"After undressing, first the men and later the women with the children
were taken through the "tube" to the gas chambers. SS Unterscharfuhrer
Schluch testified:

'My post in the "tube" was close to the undressing barrack. Wirth
briefed me that while I was there I should influence the Jews to
behave calmly. After leaving the undressing barracks, I had to show
the Jews the way they were convinced that they were really going to
the baths. After the Jews entered the gas chambers, the doors were
closed by Hackenholt himself or by the Ukrainians subordinate to him.
Then Hackenholt switched on the engine which supplied the gas. After
five or seven minutes -- this is only an estimate -- someone looked
through the small window into the gas chamber to verify whether all
inside were dead. Only then were the outside doors opened and the gas
chambers ventilated....After the ventilation of the gas chambers, a
Jewish working group under the command of their capos entered and
removed the bodies from the chambers. [...]

The Jews inside the gas chambers were densely packed. This is the
reason that the corpses were not lying on the floor but were mixed up
in disorder in all directions, some of them kneeling, according to the
amount of space they had. The corpses were besmirched with mud and
urine or with spit. I could see that the lips and tips of the noses
were a bluish color. Some had their eyes closed, others' eyes rolled.
The bodies were dragged out of the gas chambers and inspected by a
dentist, who removed the finger-rings and gold teeth....After this
procedure, the corpses were thrown into a big pit." <1>

[Regarding the disposal of bodies into the pit, Franz Stangle is
quoted...]

"Wirth was not in his office, they said he was in the camp....I asked
what was the matter. The man I was talking to said that one of the
pits had overflowed. The had put too many corpses in it and
putrefaction had progressed too fast so that the liquid underneath had
pushed the bodies on top up and over, and the corpses had rolled down
the hill. I saw some of them -- oh, God, it was awful...." <2>

<1> Yad Vashem Archives, TR-10/517 (The trial of Josef Oberhauser)
    Landgericht, Munchen, Band 8, p1512

<2> Gitta Serini, Into the Darkness, London, 1974, p.112.

Excerpted from....----------------------------------------------
BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA - the Operation Reinhard Death Camps
Indiana University Press - Yitzhak Arad, 1987. ISBN 0-253-3429-7
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