CHAPTER IV

MENGELE'S COLLEAGUES IN AUSCHWITZ

The horrific experience of Auschwitz did not consist solely of Josef Mengele's experiments.

Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II - Birkenau, and Auschwitz III - Monowitz all combined to hold upwards of one hundred thousand souls from all over Europe.

Many inhabitants never came into contact with Josef Mengele, but their experiences were no less gruesome.

This chapter will describe Josef Mengele's medical colleagues, as well as give a rough overview of concentration camp life.

The original deployment of Nazi physicians to Auschwitz was perhaps a welcoming sight to the initial Polish and Russian prisoners of the concentration camp.

However, this excitement was quickly erased when the inmates realized that the physicians were not there to keep the prisoners healthy, but rather to conduct heinous experiments in the name of Nazi science.

Realistically, the physicians were deployed to Auschwitz for two main reasons.

The first reason included discovering new ways of curing disease, programming German reproduction, and helping German soldiers endure extreme conditions on the war front.

The second reason was to facilitate the systematic murder of Auschwitz's inmates.

"The SS doctor did no direct medical work. His primary function was to carry out Auschwitz's institutional program of medicalized genocide"

Nazi physicians were encouraged to conduct limitless research trials due to the innumerable test subjects.

However, even with unfettered access to research subjects and no adherence to medical ethics, nothing substantial ever emerged from the physician's work.

While Auschwitz was one of the largest concentration camps, and certainly the one in which the most Jews were murdered, it was not the first concentration camp to employ doctors among the inmates.

"The medical blocks probably existed because of prior concentration camp practice, concern about epidemics --- and above all the broad Nazi impulse toward medical legitimation of killing"

The combination of the Nazi drive for medical professional elitism and the availability of test subjects, sprinkled with the fear of typhus and dysentery, provided the perfect storm for the medical deployment to the Polish countryside.

Auschwitz would soon stand alone as the most diabolical Nazi beacon of Aryan science and power.

In contrast to the Nazi ideal of superiority, the actual physicians who were conscripted to work in the camps were not, in mass, the medical elite.

Of course there were renowned physicians and researchers in their midst, such as Josef Mengele, but the general practitioners in the camps were rather unremarkable.

"The SS doctors assigned to the concentration camps tended to be medically undistinguished, strong in their Nazi ties, and personally self-aggrandizing"

This led to a majority of the experiments being conducted rather shoddily by those professionals who had no business operating in that discipline.

Unfortunately, this unprofessionalism also led to a rampant increase in patient suffering.

With the research largely resulting in the death of the test subject, the Nazi physicians organized a way to catalogue each death by means of natural causes.

Doctors authorized "--- false death certificates, attributing each death of an Auschwitz inmate or an outsider brought there to be killed to a specific illness (cardiac, respiratory, infectious, or whatever)"

It is important to note that those prisoners unloaded from the transport cars and sent directly to the gas chambers were never entered into the camp's registrar and therefore no alternative cause of death was necessary.

These lower tier medical professionals were also responsible for administering selection on a daily basis.

More than that, however, the doctors were involved in the entire killing process, from the transport car to the gas chambers.

Their participation was as follows:

first, the chief doctor's assignments to his subordinates concerning duty schedules and immediate selection policies;

second, the individual doctor's service on the ramp, performing selections "in a very noble [seemingly kind] manner";

third, the doctor riding in the ambulance or Red Cross car to the crematoria;

fourth, the doctor ordering "how many [pellets] of gas should be thrown in these holes from the ceilings, according to the number of people, and who should do it. There were three or four Desinfektoren";

fifth, "He observed through the hole how the people are dying";

sixth, "when the people were dead, he gave the order to ventilate to open the gas chamber, and he came with a gas mask into the chamber";

seventh, "He signed a [form] that the people are dead, and how long it took";

and eighth, "he observed the teeth extraction [from] the corpses.

This was done primarily to trick the prisoners into walking towards the gas chambers without inciting violence or revolt.
Impeccably dressed, the doctors were respected and trusted by the new inmates.

This mirage was intentional and highly successful in keeping order during the unloading chaos.

It would be inappropriate to simply categorize every Nazi physician as an uneducated and myopic believer in the acceptability of murder and human suffering.

