Sonderkommando [splittat från En gasning med Zyklon-B, filmad och dokumenterad.]

The "Sonderkommando" ("Special commando") was a group of male inmates, who were already sentenced to death by committing them into that commando. Since the SS wanted to avoid witnesses of their horrible crimes, they also killed the members of the "Sonderkommando" at regular intervals.

The "Sonderkommando" had to "help" the SS, when prisoners undressed before entering the gas chamber, it had to convey the bodies from the gas chambers to the crematory ovens or to pile them, burn them and get rid of the ashes. Sometimes it happened that members of that "Sonderkommando" met family members and had to help killing them.

After the gassing, the "Sonderkommando" also had to clean the gas chamber and sort the remains of the dead people, such as their clothes. Prisoners physicians who belonged to the "Sonderkommando", too, removed golden teeth from the bodies.

The "Sonderkommando" was strictly isolated from other inmates. The prisoners were not allowed to have any contact with members of that commando.

The influence of the work within the "Sonderkommando" was pernicious to its members: They became hardened, lost any feeling, their physiognomy changed that much, that they looked very much alike in their brutal appearance.

"Greenhorns" in the "Sonderkommando" often broke down psychically when they became aware of what they did. The consequence was refusal to work. They voluntarily jumped into the gas chamber or into the SS-guards in order to be shot, just because they wanted to escape their horrible destiny.

"The "Sonderkommando" ("Special commando") was a group of male inmates, who were already sentenced to death by committing them into that commando. Since the SS wanted to avoid witnesses of their horrible crimes, they also killed the members of the "Sonderkommando" at regular intervals.

"---Even according to the statements of pharmacist J.-C. Pressac, who, in the late 80s and early 90s, was promoted as the technical Holocaust expert, eyewitness testimonies relating to the engineering of the installations and their capacity are, almost without exception, untenable. But even the corrections to the testimonies considered by Pressac to be necessary do not go far enough to make them credible. In particular, the testimonies relating to the duration of executions in the 'gas chambers' (morgue 1) of crematoria II and III, as well as the ventilation times after the executions go completely awry. This is because of the over-estimation of the evaporation rate of hydrogen cyanide from the carrier of Zyklon B, as well as the incorrect concept of the effectiveness of the ventilation of the rooms. If the eyewitness testimonies relating to the quantities of Zyklon B used, and at least approximately relating to the rapidity of the execution procedure are to be accepted, then they are incompatible with testimonies, sometimes of the same witnesses, that the victims' corpses were removed from the 'gas chambers' immediately after the executions and without gas masks and protective garments. This is particularly true for those alleged 'gas chambers' without ventilation installations (crematoria IV and V and farmhouses I and II), since working in poorly ventilated 'gas chambers' with high concentrations of poison gas is impossible without gas masks. The extreme danger to the sweating workers of the Sonderkommando, who are supposed to have worked without protective garments, makes the witnesses untrustworthy. The eyewitness accounts are therefore completely contradictory, illogical, contrary to the laws of nature, and therefore incredible. The witnesses engage in particular contortions when it comes to the cremations (amount and kind of fuel used, speed of cremation, development of flames and smoke), which furthermore fail to accord with the analyses of aerial photography.---"