OK – A couple other threads got me thinking about this. It’s something I’ve always wanted to know. I know it’s insanely impersonal and I’m going to be impersonal in my post, so don’t read if this is upsetting.
Also, I’m sure this has been covered somewhere, but a google search of “logistics holocaust” doesn’t turn up much that’s useful, nor a similar search here.
Let’s say the “final solution” went on for 6 years, and that 6 million people died. How exactly can you pull that off?
That’s 1 million people a year.
That’s 2800 people per day.
Even if you had 28 death camps, you’re talking about 100 people per day. At 100 pounds per person, that’s about 10000 pounds of material for each camp, every single day for 6 years straight to dispose of. No matter how you look at it, that’s man power, fuel, machinery, efficiency, all while you’re running a war, on two fronts.
And as far as I know, people really only starting dying in large numbers starting in about '41. And I don’t think there were 28 death camps. So I’m probably being conservative in saying 100 people per camp per day.
The numbers to me just seem impossible.
I ask this in all sincerity. Am I ignorant of the size of some of the death camps? Could one camp have exterminated 1000 people per day for 4 years straight? And it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about mass burial, incineration, bringing them somewhere else.
I presume the real experts will be along shortly, so let me just fill in for a minute until they arrive.
It is a good question. History does provide the answers however. How did the Nazis do it? Simply by giving it a very high priority in a very efficient society.
(You want to ponder a logistical nightmare? How did any army get the right supplies to the right place in an age before computers and FedEx?)
In the final months of the war, while military forces were screaming for every sort of supply, the death camps still had priority of the rail lines. Imagine that! Their own soldiers had to play second fiddle to trains taking civilians to their deaths.
The number killed in The Holocaust includes those killed locally, without being transported, as well as those killed in the camps. I am not sure which years are included in the ‘official’ count.
So in total, the killing lasted more than a few years, and occurred both in the camps and elsewhere.
Having said that, I will sit back and be educated.
The article “An Analysis of Furnace Capacity” at the Nizkor Project uses Nazi source documents to arrive at a figure of over 1 million cremations possible at Auschwitz alone in the period March to December 1943. There is a wealth of material at Nizkor based on primary source materials that give witness to the scale and industrial “efficiency” of the Nazi’s Final Solution.
I’m assuming the Holocaust totals include atrocities such as Babi Yar, where civilians were machine-gunned into waiting pits. You’d be amazed at how effective a few soldiers with machine-guns can be.
The Nazi killings don’t begin and end with the industrial terrors they perpetrated. A lot of it was old-fashioned execution-style mass murder.
I think the OP probably is unaware of the size of the camps. I’ve visited Auschwitz/Birkenau…the latter is immense, stretching to the horizon in two directions.
I’ve been to Babi Yar. The pit is huuuuge. It’s been a while, but I remember it being maybe 100 yards across, and even after being partially filled in, still about 20 yards deep. I was there in 1989, and the plaque at the edge of the pit said (in Russian, Ukrainina, and Yiddish) something like “here, in the years 1941-1945, the German fascists killed 100,000 Soviet citizens, residents of Kiev.” I don’t know whether 100,000 is the total for the entire Nazi occupation of Ukraine (seems awfully low) or what, but any way you slice it, that’s still a lot of people.
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I’ve been to Babi Yar. The plaque at the edge of the pit said (in Russian, Ukrainina, and Yiddish) something like “here, in the years 1941-1945, the German fascists killed 100,000 Soviet citizens, residents of Kiev.” I don’t know whether 100,000 is the total for the entire Nazi occupation.
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That was just from Kiev. Roughly 50,000 Jews and 50,000 others, mainly Gypsies and POWs.
A more factual account of Babi Yar. – The link in my first post goes to a poem, actually, and since the OP is honestly curious I think I’ll give him something more to chew over.
Anyway, the Holocaust is one of the most obsessively-documented atrocities in history because of the deniers: The people who don’t want to see it repeated (not just Jewish groups, but a whole range of people who are not, in fact, assholes) have been forced to document everything to counter the wild claims of the deniers. First-hand testimonies have been collected, photos and other studies of the camps have been done and preserved, and logical arguments have been posited and recorded to be reused against the morons over and over again, as new ones spring up. So as odious as Holocaust denial is, without it we would have lost a lot of what we have, especially the first-hand accounts.
One book that outlines the methods that concentration camps used to kill so many people is The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them by Eugen Kogon.
Interesting links to Babi Yar. I was not familiar with that. I was familiar with a Shostakovich symphony of that name. I would assume, now, that the symphony was about this massacre, but I was oblivious of that until now.
Actually, Auschwitz and Majdanek were exceptional in their size (both had started out as slave labor camps, similar to Dachau, and the extermination function was grafted on later). The “pure” death camps (Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmo) which were only used for extermination and had no slave labor function were much smaller; the “beauty” of Hitler’s industrialization of mass murder was that it only required a few hundred individuals to fully staff a killing center capable of murdering tens of thousands of people a year.
It wasn’t. Believe it or not, disposal of the bodies was a major rate-limiting step at Auschwitz; the Nazis, when they were using the gas chambers to their maximum efficiency, could kill people faster than the crematoria could incinerate the resulting corpses. During the liquidation of the Hungarian Jews, when they were killing more than 4-5,000 people per day every day, they had to resort to burning the bodies in open pits as a supplement to the crematoria ovens.
If you’re seriously interested in learning more about the logistics of the Nazi killing machine, I recommend reading Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. It’s the definitive history outlining the process of implementation of the Nazi death machinery.
This begs an addition question. I understand that it’s very difficult to completely eliminate a person during cremation. The large bones persists and usually must be ground up. Where did the Nazi’s put all those bones? Are there pits of them near the camps? Or did they indeed grind them up. If so, where did they dump the ground-up bones?
I knew it was just for Kiev; by “the entire Nazi occupation” I meant the time period. Although there were some Jews in Kiev, I believe the bulk of the Jewish population of Ukraine was in Galicia (five of my eight great-grandparents are from Galicia, either the parts that are now in Ukraine or the parts that are now in Poland). Somewhere at home I’ve got some old census figures for the Jewish population of Ukraine, from 1897 (the first All-Russian Census) to 1989 (the last comprehensive Soviet census); maybe I’ll dig them up.
My ex-boyfriend’s father was in a camp in rural Ukraine as a child/teenager; his mother bribed a guard to let the kids run away, so they first shot her in front of the kids, and then let the kids run away. He spent most of the rest of the war being hidden by a sympathetic Ukrainian family in the barn, living by eating rats, until they family turned him in. Luckily by that time the war was almost over, so he survived. He never did find out why the family turned him in again. He’s now retired and living partly on German government compensation.
Generally what’s left is ash and a few pounds of burnt up bone fragments. They pretty much just scattered it around the crematoria. There’s a pond next to the creamatoria in Birkineau that’s still clouded grey with ash and bone to this day.
That makes sense. Is the ground around the crematoria elevated? Millions of people seem like they’d leave tons of ash and bone chips. I know a lot of the ash went up the chimneys. I just wonder if the ground around the camps are at a higher elevation.
