| Sonderkommando | |
|---|---|
 Survivors ofSonderkommando 1005 posing next to a bone-crushing machine at the site of theJanowska concentration camp.Photograph taken following the liberation of the camp. | |
| Location | German-occupied Europe |
| Date | 1942–1945 |
| Incident type | Removal ofHolocaust evidence |
| Perpetrators | Schutzstaffel (SS) |
| Participants | Arbeitsjuden |
| Camp | Extermination camps includingAuschwitz,Belzec,Chełmno,Majdanek,Sobibór andTreblinka among others |
| Survivors | Filip Müller,Henryk Tauber,Morris Venezia,Henryk Mandelbaum,Dario Gabbai, Antonio Boldrin |
Sonderkommandos (German:[ˈzɔndɐkɔˌmando],lit. 'specialunit') werework units made up ofGerman Nazideath 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 duringthe Holocaust.[1][2] The death-campSonderkommandos, who were always inmates, were unrelated to theSS-Sonderkommandos, which weread hoc units formed from members of variousSS offices between 1938 and 1945.
The German term was part of the vague andeuphemistic language which the Nazis used to refer to aspects of theFinal Solution (e.g.,Einsatzkommando, "deployment units").
Sonderkommando members did not participate directly in killing; that responsibility was reserved for the SS, while theSonderkommandos' primary duty[3] was disposing of the corpses.[4] 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 theSonderkommando inductees would discover members of their own family amid the bodies.[5] They had no way to refuse or resign other than by committing suicide.[6] In some places and environments, theSonderkommandos might be euphemistically calledArbeitsjuden (Jews for work).[7] At other times,Sonderkommandos were calledHilflinge (helpers).[8] AtBirkenau theSonderkommandos numbered up to 400 people by 1943 and, when Hungarian Jews were deported there in 1944, their numbers swelled to more than 900 persons, in order to keep up with the increased rounds of murder and extermination.[9]
Because the Germans needed theSonderkommandos 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 killing by guards. Their livelihood and utility were determined by how efficiently they could keep the Nazi death factory running.[10] As a result,Sonderkommando members survived longer in the death camps than other prisoners – but few survived the war.
As they had detailed knowledge of the Nazis' practice of mass murder, theSonderkommando were consideredGeheimnisträger – bearers of secrets. As such, they were held in isolation away from prisoners being used as slave labor (seeSS Main Economic and Administrative Office).[11] There was a belief that every three months, according to SS policy, almost all theSonderkommandos working in the death camps' killing areas would be gassed themselves and replaced with new arrivals to ensure secrecy, and that some inmates survived for up to a year or more because they possessed specialist skills.[12] Usually, the task of a newSonderkommando unit would be to dispose of the bodies of their predecessors. Research has calculated that from the creation of a death camp's firstSonderkommando to the liquidation of the camp, there were approximately 14 generations ofSonderkommando.[13][page needed] However, according to historian Igor Bartosik, author ofWitnesses from the Pit of Hell: History of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando (2022) published by theAuschwitz Museum, the renewed exterminations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommandos are a myth, since such an extermination only took place there once. "Nor was it true that prisoners were selected for their technical expertise. After a cursory inspection, they were selected merely in view of their apparent ability to work," wrote Bartosik.[14]
Fewer than 20 of several thousand members of theSonderkommandos are documented to have survived until liberation and to have testified about the events (although some sources claim more).[15] Among them wereHenryk (Tauber) Fuchsbrunner,Filip Müller, Daniel Behnnamias,Dario Gabbai,Morris Venezia,Shlomo Venezia, Antonio Boldrin,[16] Alter Fajnzylberg,Samuel Willenberg, Abram Dragon,David Olère,Henryk Mandelbaum andMartin Gray. Another six or seven are confirmed to have survived, but did not give witness (or at least, such testimony is not documented). Buried and hidden accounts by members of theSonderkommando were later found at some camps.[17]
Between 1943 and 1944, some members of the BirkenauSonderkommando were able to obtain writing materials and record some of their experiences and what they had witnessed. 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, andLeib Langfus, who wrote inYiddish; Chaim Herman, who wrote in French; andMarcel Nadjary, who wrote in Greek. Of the five, only Nadjary survived until liberation; Gradowski was killed in the revolt at Crematorium IV on 7 October 1944 (see below), or in retaliation for it; Lewental, Langfus, and Herman are believed to have been killed in November 1944.[18] Gradowski wrote the following note, found buried at an Auschwitz crematorium site:
Dear finder of these notes, I have one request of you, which is, in fact, the practical objective for my writing ... that my days of Hell, that my hopeless tomorrow will find a purpose in the future. I am transmitting only a part of what happened in the Birkenau-Auschwitz Hell. You will realize what reality looked like ... From all this you will have a picture of how our people perished.[19]
The manuscripts are kept primarily in the archive of theAuschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial Museum. Exceptions are Herman's letter (kept in the archives of theAmicale des déportés d'Auschwitz-Birkenau) and Gradowski's texts, one of which is held in theRussian Museum of Military Medicine inSt. Petersburg, and another inYad Vashem, Israel.[20][21]Some of the manuscripts were published asThe Scrolls of Auschwitz, edited by Ber Mark.[22] The Auschwitz Museum published some others asAmidst a Nightmare of Crime.[23]
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.[21]
Sonderkommando prisoners participated in uprisings on two occasions.
