Sonderkommando
Sonderkommandos were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. The death-camp Sonderkommandos, who were always inmates, were unrelated to the SS-Sonderkommandos which were ad hoc units formed from various SS offices between 1938 and 1945.
The German term itself was part of the vague and euphemistic language which the Nazis used to refer to aspects of the Final Solution.
Death factory workers
Sonderkommando members did not participate directly in killing; that responsibility was reserved for the SS, while the Sonderkommandos primary duty was disposing of the corpses. In most cases, they were inducted immediately upon arrival at the camp and forced into the position under threat of death. They were not given any advance notice of the tasks they would have to perform. To their horror, sometimes the Sonderkommando inductees would discover members of their own family amid the bodies. They had no way to refuse or resign other than by committing suicide. In some places and environments, the Sonderkommandos might be euphemistically connoted as Arbeitsjuden. Other times, Sonderkommandos were called Hilflinge. At Birkenau the Sonderkommandos numbered up to 400 people by 1943 and, when Hungarian Jews were deported there in 1944, their numbers swelled to over 900 persons to accommodate the increased rounds of murder and extermination.Because the Germans needed the Sonderkommandos to remain physically able, they were granted much less squalid living conditions than other inmates: they slept in their own barracks and were allowed to keep and use various goods such as food, medicines and cigarettes brought into camp by those who were sent to the gas chambers. Unlike ordinary inmates, they were not normally subject to arbitrary, random killing by guards. Their livelihood and utility was determined by how efficiently they could keep the Nazi death factory running. As a result, Sonderkommando members survived marginally longer in the death camps than other prisoners — but few survived the war.
As they had intimate knowledge of the Nazis' policy of mass murder, the Sonderkommando were considered Geheimnisträger — bearers of secrets — and, as such, were held in isolation away from prisoners being used as slave labor. Every three months, according to SS policy, almost all the Sonderkommandos working in the death camps' killing areas would be gassed themselves and replaced with new arrivals to ensure secrecy. However, some inmates survived for up to a year or more because they possessed specialist skills. Usually the task of a new Sonderkommando unit would be to dispose of the bodies of their predecessors. Research has calculated that from the creation of a death camp's first Sonderkommando to the liquidation of the camp, there were approximately 14 generations of Sonderkommando.
Eyewitness testimony
Between 1943 and 1944, some members of the Sonderkommando were able to obtain writing equipment and record some of their experiences and what they had witnessed in Birkenau. These documents were buried in the grounds of the crematoria and recovered after the war. Five men have been identified as the authors of these manuscripts: Zalman Gradowski, Zalman Lewental, Leib Langfus, Chaim Herman and Marcel Nadjary. The first three wrote in Yiddish, Herman in French and Nadjary in Greek. The manuscripts are mostly kept in the archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial Museum, apart from Herman's letter and Gradowski's texts, one of which is held in the Russian Museum of Military Medicine in St. Petersburg, and another in Yad Vashem.Some of the manuscripts were published as The Scrolls of Auschwitz, edited by Ber Mark. The Auschwitz Museum published some others as Amidst a Nightmare of Crime.
The Scrolls of Auschwitz have been recognised as some of the most important testimony to be written about the Holocaust, as they include contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the workings of the gas chambers in Birkenau.
The following note, which was found buried in an Auschwitz crematorium, was written by Zalman Gradowski, a member of the Sonderkommando who was killed in the revolt at Crematoria IV on 7 October 1944:
Fewer than 20 out of several thousand members of the Sonderkommandos - who were forced to work in the Nazi death camps - are documented to have survived until liberation and were able to testify to the events, among them: Henryk Fuchsbrunner, Filip Müller, Daniel Behnnamias, Dario Gabbai, Morris Venezia, Shlomo Venezia, , Alter Fajnzylberg, Samuel Willenberg, Abram Dragon, David Olère, Henryk Mandelbaum and Martin Gray. There have been at most another six or seven confirmed to have survived, but who have not given witness. Buried and hidden accounts by members of the Sonderkommando were also later found at some camps.
Revolts
Sonderkommando prisoners participated in uprisings on two occasions.Treblinka
The first revolt occurred at Treblinka on 2 August 1943 when 100 prisoners succeeded in breaking out of the camp. They stole 20–25 rifles, 20 hand grenades, and several pistols from the camp arsenal using a duplicate key. At 3:45 p.m., 700 Jews launched an attack on the camp's SS guards and trawnikis that lasted for 30 minutes. Buildings were set ablaze and a fuel tanker was set alight. Armed Jews attacked the main gate, while others attempted to climb the fence. However, the well-armed guards concentrated their fire on the prisoners creating a near-total slaughter. Although about 200 Jews escaped from the camp, half of them were killed after a chase in cars and on horses because they did not cut the phone wires. This allowed the SS to call in reinforcements from four different towns and set up roadblocks.Partisans of the Armia Krajowa transported some of the surviving escaped prisoners across the river while others were helped and fed by Polish villagers. Out of 700 Sonderkommando who took part in the revolt, 100 managed to get out of the camp, and around 70 them are known to have survived the war. These include Richard Glazar, Chil Rajchman, Jankiel Wiernik, and Samuel Willenberg who co-authored the Treblinka memoirs.
