those who supplied her with powder were Ala Gertner from Będzin, Regina Safirsztajn and Estusia (Estera) Wajcblum from Warsaw.

7 October

The immediate trigger was the announcement of another selection. The SS demanded from the detachment a list of about 300 men, supposedly for transfer to another camp; the prisoners had no illusions about what that meant. According to survivors’ accounts, the uprising was to have begun in the evening, but it broke out earlier. At around 1 p.m. the SS assembled the crews of Crematoria IV and V in the yard of Crematorium IV and began reading out the numbers of those selected. The men called did not step forward. One prisoner went for an SS man with a hammer, while others pelted the guards with stones and attacked them with axes and iron bars. The SS men withdrew behind the fence and opened fire, summoning reinforcements from all over the camp, and the rebels set fire to the undressing room of Crematorium IV. The fire spread to the wooden roof and the building burned down; some studies also speak of it being blown up with smuggled explosive.

Armed SS units, including machine-gunners, surrounded the area and fired on the prisoners in the yard and in the buildings. Most of the crews of Crematoria IV and V were killed on the spot. Once the fighting had been put down, the SS carried out a selection among the survivors; some were ordered to lie face down on the ground and were killed with a shot to the back of the head.

At the sound of shooting and the sight of the fire, the crew of Crematorium II, on the other side of the camp, joined the revolt. The prisoners overpowered a German kapo and – according to survivors’ accounts – threw him into an oven, cut through the wire fence of the crematorium and the adjoining section of the women’s camp, and headed south. Three of them had earlier tried to blow up the ovens, but the charges failed to go off. The escapees – about 80 of them – were caught by SS pursuit squads about a kilometre and a half from the crematorium, still within the zone around the camp (Interessengebiet), near Rajsko; according to accounts, some took refuge in a barn, which the SS set on fire. All were shot. The report book of the German police post in Oświęcim recorded at 2 p.m. a mass escape of Sonderkommando prisoners. The crew of Crematorium III, guarded by the SS, did not join the fighting.

The toll and the reprisals

On the day of the revolt the Sonderkommando numbered 663 prisoners. According to the Auschwitz Museum, the direct result of the revolt was the death of three SS men (their names – Rudolf Erler, Willi Freese and Josef Purke – are given in a garrison order of 12 October) and about 450 prisoners; the figures 451 and 452 appear in the literature. According to the findings of the museum historian Igor Bartosik, about 250 men were killed in the fighting and about 200 were shot after it had ended; a dozen or so SS men were wounded. Almost all the leaders of the conspiracy were killed, among them Zalmen Gradowski and Jakub Kamiński. The only survivors were the few who managed to hide – Shlomo Dragon concealed himself under stacks of wood, Henryk Tauber in the flue of a disused oven – and the crew of Crematorium III, which had not joined the fighting.

The SS immediately opened an investigation. The surviving Soviet prisoners of war from the detachment and a dozen or so prisoners suspected of involvement in the plot were taken to Block 11 in the main camp, where they were murdered. The camp Gestapo soon picked up the trail of the powder from the Union factory. The women arrested – Róża Robota, Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztajn and Estusia Wajcblum – were interrogated and tortured for weeks; they betrayed no one else. They were hanged publicly on 6 January 1945, in front of the assembled women prisoners, less than two weeks before the camp was evacuated. It was the last public execution at Auschwitz.

Testimonies buried in the ground

The Sonderkommando revolt left behind more than the ruins of Crematorium IV. For many months several members of the conspiracy had been secretly writing down – mostly in Yiddish – what they had seen, and burying the manuscripts in jars, bottles and mess tins in the grounds of the crematoria, in the hope that the world would one day find them. Zalmen Gradowski, who had lost his wife, mother and sisters at Birkenau in December 1942, described the transports from the Grodno region and the murder of the family camp of Jews from Theresienstadt in March 1944; two of his manuscripts were found at Birkenau after the war and published in Polish under the title Znajduję się w sercu piekła (“I am in the heart of hell”). The notes of Leib Langfus, who was most probably murdered at the end of November 1944, were found in the ruins of Crematorium III in the spring of 1945 and made public in 1970. The manuscripts of Zalmen Lewental, who in his last notes described the preparations for the revolt and his disappointment at the lack of support from the rest of the camp, were dug up only in 1961–1962, partly destroyed by damp. In 1980 a letter by the Greek prisoner Marcel Nadjari was also found.

These texts, sometimes called the Auschwitz scrolls, are among the most important documents of the Holocaust: they are the only contemporaneous testimony of people who worked inside the gas chambers and crematoria. They were supplemented by the post-war testimony of survivors – Shlomo Dragon, Henryk Tauber, Henryk Mandelbaum and Filip Müller – given, among others, to the investigating judge Jan Sehn, who prepared the indictment in the Höss trial.

Place in the history of the war

The revolt did not stop the machinery of extermination – people were murdered in the surviving crematoria for several more weeks, and transports from Theresienstadt among others were still sent to the gas chambers. But it did deprive the machinery of one of its four crematoria, which the Germans never rebuilt. The mass killing of Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz ceased at the beginning of November 1944; the order to stop the gassing attributed to Heinrich Himmler has not survived, and historians date it variously. The ruins of Crematorium IV were dismantled by the end of 1944, the equipment of Crematoria II and III was taken apart and shipped into the interior of the Reich, and the buildings themselves were blown up before the camp was evacuated. The last surviving members of the Sonderkommando were marched out in the evacuation columns in January 1945; some, like Henryk Mandelbaum, managed to hide among them and survive. The Red Army entered Auschwitz on 27 January 1945.

Against the background of the war as a whole the event was small – a few hundred victims in a camp where some 1.1 million people perished – but its significance goes far beyond the numbers. Men whom the Germans had forced into the most terrible work imaginable, and who were later sometimes accused of complicity, took up arms in a hopeless situation, knowing that they would almost certainly die. Their revolt, together with the uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibór, is one of the clearest examples of Jewish resistance at the very heart of the extermination system, and the manuscripts they buried are among the most important sources for its history. The four hanged women are commemorated by a plaque on Block 27 of the former main camp and by a memorial at Yad Vashem, and the place where the revolt began is marked today by a plaque by the ruins of Crematorium IV.

The fate of the Sonderkommando long remained in the shadows. Only in the last decades of the 20th century, thanks to the publication of the scrolls, the research of the Auschwitz Museum and testimony such as Filip Müller’s account in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, did it come to be understood that these men were neither accomplices of the perpetrators nor passive victims, but prisoners in a so-called grey zone, where most ordinary moral concepts lost their meaning. The revolt of 7 October 1944 shows that even there some of them sought to the very end a way to destroy the instruments of the crime and to leave testimony behind them.