There did exist physicians working in Auschwitz who were highly regarded prior to the war.

One of the most important and tireless reporters on the Auschwitz concentration camp, Hermann Langbein, approached the categorization question and was ultimately able to classify the Nazi doctors as follows:

--- zealots who participated eagerly in the extermination process and even did "extra work" on behalf of killing;
those who went about the process more or less methodically and did no more and no less than they felt they had to do;
and those who participated in the extermination process only reluctantly.

There are examples of doctors helping inmates to better medical care or extra rations of food.

However, this seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

Furthermore, it was not professionally advantageous for the doctors to act in such a beneficent manner while employed in the concentration camp.

German accolades and promotion were only given to those doctors who most closely followed Nazi protocol, not those who aided in keeping a prisoner out of the gas chambers.

The highest German military honor was bestowed upon only a few men in Auschwitz:

The recipients were Otto Moll, who was in charge of the gas chambers;

Josef Klehr, who administered the largest number of poison injections and later became chief of the "disinfectors", who
had to insert the poison gas; and Hoss himself.

These decorations were an unmistakable indication that Himmler approved of the three men's zeal, and at the same time it
underscored the fiction that mass murder in Auschwitz was the equivalent of frontline service.

The overall intention of the Auschwitz concentration camp was the medical justification of human experimentation and murder.

Those who adhered to this policy with the utmost fervor were celebrated and promoted.

This established an environment of increasing violence and suffering among the prisoners.

A unique problem that the Auschwitz doctors encountered was how to deal with camp pregnancies.

Typically, a pregnant mother was immediately gassed along with her unborn child.

However, some women were able to escape imminent death during selection and in the following months went into labor.

Standard medical ethics state that if a mother and child are in peril during the birthing process, the mother must be saved first.

In Auschwitz, this extended to immediately after the birth, even if the child was born healthy.

Lucie Adelsberger, a prisoner physician, worked extensively with pregnant women while imprisoned in Auschwitz.

Unfortunately, she writes that the newborn had to die immediately if the mother's life were to be saved.

Sympathetic prisoner doctors "--- saved up all the poison we could find in the camp, and it still wasn't enough. It's amazing what newborns can bear. They simply slept off otherwise lethal doses of poison --- without any apparent damage"

In some cases the child's life was spared and the birth was hidden.

However, in most cases the child was either killed by the SS or the mother chose to walk with her newborn into the gas chambers because she refused to be separated.

One of the more ruthless Auschwitz physicians was Dr. Freidrich Entress, who became an expert at administering phenol injections directly into the heart cavity, which would cause almost immediate death.

Dr. Entress is one of the doctors that Hermann Langbein would have categorized as one of the zealots who did extra work in order to curry favor with his SS superiors.

In fact, Dr. Entress took a routine order from the Auschwitz Central Office as an excuse to increase his killing capabilities.

He soon pioneered the use of phenol injections in the infirmary, which was previously unknown to that extent, and organized it "in such a way that any of the ss [sic] medics to whom Entress soon entrusted this dirty work could easily and without a hitch kill a hundred or more patients by means of phenol injections"

This deadly work could be concluded in the matter of a few short hours, and by lunch the former patients were burning in the crematorium.

Dr. Entress was also responsible for the infirmary selections conducted to prevent overcrowding in the hospital.

Entress would routinely order the patients to strip naked prior to his arrival, and then Entress would only give a cursory peek at the patient before making his decision.

"--- Entress contented himself with just glancing at the naked patients presented to him in the clinic before he made the decision. However, he reported to Wirths that all those he had destined for death had tuberculosis"

Because the Nazi authorities did not question "tuberculosis" as an ailment and desperately wished to avoid a tuberculosis outbreak, the categorization of this illness was not questioned and Entress was permitted to continue with his selections.

Another infamous Auschwitz physician was Professor Carl Clauberg, who experimented with ways of sterilizing the Jewish population.

Heinrich Himmler had been searching for a way to effectively sterilize the entire population, as systematic liquidation of the Jewish people was proving somewhat ineffective and labor intensive.

"Clauberg was to find an answer to a question that occupied the heads of all concentration and extermination camps: how can offensive peoples still be eradicated while still making use of their labor for the arms industry?"

