“ENTRANCE IS ENTRANCE IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO ALL THOSE WHO
HAVE NO BUSINESS HERE.
INCLUDING SS PERSONNEL NOT ASSIGNED TO THIS COMMAND”

In spite of this sign, we entered without the guards even asking for our pass. The reason was simple: the SS on duty here were from the crematoriums, and the 60 Sonderkommando men who worked at the pyre were also crematorium personnel front number two [Kr III]. At present the day shift was on. They worked from seven at the morning till seven in the evening, when they were replaced by the night watch, which also consisted of 60 men, taken from number four [Kr V].

Passing through the gate, we reached an open place which resembled a courtyard, in the middle of which stood a thatched roof house whose plaster was peeling off. Its style was that of a typical German country house, and its small windows were covered with planks. As a matter of fact, it no doubt had been a country house for at least 150 years, to judge by its thatched roof, which had tong since turned black, and its often replastered, flaking walls.

The German State had expropriated the entire village of Birkenau near Auschwitz in order to establish the KZ there. All the houses, with the exception of this one, had been demolished and the population evacuated.

What, in fact, must this house have been used for? Had it been meant to be lived in? In that case partitions must have divided the interior into rooms. Or had it originally been one large room, without partitions, meant to be used as a hangar or storeroom? I asked myself these questions, but was un able to supply the answers In any case, it was it was now used as an undressing room for those on their way to the pyre. It was here that they deposited their shabby clothes, their glasses, and their shoes.

It was here that the “surplus” from the “Jewish ramp” was sent, that is, those for whom there was no room in the four crematoriums The worst kind of death awaited them. Here there were no faucets to slake their thirst of several days' voyage, no fallacious signs to allay their misgivings, no gas chamber they could pretend was a disinfecting room. Merely a peasant house, once painted yellow and covered with thatch, whose windows had been replaced by planks.

Behind the house enormous columns of smoke rose skyward, diffusing the odor of broiled flesh and burning hair. In the courtyard, a terrified crowd of about 5,000 souls; on all sides, thick cordons of SS, holding leashed police dogs. The prisoners were led, three or four hundred at a time into the undressing room. There, hustled by a rain of truncheon blows, they spread out their clothes and left by the door on the opposite side of the house, yielding their places to those who were to follow. Once out of the door, to they had no time even to glance around them or to realize the horror of their situation. A Sonderkommando immediately seized their arms and steered them between the double row of SS who lined the twisting path, which, flanked on either side by woods, ran for 50 yards [150 in the French] to the pyre, which till now had been hidden by the trees.

The pyre was a ditch 50 yards long, six yards wide and three yards deep, a welter of burning bodies. SS soldiers, stationed at five yard intervals, along the pathway side of the ditch, awaited their victims They were holding small caliber arms — six millimeters used in the KZ for administering a bullet in the back of the neck. At the end of the pathway, two Sonderkommando men seized the victims by the arms and dragged them for 15 or 20 yards into position before the SS. Their cries of terror covered the sounds of the shots. A shot, then, immediately afterwards, even before he was dead, the victim was hurled into the flames Fifty yards farther on, a scene similar in all respects was being enacted. Oberscharführer Molle [Moll] was in charge of these butchers. As a doctor and as an eye witness, I swear that he was the Third Reich’s most abject, diabolic, and hardened assassin. Even Doctor Mengele showed from time to time that he was human. During the selections at the unloading ramp, when he noticed a healthy young woman who wanted above all to join her mother in the left hand column, he snarled at her coarsely, but ordered her to rejoin the right hand group. Even the ace shot of the number one crematorium (Kr II], Oberschaarführer Mussfeld, fired a second shot into anyone who the first shot had not killed outright. Oberschaarführer Molle wasted no time over such trifles. Here, the majority of the men were thrown alive into the flames. Woe to any Sonderkommando man by whose action the living chain, which extended from cloakroom to pyre, was broken, with the result that one of the members of the firing squad was forced to wait few seconds before receiving his new victim.

Molle was everywhere at once. He made his way tirelessly from one pyre to the next, to the cloakroom and back again. Most of the deportees allowed themselves to be led without resistance. So paralyzed were they with fright and terror that they no longer realized what was about to happen to them. The majority of the elderly and children reacted in this way. There were, however, a goodly number of adolescents among those brought here, who instinctively tried to resist with a strength born of despair. If Molle happened to witness such a scene, he took his gun from his holster. A shot, a bullet often fired from a distance of 40 to 50 yards (20 or 30 in the French), and the struggling person fell dead in the arms of the Sonderkommando who was dragging him towards the pyre. Molle was an ace shot. His bullets often pierced the arms of the Sonderkommando men from one side to the other when he was dissatisfied with their work, In such cases he inevitably aimed for the arms, without otherwise manifesting his dissatisfaction, but also without giving but any previous warning.

When the two pyres were operating simultaneously, the output varied from five to six thousand dead a day. Slightly better than the crematoriums, but here death was a thousand times more terrible, for here one died twice, first with a bullet in the back of the neck, then by fire.