The first revolt occurred atTreblinka on 2 August 1943.[24] Prisoners used a duplicate key to open the camp arsenal and steal 20 to 25 rifles, 20 hand grenades, and several pistols. At 3:45 p.m., 700 Jews launched an attack on the camp'sSS guards andtrawnikis that lasted for 30 minutes.[25] They set buildings and a fuel tanker ablaze. Armed Jews attacked the main gate, while others attempted to climb the fence. About 200 Jews escaped from the camp,[a][26][25] but the well-armed guards slaughtered hundreds of others.[27] They phoned forSS reinforcements from four towns, and these set up roadblocks[25] and pursued escapees in cars and on horses.
Partisans of theArmia Krajowa (Polish: Home Army) transported some of the surviving escaped prisoners across theBug River,[28] while others werehelped and fed by Polish villagers.[27] Of the 700 Sonderkommando who took part in the revolt, 100 managed to survive and escape from the camp, and around 70 of these are known to have survived the war.[29] These includeRichard Glazar,Chil Rajchman,Jankiel Wiernik, andSamuel Willenberg, who co-wrote theTreblinka Memoirs.[30]
In October 1944, theSonderkommando rebelled atCrematorium IV inAuschwitz II. For months, young Jewish women workers had been smuggling small packets ofgunpowder out of the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke, a munitions factory in an industrial area between the main camp of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II. The gunpowder was passed along a smuggling chain toSonderkommando in Crematorium IV. The plan was to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria and launch an uprising.[31]
However, on the morning of 7 October 1944, the camp resistance warned theSonderkommando in Crematorium IV that they were to be killed, and theSonderkommando attacked theSS andKapos with two machine guns, axes, knives, and grenades, killing three and injuring about a dozen more.[32] Some of theSonderkommando escaped from the camp, but most were recaptured later the same day.[13] Of those who did not die during 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 451Sonderkommandos were killed that day.[33][34][35]
The earliest portrayals of theSonderkommando were generally unflattering.Miklos Nyiszli, inAuschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, described theSonderkommando as enjoying a virtual feast, complete with chandeliers and candlelight, as other prisoners died of starvation. Nyiszli, an admitted collaborator who assistedJosef Mengele in his medical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, would appear to have been in a good position to observe theSonderkommando in action, as he had an office in Krematorium II. But some of his inaccurate physical descriptions of the crematoria diminishes his credibility in this regard. HistorianGideon Greif characterized Nyiszli's writings as among the "myths and other wrong and defamatory accounts" of theSonderkommando, which flourished in the absence of first-hand testimony by survivingSonderkommando members.[36]
Primo Levi, inThe Drowned and the Saved, characterizes theSonderkommando as being "akin to collaborators." He said that their testimonies should not be given much credence, since they had much to atone for and would naturally attempt to rehabilitate themselves at the expense of the truth.[37] But, he asked 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."[38]
Filip Müller was one of the fewSonderkommando members who survived the war and was also unusual in that he served on theSonderkommando far longer than most. He wrote of his experiences in his bookEyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (1979).[39] 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.[40]
Since the late 20th century, several other more sympathetic accounts of theSonderkommando have been published, beginning with Gideon Greif's own bookWe Wept Without Tears (1999 in Hebrew, 2005 in English), which consists of interviews with formerSonderkommando members. Greif includes as his prologueGunther Anders' poem "And What Would You Have Done?", which says that one who has not been in that situation has little right to judge theSonderkommando: "Not you, not me! We were not put to that ordeal!"[41]
The first depiction of theSonderkommando revolt was titledIkh leb (I live), a play written by Jewish author Moshe Pinchevski. It was also the first post-World War 2, Yiddish-language performance at the Idisher Kultur Farband Teater inBucharest,Romania, in 1945.[42]
A theatre play that explores the moral dilemmas of theSonderkommando wasThe Grey Zone, directed byDoug Hughes and produced in New York atMCC Theater in 1996.[43] The play was later adapted as afilm of the same title by producerTim Blake Nelson.[44] The film took its mood, as well as much of its plot, from Nyiszli, portraying members of theSonderkommando as crossing the line from victim to perpetrator.Sonderkommando Hoffman (played byDavid Arquette) beats a man to death in the undressing room under the eyes of a smiling SS member. Nelson emphasizes 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."[45]
A "novelized" memoir,A Damaged Mirror (2014), by Yael Shahar and Ovadya ben Malka, explores the lengths to which a formerSonderkommando will go to obtain forgiveness andclosure: "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."[46]
Son of Saul, a 2015 Hungarian film directed byLászló Nemes, and winner of the2015 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix, details the story of oneSonderkommando 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 theSonderkommando 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."[47]
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