As the German war effort became increasingly bereft of men and munitions, the need for a slave labor force increased.

Whereas a principle goal of concentration camps had been to forcefully exterminate those considered subhuman, this was amended to include a workforce producing wartime commodities.

In fact, the third sub-camp of Auschwitz, called Auschwitz III - Monowitz, was an IG Farben production plant for synthetic rubber, commonly referred to as Buna.

Clauberg routinely injected mixtures into a woman's womb to produce sterility but his colleague Dr. Horst Schumann, experimented freely on both women and men in an effort to increase a population's sterility.

Differing from Clauberg in his methods, Schumann routinely utilized radiation as the means for sterilization, considered an extremely painful procedure.

Furthermore, Schumann had no professional training with regard to radiation treatment.

During his trial following the war, Schumann acknowledged in court that "he had no psychiatric training that would have enabled him to judge mental illnesses; and when he began his series of experiments in Auschwitz, he did not know any more than that about radiation treatment"

Dr. Schumann is emblematic of the Nazi environment in that he was not trained in the specific discipline he was responsible for; rather, he was simply an SS doctor who was willing to radiate the genitals of men and women and seemed to suffer no ill mental effects from the responsibility.

A general concern in the Nazi infirmary was that some members of the slave labor force were intentionally becoming ill to avoid the harshest work.

This manner of escaping service was also present in the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces), which was losing numbers at an astounding rate.

Ultimately, it fell to Dr. Emil Kaschub to devise an experiment which would best determine if the infirmed was legitimately ill or if the illness was faked.

"By means of subcutaneous injections and ointments. . .pus, sewage, and unknown chemicals, [Emil] Kaschub gave his test subjects cellulitis, which he repeatedly photographed and lanced ---"

Due to the malaise within the German army, the doctors in Auschwitz were hopeful of creating an experiment which would decrease the number of Wehrmacht patients.

That experiment was created and fostered in the flesh of Auschwitz prisoners, but it was ultimately unsuccessful.

While Dr. Entress frequently only glanced at his patients during selection, the majority of Auschwitz physicians conducted actual physical examinations.

Even though the physicians did not spend very long with each individual patient, there was at least some consensus as to the criteria needed for selection.

Dr. Horst Fischer was one of these physicians, and attended several meetings which aimed to establish concrete selection parameters.

Dr. Fischer explains how the criteria for selections were conducted:

There were a number of conferences of all ss physicians in Auschwitz for the purpose of working out firm criteria for
selections.

These discussions produced essentially the following characteristics as prerequisites for the selections:

starvation edemas;

the complete lack of fatty tissue in the buttocks (to diagnose this the physicians had the naked inmates turn around);

the suspicion of TB (because of the deficient medical equipment actual TB was difficult to diagnose, and it evidently
seemed too bothersome to perform X rays in the main camp);

accidents that caused broken bones;

and severe suppuration.

Roughly speaking, these were the cases in which selections appeared to be indicated.

Examples of these cases were numerous in the infirmaries frequented by the slave labor force.

As such, an SS physician did not have a difficult time finding those qualified for the gas chambers.

One of the most senior physicians in the camp, Dr. Eduard Wirths, was consistently at odds with men such as Entress and Clauberg, among others.

This was not due to Wirths' beneficence, as he is charged with removing the reproductive organs of large quantities of women without reason and without their consent.

However, Wirths classified his experiments as true science, while he felt that Entress was simply a mad man.

After requesting to be transferred out of the camp, Wirths decided to stay and following this decision, the "--- lethal injections in the infirmaries were stopped --- Entress and Klehr, were removed from their key positions --- epidemics were brought under control; the supervision of nutrition was improved ---"

Wirths also entrusted more responsibility to inmate doctors, who were more sympathetic to their fellow prisoners.

These actions did not cease his experiments however, and following the war Dr. Wirths committed suicide before he was brought to trial.

Even with his heinous experiments, Wirths is remembered fondly by some SS and inmate physicians.

Corruption in Auschwitz was endemic, with many SS men being bought off by items stolen from "Canada"

These favors sometimes brought an extra ration of bread or saved an inmate from selection.