Auschwitz
In October 1944, the Sonderkommandos rebelled at Crematorium IV in Auschwitz II. For months, young Jewish women had been smuggling small packets of gunpowder out of the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke, a munitions factory in an industrial area between the Auschwitz I main camp and Auschwitz II. Eventually the gunpowder was passed along a smuggling chain to Sonderkommando in Crematorium IV. The plan was to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria before launching an uprising.However, on the morning of 7 October 1944, the camp resistance gave advanced warning to the Sonderkommando in Crematorium IV that they were due to be killed. The Sonderkommando attacked the SS and Kapos with two machine guns, axes, knives and grenades. The guards suffered 15 casualties of whom about 12 were injured and 3 were killed. Some of the Sonderkommando escaped from the camp but most were recaptured later the same day. Of those who did not die in the uprising itself, 200 were later forced to strip and lie face down before being shot in the back of the head. A total of 451 Sonderkommandos were killed on this day.
Portrayals in literature and media
The earliest portrayals of the Sonderkommando were generally unflattering. Miklos Nyiszli, in Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, described the Sonderkommando as enjoying a virtual feast, complete with chandeliers and candlelight, as other prisoners died of starvation. Nyiszli, an admitted collaborator who assisted Josef Mengele in his medical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, would appear to have been in a good position to observe the Sonderkommando in action, as he had an office in Krematorium II; and yet, the significant inaccuracy of some of his physical descriptions of the crematoria diminishes his credibility in this regard. Historian Gideon Greif characterized Nyiszli's writings as among the “myths and other wrong and defamatory accounts” of the Sonderkommando that flourished in the absence of first-hand testimony by surviving Sonderkommando members.Primo Levi, in The Drowned and the Saved, characterizes the Sonderkommando as being a step away from collaborators. Nevertheless, he asks his readers to refrain from condemnation: “Therefore I ask that we meditate upon the story of ‘the crematorium ravens’ with pity and rigor, but that judgment of them be suspended.” Levi, whose time at Auschwitz was spent at Camp III/Monowitz, may not have directly encountered the Sonderkommando. It has been said that he could have based his description of them on Nyiszli.
Filip Müller was one of the few Sonderkommando members who survived the war, and was also unusual in that he served on the Sonderkommando far longer than most. He wrote of his experiences in his 1979 book Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Among other incidents he related, Müller recounted how he tried to enter the gas chamber to die with a group of his countrymen, but was dissuaded from suicide by a girl who asked him to remain alive and bear witness.
In the last several years, several other more sympathetic accounts of the Sonderkommando have been published, beginning with Gideon Greif’s own book We Wept Without Tears, which consists of exhaustive, and sometimes grueling, interviews with former Sonderkommando members. Greif includes as his prologue the poem “And What Would You Have Done?” by Gunther Anders, which makes the point that one who has not been in that situation has little right to judge the Sonderkommando: “Not you, not me! We were not put to that ordeal!”
The first theatre play to describe the Sonderkommando revolt was written in 1947 by Ludovic Bruckstein. It was entitled Nacht-Shicht and played with great success by the Romanian Yiddish Theaters of Bucharest and Yasi, from 1948 till 1957. It is available on the internet.
A theatre play that explores the moral dilemmas of the Sonderkommando was The Grey Zone, directed by Doug Hughes and produced in New York at MCC Theater in 1996. The play was later made into a film of the same title by producer Tim Blake Nelson. The film took its mood, as well as much of its plot, from Nyiszli, portraying members of the Sonderkommando as crossing the line from victim to perpetrator, as when Sonderkommando Hoffman beats a man to death in the undressing room under the eyes of a smiling SS member. Nelson makes it clear that the subject of the film is that very moral ambiguity. “We can see each one of ourselves in that situation, perhaps acting in that way, because we are human. But we’re not sanctified victims.”
A 2014 “novelized” memoir, A Damaged Mirror, explores the lengths to which a former Sonderkommando will go to obtain forgiveness and closure: “The fact that good people can be forced to do wrong doesn’t make them less good,” the survivor says of himself, “but it also doesn’t make the wrong less wrong.”
Son of Saul, a 2015 Hungarian film directed by László Nemes, and winner of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix, details the story of one Sonderkommando attempting to bury a dead child he takes for his son. Géza Röhrig, who starred in the film, reacted with anger to the suggestion, made by a journalist, that members of the Sonderkommando were “half-victim, half-hangman”. “There has to be a clarification,” he said. “They are 100% victims. They have not spilled blood or been involved in any sort of killing. They were inducted on arrival under the threat of death. They had no control of their destinies. They were as victimised as any other prisoners in Auschwitz.”