Birkenau Little Wood

People were either brought here by truck or were forced to walk about a mile to what has become known as “The Little Wood”; for what they had been told was a disinfecting shower and then work. But this was simply another brutal joke. What the Nazis really meant by disinfection was cleansing the world of what they considered the “lower breeds of mankind”.

The Path Between Krematoriums IV and V

After they got off the transports the Jews selected for immediate extermination were brought here to await their sad fate. The road runs between two Krematoria, IV and V.The first view is of the path leading to Krematorium V that began operations on April 4, 1943.

It had a cremation capacity of 768 corpses in a 24-hour period. The ruins of the Krematorium V structure are at the end of the path. Scrolling around to the left you see the entirety of the Little Wood on the Krematorium V side.

Behind the main camp there were two more crematoria. Krems IV, and V. Scrolling around to the left you see the entirety of the Birkenau Little Wood on the Krematorium V side.

They were considerably smaller than II, and III but were still of sufficient size to kill many people each day. The area was cordoned off with barbed wire. Branches of leaves were woven thickly into the wire to deaden noises and shield the crematoria and gas chambers from view.

I remember I once took part in the gassing of one of these groups of women [from the women’s camp in Auschwitz]. I cannot say how big the group was. when I got close to the bunker I saw them sitting on the ground. They were still clothed. As they were wearing worn-out camp clothing they were not left in the undressing hut but made to undress in the open air. I concluded from the behavior of these women that they had no doubt what fate awaited them, as they begged and sobbed to the SS men to spare them their lives. However, they were herded into the gas chambers and gassed.

SS Doctor Kremer on 18 July, 1947. (Klee, Ernst, Willi. Dressen, Volker Riess. The Good Old Days: The Holocaust As Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. NY: The Free Press, 1992, p. 258.)