Sometimes, inmates were even able to get word out to loved ones across Europe or permitted to obtain a bottle of alcohol from the SS.

Dr. Wirths, conversely, did not partake in the corruption.

"It is part of Wirths's personality profile that he and his family lived on his food ration coupons --- In this he was the lone exception in the jungle of corruption"

Dr. Wirths would not be considered one of the true and good "benevolent Nazis", but he was fondly remembered by many of those with whom he had daily contact.

The stereotype of the SS officer as being cold, uneducated, and violent may not actually be true.

Composed with an elite officer unit, the SS was comprised of men who came from educated and powerful families, and whose future was not solely tied to the military.

Karl Brandt was the embodiment of this classification of leadership.

Men such as Brandt were typically "--- from an aristocratic or professional, often medical family whose general cultivation and pre-Nazi ethical concerns seemed strikingly at odds with the depth of his Nazi commitment"

Brandt became the personification of the educated Nazi, one who was worldly and well read yet still bought into the machinations of systematic murder.

Karl Brandt was a powerful Nazi well before the founding of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

He had become a commanding administrator in the Nazi Party, and in "--- the autumn of 1939, Karl Brandt and Philipp Bouhler, head of the Chancellery of the Fuhrer, were personally entrusted by Hitler to organize and implement the 'euthanasia programme'"

Brandt's participation in the euthanasia program increased, and he contributed to the first German case of killing a severely physically disabled newborn.

The case is shrouded in mystery and the name of the child may never be known, but Brandt's involvement has been catalogued.

Following the end of World War II, Brandt was taken into Allied custody and interrogated on his professional exploits and ethics.

When the subject of euthanasia was broached, he spoke openly about the decisions behind Hitler's initiative to purify the German race.

Brandt's depositions propose that those who participated "--- were not ignorant of the fact that their action was illegal. Hitler, Brandt --- even the parents knew that what they were doing was outside the law and generally accepted medical conduct"

Brandt seemed to suffer no remorse resulting from his killing of the innocent child, a reaction which was validated soon thereafter, at the advent of 1940, when he participated in the "--- first deadly injections in the adult euthanasia programme"

New ground had been broken with regard to medical contributions in government sanctioned killings, and Brandt was head of the new vanguard.

Karl Brandt was able to operate without fear of prosecution from the German government and this allowed him to lobby for an enlarged euthanasia program.

Brandt, and his fellow SS elite, knew "--- that their action was (still) against the law and contrary to medical ethics. As long as there was no official government legislation, they felt that their actions had to remain secret"

Furthermore, those joining in the euthanasia initiative had a collective vested interest in keeping the program quiet.

While the German government may accommodate and approve of the initiative, most likely the same would not be said for the global community.

Therefore, the euthanasia program spearheaded by Karl Brandt was kept relatively quiet and out of the public view.

While in Allied custody, Brandt was routinely asked how he could reconcile his actions with his professional ethics.

His explanation haunted the interrogators when he responded: doctors could not violate medical ethics, not because they were unable to inflict harm on humans, but because they were doctors.

Their professional status freed them from any kind of moral and ethical responsibility towards their patients, and gave them immunity from medical ethics violations.

Brandt must have been fully indoctrinated in the Nazi beliefs to believe that doctors could not inflict harm on human beings, especially considering he was most likely well aware of the medical experiments occurring in horrific places such as Auschwitz.

However, when pressed by his captors on this precise question, Brandt stood apart from the physicians of the concentration camps.

"Rather than showing a callous disregard for the life and dignity of subjects used for research in concentration camps, Brandt was largely indifferent to the ethics of human experimentation"

Brandt simply did not concern himself with ethical measure such as informed consent, do no harm, and other medical ethical principles.

There were two main racial justifications for the establishment of concentration camps.

The first justification was that the Jew was inherently evil and the staunch enemy of the European community, most especially the Aryan race.

Therefore, killing of Jews became not only acceptable, but appropriate because it protected the life and rights of Aryans.

The second justification is on more of a physical level:

The non-material motive for getting a Jew to work was the satisfaction it gave his German masters, by providing them with the pleasing sight of a laboring Jew and by demonstrating their ability to subdue the Jew to such a degree that he acts contrary to his nature, namely like an honest man.

