The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: camps//auschwitz/sonderbehandlung.01


_Nazi Mass Murder_, Kogon et al., pp. 160, 267n.
------------------------------------------------

A report on prisoner strength in the women's camp at Birkenau, dated
8 October 1944, speaks a language that cannot be misunderstood:

Strength on 7 October 1944         .......... 38,792 prisoners
Arrivals on 7 October 1944
   Entries                       7
   Transfers                     1 ............... 8     "
Departures on 7 October 1944
   Natural deaths                7
   S.B.                      1,229
   Releases                      8
   Transfers                 1,150 ........... 2,394     "
   
                             Total .......... 36,406 prisoners ^56

How did these prisoners "depart," if they were not transferred or
released, or died a natural death?  The initials "S.B." in the departure
column stand for the word "Sonderbehandlung," or "special treatment."

56. _Hefte von Auschwitz_, no. 8 (1964), p. 116.  Auschwitz State
Museum, ref. D-Au-3a/56, no. 30094.

                             Work Cited

Kogon, Eugen, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Rueckerl, eds.  _Nazi Mass
Murder:  a Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas_.  Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1993.


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