Birkenau Woods Incineration

Testimony of SS private Boeck

[Extracted from “Der Auschwitz Prozess”, by Hermann Langbein, Vol. I, quoted in “Auschwitz: Technique and operation of the gas chambers – J.C Pressac, the Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, NY, 1989, p. 181].

Q: were you present at a gassing operation one day?

A: Yes, it was one evening. I accompanied the driver Hoeblinger. A transport had arrived from Holland and the prisoners had to jump from the wagons. They were well-off Jews. There were women with Persian furs. They arrived by express train. The trucks were already there, with wooden steps before them, and the people climbed aboard.

Then they all started off. In the place Birkenau once stood, there was only a long farmhouse (Bunker 2) and beside it four or five big huts. Inside, the people were standing on clothes which were building up on the floor. The block leader and the sergeant, carrying a cane, were there. Hoeblinger said to me ‘lets go over there now’. There was a sign ‘to disinfection’. He said ‘you see, they are bringing children now’.

They opened the door, threw the children in and closed the door. There was a terrible cry. A member of the SS climbed on the roof. The people went on crying for about ten minutes. Then the prisoners opened the doors. Everything was in disorder and contorted. Heat was given off. the bodies were loaded on a rough wagon and taken to a ditch. The next batch were already undressing in the huts. After that I didn’t look at my wife for four weeks.

Incineration Area in the Woods

Notice how far away we are moving from the main camp and Krematoriums. In this field people were also burned in large cremation pits.

Himmler’s Four Killing Centers

“Himmler designed the killing centers exclusively as places of secret and instant death. Today there is widespread misunderstanding and ignorance about the four killing centers, which were all on isolated occupied Polish territory and had short histories.

Writers often confuse the centers with the camps. Very few people survived the centers, and those who did have seldom written about them; almost nothing remains of the centers; few people have visited them; all are located deep in rural Poland, and the Polish government would like them to remain obscure because they are reminders of a separate form of dying for Jews – these factors all contribute to the confusion.

The key to understanding is that the killing centers were only killing centers – they had no other function. The prisoners there did not die on the way to death – they were killed.” Excerpted From “Hitler’s Death Camps” Konnilyn G. Feig. LOC D810.J4 F36 1981

The monuments in four languages – Polish, Russian, English, and German – read:

To the memory Of the men, women and children

Who fell victim to the Nazi genocide.

Here lie their ashes. May their souls rest in peace.