It fulfilled the psychological need, expressed again and again in Germans' treatment of Jews, to have total power over Jews.

The notion of total power extended itself to include power over the life and death of a Jewish prisoner.

The evolution of Auschwitz from conception to killing center is an amazing journey.

Auschwitz was not the first concentration camp, nor was it the first liquidation center for the undesirables.

However, Auschwitz did become the most notorious concentration camp in the entire Third Reich, and ultimately became the physical embodiment of the evil mankind can enact on each other.

The survivor testimonials, which first emerged during the war but grew immensely following liberation, give insight to the daily horrors that a prisoner endured.

It was not simply that an inmate had to avoid experimentation by one of the SS doctors, but also that the malnourished individual lived in constant fear of death at each moment in every day.

The location of Auschwitz was ideal for many reasons.

First and foremost, it was not located in Germany, which Hitler had declared would be judenfrei (Jew-Free) by the end of 1941.

Furthermore, it would be located in the Polish countryside, an area which was easily masked by the creation of a buffer zone around the camp.

Upon close examination the "--- the concentration camp inspectors saw its benefits: the area had transport connections, it was at a railway junction, and it was easy to close off against the outside world"

Finally, old Polish army barracks existed on the site of Auschwitz I and could be quickly converted to stone barracks which would provide housing for the labor force charged with building the remaining two sub camps.

While Auschwitz I and Auschwitz III - Monowitz were the slave labor component to the entire Auschwitz operation, the "primary function of Auschwitz was the murder of every single Jew the Nazis could (in Himmler's words) lay their hands on anywhere"

With transports arriving from nearly every corner of Europe, it became impossible to exterminate every individual immediately upon their arrival to Auschwitz, and so those selected as "fit to work" were transported away from Auschwitz II - Birkenau.

However, not every one of these new arrivals was physically able to work.

Many were elderly or sick and they were accompanied by small children and pregnant mothers.

The Nazis claimed they could not provide the sustenance necessary to keep the prisoners in good health; therefore the selection process was introduced.

Indeed, Auschwitz, more than any other camp, reflected the inner Nazi struggle between pragmatic strengthening (through forced labor on war works) and visionary murder.

No matter how many prisoners were selected as "fit to work" or how many commodities were produced in Auschwitz III - Monowitz could hide the real function of Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was created as the epicenter where the European Jews would be eliminated from existence.

The holding pen of Auschwitz II - Birkenau was not comprised entirely with Jews awaiting their turn in the gas chambers.

It held vast numbers of nationalities and orientations and languages.

Therefore, to keep order, a visible representation of one's identity was to be worn at all times.

This identification was broken down as follows:
system of identification was instituted, according to which each prisoner had a rectangular piece of material sewn onto his or her uniform, upon which was imprinted a colored triangle: red for political prisoners, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, black for asocial (for example, prostitutes), green for criminals, and pink for homosexuals.

Jews work a triangle (usually red), under which an added yellow triangle was sewn on to form a hexagram (Star of David).

Those individuals seen without their identification were routinely tortured and exterminated.

The sense of order was integral to the camp's structure.

The reality now facing the new prisoners must have been quite confusing.

In home countries such as Greece, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Romania, among others, these human beings were packed into transport cars for the long journey to Poland, sometimes having to endure this dank and feces infested environment for days at a time.

When one has been subject to that environment for such a period of time, any pretense regarding acceptable public behavior is eliminated.

"When the doors finally opened, the survivors, parched and overcome by thirst, threw themselves like unclean animals on the slimy water of the puddles lining the railroad tracks"

Sadly, this scene of starving and dehydrated inmates consuming any possible semblance of sustenance would be replayed daily in Auschwitz.

The loneliness of the new prisoners was debilitating.

Following arrival, selection occurred, and those considered "fit to work" were separated from friends and family and simply ushered into the larger camp.

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everything he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.

The slide to the animalistic drive to survive began in earnest at this point.

The new camp inductee was alone and subject to the camp's hierarchy, which may be conducted in a language this individual does not understand.

For the Jewish inmates it was worse.

While the sending of letters was permitted for certain ethnicities and communal family camps existed for the Sinti and Roma, the Jews were not granted any camp luxury.

