News
A New Auschwitz Discovery
After 60 years, a metal rack used to load victims’ remains into the furnaces has been excavated adjacent to the ruins of crematorium and gas chamber V. For years, only part of a handle protruded from the ground; everything else lay buried almost a meter below the surface.
The decision to excavate was taken after an examination of the site confirmed that the piece was almost certainly part of the rack.
The rack was in relatively good condition due to soil conditions and the fact that it was buried close to the surface.
The rack was visibly damaged and its handles bent in the explosion that the withdrawing SS set off in order to demolish the crematorium and gas chamber V structure on January 26, 1945, only hours before the Red Army entered Auschwitz.
The Museum Collections Department will receive the rack after conservation. Department director Igor Bartosik said that the new exhibit will be exceptionally valuable, since it includes the only extant loading rack from among those used in the Birkenau crematoria.
The use of the metal rack in mass murder and the burning of corpses
Extracts from a deposition by the witness Shlomo Dragon, Auschwitz prisoner number 80359. On May 10-11, 1945, he testified as follows to the murder of people in the gas chambers and the burning of their corpses:
Gassing:
When the chamber was full, the door was closed. This was done by SS guards and usually by Moll himself. Then Mengele gave an order to Scheinmetz who, just as he did at the bunkers, went over to a vehicle with the sign of the red cross on it, took out a canister of gas, opened it, and poured its contents into the chamber through the little window in the side wall. The little window was fairly high up, so he had to use a step-ladder to get to it. Here, just as at the bunkers, he was wearing a mask when he did it.
Extracting teeth and cutting off hair:
After a certain time, Mengele communicated that the people were dead. He said, “Es ist schon fertig,“ and drove away with Scheinmetz in the vehicle with the red cross. Then Moll opened the door of the gas chamber. We put on gas masks and dragged the corpses out of the different chambers, through the little corridor to the undressing room, and through the dressing room and then through the little corridor to the furnaces. Barbers sheared their heads in the first corridor, at the entrance door, and dentists pulled teeth in the second corridor.
Burning corpses:
In front of the furnaces, we put the corpses on an iron rack that we then pushed into the furnaces on rollers installed on the furnace door. We put the corpses on the rack in such a way that, if the first one was lying headfirst, then we put the next one on feet first. We loaded three bodies into each furnace. By the time we put the third cadaver in, those first ones loaded into the furnace were already burning. I saw how the arms of those cadavers lifted up, and then the legs lifted up. But we were in such a hurry that I could not make a thorough observation of the whole process of burning. We had to hurry up because we had trouble getting the third corpse into the furnace if the limbs of the corpses that were already burning lifted up too much.
The way we used the rack was that two prisoners lifted it up by the end farthest from the furnace, and one by the end that went into the furnace first. After inserting the rack, one of the prisoners held the corpses with a long iron poker, flanged at the end, which we called a “hoe,” and the other two pulled the rack out from under the corpse. After loading a furnace, we closed the door and loaded the next furnace. The burning took fifteen to twenty minutes. At the end of that time, we opened the furnace doors and inserted more corpses.
Burning in pits:
At the time when the Hungarian transports were arriving, we worked two shifts in the fifth crematorium. The day shift lasted from 6:30 AM until 6:30 PM, and the night shift from 6:30 PM until 6:30 the next morning. This job went on for about three months. However, because the crematoria were less efficient, pits for burning the gassed Hungarians were dug next to crematorium V.
There were 3 larger pits and two smaller ones. The process of burning in the pits next to crematorium V was the same as in the pits next to bunkers 1 and 2. Moll was the one who set the corpses alight here, as well. The ashes were removed from the pits the same way as was done in the bunkers, crushed to powder in special crushers and transported to the [river] Sola.
The ashes from the crematorium furnaces were first buried in ditches dug especially for this purpose. Later, however, when the Russian offensive began, Höss ordered the crematorium ashes to be removed from those holes and taken to the Sola as well.
