"...I have been constantly associated with the administration of
concentration camps since
1934, serving at
Dachau until 1938; then as Adjutant in
Sachsenhausen from 1938 to 1 May 1940, when I was appointed Commandant of
Auschwitz. I commanded Auschwitz until 1
December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to
starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70 or 80 percent of all persons sent to
Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for
slave labor in the concetration camp industries; included among the executed and burned were approximately 20,000
Russian prisoners of war who were delivered at Auschwitz in
Wehrmacht (
German army) transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000
German Jews, and great numbers of citizens, mostly
Jewish, from
Holland,
France,
Belgium,
Poland,
Hungary,
Czechoslovakia,
Greece, or other countires. We executed about 400,000
Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944....
"The '
final solution' of the Jewish question meant
the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish
extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there were already in the
General Government (western
Poland) three other extermination camps:
Belzek,
Treblinka, and
Wolzek.... I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their exterminations. The camp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one-half year. He was principally concerned with
liquidating all the Jews from the
Warsaw Ghetto. He used
monoxide gas (truck engine emissions), and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So, when I set up the extermination building at
Auschwitz, I used
Cyklon B, which was a crystallized
prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions.
We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about one-half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special
Kommandos (
Jewish prisoners who were gassed after doing this job for several weeks) took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses....
"Another improvement we made over
Treblinka was that we built our gas chamber to accommodate 2,000 people at one time whereas at Treblinka their gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: We had two
SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make the spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were
sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the
extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a
delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had
riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes, but of course when we found them
we would send the children in to be exterminationed. We were required to carry out these exterminations in
secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous
burning of bodies permeated the entire area and
all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz."
Excerpted from the testimony of Rudolf Hoess, Nuremburg, 1946