No word of the outside world, of family or friends, or of the war effort ever made it into the Jewish district.

As a people, they were alone and hunted by both the Nazis and fellow anti-Semitic inmates.

The camp itself was muddy and stagnant and had stagnant pools of blood adjacent to every bunk and walkway.

"The place was crawling with vermin; a constant lack of water made the situation worse, leading to epidemics such as spotted fever and typhus"

Bodies were sometimes left lying where the prisoner had died, and so decaying human flesh peppered the air with a heinous stench.

The dehumanizing measures did not cease at that point.

These individuals were led through the processing section of the camp where their identification numbers were tattooed on their arms, their bodies were shaved, and they were deloused before heading back into their new home.

This process was entirely demeaning, especially for the women inmates:

--- like all concentration camp inmates ---　were deeply ashamed by the shaving on their bodies.

Although men were less traumatized by these experiences than women, even they concurred that compulsory body shaving was just one of the many dehumanizing measures aimed at torturing all concentration camps prisoners.

For women it was much harder.

Women's sexual identification is more closely tied to their body and their hair.

In concentration camps, public nudity and the shaving of body hair happened simultaneously.

The public shaming was soon followed by the donning of concentration camp garb, which was comprised of ill fitting thin rags taken off the bodies of the recently deceased.

The new arrival had precious little time to acclimate to the camp's structure.


--- new arrivals were assigned hard physical labor, whereas "old numbers" were more likely to get a good detail.
The SS did not have to enforce this law rigorously, for it was respected by the inmate hierarchy.

The reasoning for this included that the new arrival was likely in better shape to survive the grueling fifteen hour work days of hard labor.

More importantly, though, it aided in breaking down the will of the prisoner.

Once that will is broken, the inmate becomes concerned only with the daily routine, and would not be interested in participating in an uprising.

The skeletons that were the prisoner work force became almost zombies, and a large percentage did not care if they lived or died.

If the new arrival sought the aid and support of experienced camp inmates, he or she was routinely denied even the simplest assistance:

In addition, experienced inmates could hardly help someone who suffered the consequences of a shock.

The fact that people in Auschwitz had few chances to think of matters that did not directly concern them was not the only reason.

A host of informers made it risky to converse openly with someone whom one did not know well and who had as yet no camp experience.

A thoughtless remark or reaction could mean mortal danger not only for the novice but also for his informant.

Officially, an inmate was not supposed to know anything about the machinery of mass extermination, and talking about it was taboo.

Precisely at the time when a helpless new arrival had the greatest need for support, he remained woefully isolated.

The new arrival was now completely and utterly alone.

No support network was available, and fellow prisoners were concerned only with their own survival.

Daily life in the Auschwitz concentration camp was nefarious and full of danger.

The ever present starvation made the day's sole focus amassing enough food to survive, and the experience of starvation was the cause of many of the camp's maladies.

Lucie Adelsberger, an inmate doctor, explains that many despicable acts were perpetrated by prisoners.

"--- things that rightly seem outrageous and monstrous to the outsider, became understandable and to a certain extent excusable when seen from the perspective of starvation"

These behaviors could include beating the weaker prisoners and stealing their rations or eating food encrusted with mold or feces.

Hermann Langbein addresses the reality of starvation by reporting how the Auschwitz survivor Judith Sternberg-Newman saw how her fellow prisoners "--- stole bread from their dying comrades and ate it even if it was soiled by excrement.

She confesses that she pulled a concealed bread ration from under the body of a woman who had just died.

This behavior was highly dangerous, as prisoners who were caught rummaging through the garbage for vestiges of food were severely beaten and denied their rations for a couple of days.

Inmates suffering from starvation were required to attend daily roll calls, which sometimes lasted hours.

During these roll calls, it was routine for an SS guard to perform selection and send the weakest of the group to the gas chambers.

Due to this knowledge, the prisoners attempted every possible measure to ensure they looked healthier and stronger than the rest of the group.

"Some stuffed rags under their clothes to look fatter --- others rubbed whatever substance they could find on their faces --- to overcome pallor and produce color ---"

It was routine to see groups of inmates jogging in place to produce color in their faces in hopes of appearing healthy.

