Extermination Camp - Operation of The Camps

Operation of The Camps

The formal mass-killing method at an extermination camp was poison gas (made to order by the IG Farben chemicals company); besides gas chambers, the camp guards continued killing prisoners via mass shooting, starvation, torture, etc. After the war, the diary of the Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolf Höss, revealed that psychologically "unable to endure wading through blood any longer", many Einsatzkommandos—the killers — either went mad or killed themselves.

Operationally, there were three types of death camp:

1. Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, where prisoners were promptly killed upon arrival. Initially, the camps used carbon monoxide gas chambers; at first, the corpses were buried, but then incinerated atop pyres. Later, gas chambers and crematoria were built in Treblinka and Belzec; Zyklon-B was used in Belzec.
2. Concentration–extermination camps where some prisoners were selected for slave labor, instead of immediate death; they were kept alive as camp inmates, available to work wherever the Nazis required. These camps — including Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Jasenovac — later were retrofitted with Zyklon-B gas chambers and crematoria, remaining operational until war's end in 1945.
3. Minor extermination camps such as Sajmiste in Serbia, Maly Trostenets in the USSR, Janowska, in Poland, and Gornija Rijeka, initially operated as prisons and transit camps, then as extermination camps late in the war, using portable gas-chambers and gas vans. Gas vans were initially developed at the Chelmno extermination camp, before being used elsewhere.

The corpses were incinerated in crematoria and the ashes either buried or scattered; yet, at Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec, and Chelmno, the corpses were incinerated on pyres. The efficiency of industrialised killing at Auschwitz-Birkenau produced too many corpses to adequately burn or bury, so the crematoria (manufactured to specification by Topf und Söhne) were put into use to handle the disposals around the clock, day and night.