Sonderkommando

***Sonderkommandos*** were special work groups made up of prisoners in the Nazi extermination camps (death camps) during World War II.  (In German, "*Sonderkommando*" means "special ".)  They worked in and around the gas chambers, which the Nazis used to murder many people.

## What did the *Sonderkommando* do?
The *Sonderkommandos* did not kill anybody.  When the Nazi guards at the death camps killed people in their gas chambers, they made the *Sonderkommandos* do a few different jobs:
* Take prisoners into the gas chambers
* Take dead bodies out of the gas chambers after the Nazis had killed them
* Take things the Nazis wanted from the dead bodies.  For example, they had to take out gold teeth and tooth fillings; cut off the women's hair; and take jewelry and eyeglasses
* Bury or burn the dead bodies
* Clean the gas chambers and get them ready for the next group of people the Nazis wanted to kill

### Life as a *Sonderkommando* 
 at Dachau concentration camp]]Usually, the Nazi camp guards chose people for the *Sonderkommando* groups right after those people got to the concentration camps.  They almost always chose Jewish prisoners.  These people were told they would be killed if they did not agree.  They were not told what kind of work they would have to do.  Sometimes, the new *Sonderkommando* would find the bodies of their own families in the gas chambers.  They were not allowed to change jobs or refuse to work.  The only way they could stop working as *Sonderkommando* would be to kill themselves.

The Nazis needed the *Sonderkommandos* to stay strong enough to work.  Because of this, they were treated a little better than the other prisoners.  They were allowed to sleep in their own barracks.  They were also allowed to keep things like food, medicines, and cigarettes that had belonged to people who were killed in the gas chambers.  The Nazis also did not want anyone outside the camps to know what they were doing.  To make sure the *Sonderkommando* could never tell what they knew, the Nazis would regularly kill all of the *Sonderkommando*, usually about every 3 months.

 and an interpreter talk on the site of Birkenau's crematoria.  He was a member of the camp's *Sonderkommandos*.]]

## *Sonderkommandos* fight back
Some *Sonderkommandos* tried to revolt (fight back) against the Nazis.  For example, in 1944, *Sonderkommandos* at Auschwitz partly  one of the crematoria used for burning bodies.

However, before this plan was ready, people in the camp's resistance movement found out that the Nazi guards were going to murder the *Sonderkommando* on 7 October 1944.  The resistance members warned the *Sonderkommando*, who attacked the guards with two machine guns, axes, knives and grenades.  They killed a kapo and about 3 SS guards and hurt about 12 others.  A total of 451 *Sonderkommandos* were killed on this day.  Some died fighting the camp's guards.  Some did not, and were executed later that day by the Nazis.  At Sobibór, *Sonderkommando* in one part of the camp (Camp I) revolted on 14 October 1943.  The *Sonderkommando* in another part of the camp (Camp III) did not revolt, but were murdered the next day.  They snuck these pictures out of the camp as proof of what the Nazis were doing.  After World War II, at some camps, people found notes that members of the *Sonderkommando* had buried or hidden, hoping that someone would find the notes later and know what happened.

## Testimonies
Between 1943 and 1944, some members of the *Sonderkommando* at Birkenau (Auschwitz II) were able to get pens and paper, and they wrote about the things they had seen at the camp.  They buried the things they wrote near the crematoria.  Their writings were found after the war ended.

For example, this note was found buried in the Auschwitz crematoria.  It was written by Zalman Gradowski, a *Sonderkommando* who was killed in the revolt on 7 October 1944:"Dear finder of these notes, I have one request of you ... that my days of Hell, that my hopeless tomorrow will find a purpose in the future.  I am transmitting [writing about] only a part of what happened in the Birkenau-Auschwitz Hell. You will realize what reality looked like ... From all this you will have a picture of how our people perished [died]."

## Related pages 
* Sonderkommando photographs
* The Holocaust
* Auschwitz concentration camp

## References