Hermann Langbein again writes that most prisoners had no illusions of enduring and surviving Auschwitz.

However, the small modicum of hope still existed, that perhaps Providence would intervene and allow for the prisoner to survive.

Full immersion in death became an all too real life for Auschwitz's prisoners.

Similar to how the SS men became desensitized to the horrors of the gas chambers, the prisoners became desensitized to seeing fellow inmates dying every day:

It's amazing how a human being can adjust to living in terrible circumstances.

You see a guy die -- so what?

I never thought of the man who was going to be hanged.

I was ten or fifteen yards away from a life about to be snuffed out, and all I could think of was, "Let's get this over with so I can go back to the barracks and enjoy my free time"

The most important thing was that I wasn't the man at the end of the rope.

Public executions were routinely employed by the SS as means of controlling the inmate population.

However, after so much blood and death, some of the inmates became wholly unaffected by these actions.

This desensitization is mirrored by Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein when he writes that he heard of a capo in the main camp demonstrating a new club grip to a colleague and "--- called a Jew who happened to be passing by and used him to show how he could kill someone with one blow. The demonstration was successful. No one took notice of it"

While there may be time to mourn the death of a fellow inmate at a later date, assuming one was to survive; all human emotions must be suppressed in the interest of self preservation.

Beatings were also a daily ritual in Auschwitz, following a very strict chain of command.

The new arrivals were beaten by camp elders, the elders were beaten by capos, and the capos were beaten by the SS if the roll call numbers were not accurate, a commodity was missing, or if a member of the group was perceived as lazy.

There are two examples which best characterize the daily beatings.

The first is from a prisoner, Katarina Princz, who was interviewed after the war.

Princz witnessed her block elder beating her own cousin nearly to death because the cousin, exhausted, had hidden during roll call.

The elder beat her cousin as a result of the beatings she received at the hands of the SS for being one number short.
The second example also involves roll call:

Margit Teitelbaum was dormitory elder in Block 23.

One day someone from her barracks was missing at the roll call, and the SS was furious.

It turned out that a Jewish woman from Holland had hidden in a pallet.

Since Teitelbaum was responsible for all inhabitants in her barracks, she was given twenty-five lashes on her behind with a whip in front of all those assembled.

The Dutch woman was shot.

Routine beatings became a way for SS guards to instill order and capitulation amongst the prisoner population.

No inmate, no matter the relationship with a camp elder or capo or how corrupt the SS guard allowed himself to be, was immune to this threat.

The smoke stacks of the crematorium stood as a constant reminder to each and every inmate that their lives could end in a manner of minutes.

For those unlucky souls who entered the gas chamber, it was undoubtedly a harrowing experience:

Now everyone has undressed.

Pitiful skeletons.

Their numbers are taken down, and they are chased into the block.

The sun is shining, and the snow is glistening and merrily dripping from the roof.

No one is in front of my window; all I can see are big piles of dirty prison clothes along the wall.

Then I hear footsteps and muted voices from the corridor.

I look outside. Now there are long lines of naked inmates.

The clerk of our block walks up to each one with file cards in his hand, compares names and numbers, and writes each inmate's number on their chests; these inmates are already counted among the dead, and there has to be order.

The surreal vision of bright skies and shining snow placed against the backdrop of so much murder and suffering is unfathomable.

There is a difference, however, between those committed to the gas chambers after surviving in Auschwitz for a certain period of time and those who were led to the gas chambers immediately after departing the transport cars.

The SS took extreme measures to trick the Jews emerging from the train from start to finish.

During deportation from their home countries, they were permitted to bring luggage and personal items, as they were being resettled in a new Jewish establishment in the East.

Furthermore, certain SS administrators sold plots of land to the Jews, where they would be able to build a new home and a new life once they arrived.

Once the Jews arrived at Auschwitz, the trickery continued.

The gas chambers were equipped with shower heads to fuel the deception.

The SS guards told the prisoners that following disinfection, they would be reunited with their loved ones, and oftentimes SS men told the walking dead that coffee and cakes would be available after the showers.

The scene was as follows:

On the steps leading to the changing room there hung a panel, in German, French, Greek and Hungarian, showing the arrivals the way to the "bathroom" and the "disinfection room"

Benches and numbered clothes-hooks in the changing room suggested that the prisoners would be returning to their personal effects.

