The prosecution also took great care to stress the terrible cruelty of the gassing operations in Auschwitz, as evinced by the following statement from former SS-Unterscharfuehrer Richard Boeck: "I simply cannot describe how these people screamed. That lasted about eight or ten minutes and then everything was quiet. A short while later, some inmates opened the door and you could still see a blue fog hanging over the giant tangle of corpses. The corpses were cramped together in such a way that you could not tell to whom the individual appendages and body parts belonged. For example, I noticed that one of the victims had stuck his index finger several centimeters into the eye-socket of another. This gives you a sense of how indescribably terrible the death throes of this person must have been. I felt to ill that I almost vomited." The visceral physicality of this description is immediately striking. These victims are no mere statistics; they suffered terribly in acute, bodily ways. This description makes it plain that killing people with gas was not, at its point of application, a bureaucratic operation conducted with cold detachment but an excrutiatingly brutal form of murder. Work Cited Pendas, Devin O. "The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963-1965," New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. pp 112-113
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