The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: camps/auschwitz/crematoria/sander.001


Archive/File: camps/auschwitz sander.001
Last-Modified: 1994/07/19

Engineer Fritz Sander testifying on March 7 1946
[Quoted from the interrogation transcripts by Prof. Gerald Fleming
from the University of Surrey, in an NYT article, July 18 1993]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
I decided to design and build a crematorium with a higher capacity. I
completed this project of a new crematorium in November 1942 - a
crematorium for mass incineration, and I submitted this project to a
State Patent Commission in Berlin.

This "Krema" was to be built on the conveyor belt principle. That is
to say, the corpses must be brought to the incineration furnaces
without interruption.  When the corpses are pushed into the furnaces,
they fall onto a grate, and then slide into the furnace and are
incinerated. The corpses serve at the same time as fuel for heating of
the furnaces. This patent could not yet be approved by the Main Patent
Office in Berlin, because of its classification (as a state secret).

Q. Although you knew about the mass liquidation of innocent human
   beings in crematoriums, you devoted yourself to designing and 
   creating higher capacity incineration furnaces for crematoriums - 
   and on your own initiative.

A. I was a German engineer and key member of the Topf works and I saw
   it as my duty to apply my specialist knowledge in this way to help
   Germany win the war, just as an aircraft construction engineer builds 
   airplanes in wartime, which are also connected with the destruction 
   of human beings.


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