Here there were also panels bearing such mottoes as "One louse - your death" and "Through cleanliness to freedom"

On the door to the gas chamber it said "Bath and disinfection room", and from the ceiling hung sieves mounted on pieces of wood, to look like shower heads.

Sometimes the SS handed out soap and towels before they shut the gas chambers, each holding up to 2,000 people.

Once inside the showers, an SS man trained to handle the Zyklon-B would deposit the poison, and both SS Doctors and SS soldiers were able to watch the macabre scene inside the showers through specially designed peep holes.

Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: A History, 100. 45 Ibid., 111.

For the inmates who had lived and suffered in Auschwitz proper for a period of time, each knew full well what lie at the end of the stairs.

For some, resistance was paramount, and beatings were soon to follow.

For others, they simply followed orders and proceeded into the chambers unaffected.

"The rule was that the inmates, being exhausted unto death, an apathetic mass, let themselves be directed wherever the all-powerful SS [sic] pleased"

For some this was a form of suicide and others had simply lost all hope of survival.

To blame the victims for not resisting the march into the gas chambers is inappropriate, as one cannot comprehend the starvation, beatings, blood, and murder that these inmates experienced on minute by minute basis, and therefore one cannot understand how that experience can completely break a person.

There was, however, one major caseof resistance.

The Sonderkommando was a special unit mainly comprised of Jews who were responsible for the disposal of corpses.

Following the gas chambers' duties, this group would remove the corpses and load each body into the ovens.

On days where the ovens were over worked, the bodies were stacked into trenches and burned.

It was an occupation where the prisoners saw untold amounts of death, sometimes of even relatives and friends.

The author and activist Elie Wiesel arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, alongside his friend Bela Katz.

"Later Katz sent word to his friend that he had been assigned to the Sonderkommando, where he was forced to push his own father into the gas chamber"

It is reasonable to assume that Bela Katz later had to push his dead father's body into the ovens and watch as it slowly turned to ash.

The Sonderkommando were always working on borrowed time.

As witnesses to the most violent atrocities committed by the Nazis at Auschwitz, each Sonderkommando group was itself liquidated after two or three months.

Towards the end of the war, when the Nazi defeat was imminent, this knowledge prompted one of the last Sonderkommando groups to stage a rebellion with the assistance of the Polish underground.

The uprising commenced as follows:

An SS prisoner selection finally prompted the uprising:

after an attempted escape the SS had murdered 200 members of the Sonderkommando with cyanide in a storage room used for personal effects.

Three hundred further prisoners were to follow, and it was the responsibility of the Sonderkommandos of crematoria IV and V to make the selections.

When, on the morning of 7 October 1944, the SS announced that those selected were to be transferred o another camp the same day, the same message as had been given to the prisoners murdered in the past, the uprising broke out: just before half-past one in the afternoon prisoners attacked approaching SS men in crematorium IV with stones, axes and iron bars, set the building on fire with smuggled hand-grenades and fled.

The smoke alarmed the prisoners in the other crematoria.

The SS set up machine-guns in crematorium IV and fired into the crowd of prisoners; those who were not hit immediately were forced into crematorium V, which faced crematorium IV.

The rebellion spread to crematorium II, where the prisoners managed to part the barbed wire and flee, at least temporarily.

Beyond the "outer cordon" some made it to the adjacent forests, and others to the fish-breeding plants and agricultural estates in Rajsko, where they were able to arm themselves and attack the SS.

Some of them hid in a barn, where they were locked in and burned alive.

While none of the rebels survived the uprising, the rebellion was successful in destroying the crematoria in an act of defiance.

Not soon thereafter, as a result of the advancing Russian Red Army, the gas chamber operations were ceased.

It is reasonable to assume the Sonderkommando activity played a part in shutting down the gassings as well, as Auschwitz no longer had the capability to murder on such a grand level.

In summation, the terrible environment of Auschwitz extended far beyond Josef Mengele.

It was a horrific setting in a desolation location, and became the most notorious death factory of the Second World War.

While Josef Mengele does not solely define Auschwitz, he is certainly indicative of the Nazis' Final Solution.