JEWS IN THE PENAL COMPANY

THE EXTERMINATION OF JEWS AT AUSCHWITZ

In the second month after arrival in the camp, Jews were housed in Block 2, and later—together with the Poles accused of abetting the escape of the first escapee from the camp (Tadeusz Wiejowski)—they were removed to the upper floor of Block No. 3, until in the end they were taken down to the ground floor and partially also to the upper floor of Block No. 11. Together they formed the so-called penal company (Strafkompanie or SK) subjected to stern discipline and selected for the hardest labour. As much as in the case of Poles transfer to the SK was a punishment for alleged offences committed in the camp, Jews were incorporated into the company only due to their origin.

Inmates in the penal company were primarily used for dragging the huge roller that was used to flatten the surface of the camp roads, carrying concrete poles for the fencing, and for digging gravel in the nearby pits (there were at least four such gravel pits). The work within was conducted in downright murderous conditions: continuously beaten with clubs by the Kapos, the inmates had to push the wheelbarrows with the products at a tempo defined as Laufschritt (at a run), and if they stumbled or dropped in exhaustion, if they did not immediately stand up they were beaten until unconscious or killed,. The documents that have been preserved prove that practically all the Jews brought to the camp from 1940 to early Autumn 1941 were sent to the penal company in Block No. 11 immediately on arrival, and they probably all died there.

Franciszek Wieczorkowski, Working the Roller.
Source: Collections of A-BSM

Ernst Krankemann, No. 3210, Kapo of the penal company, exceptionally cruel to the inmates. He arrived in Auschwitz in a transport from Sachsenhausen on 29 August 1940.
Source: A-BSMA

Source: A-BSMA

Personal record card of Marcus Feingold, the only Jew known to have been transported to Auschwitz before Autumn 1941, who did not die in the camp, only because he was soon transferred to Neuengamme.

When photographing inmates began in early Spring 1941, photographs were taken of only 23 of around 250–300 Jews who were brought to the camp in the previous year. Even assuming that a small proportion of the photographs have not been preserved, it can be assumed that mortality among the Auschwitz Jews reached 90% at the time.

A Jewish inmate brought to the camp on 29 November 1940. The “black point” visible on the jacket of the striped uniform below the triangle and the camp number is the sign of the penal company.
Source: A-BSMA

In the first half of 1941, around 330 Jews were sent to Auschwitz, again like in the previous year, together with around 7,000 Poles. They are all believed to have died: some being systematically killed in the penal company, and the remaining ones (approximately 170–180), probably on 23 June, when “on the occasion” of the attack of the Wehrmacht on the USSR, the commandant of the camp ordered the inmates in positions of authority to “get rid of all the Jews”. It was a time of horrible scenes in the penal company: Kapos and their deputies ran all around the gravel pits with clubs, and mercilessly clubbed the Jews, who inefficiently tried to avoid the blows.

There are no entries in the quite large number of preserved documents from the second half of 1941 to attest to the presence of any Jew brought to the camp in the previous period. This is indirectly corroborated by the accounts of witnesses, former inmates, speaking of the total and mass nature of that crime.

Excerpt from the account of Kazimierz Hałgas:

Of other events connected to my stay in Auschwitz, I especially well remember Monday, 23 June, the second day after the Sunday when all the SS got drunk, because that was how they celebrated the outbreak of war against the USSR. Immediately after the morning roll call, the commandant summoned all the inmates in positions of authority, therefore also the block elders, to a briefing …. He clearly stated that by the evening roll call he would not wish to have any more Jews in the camp. They are guilty of causing the war.

His intention was fully achieved. First, all the sick Jews in the SK were finished off. At the time, sick Jews were not allowed admission to the hospital. If they couldn’t lift up, they were left in the block, and there during the day they were trudged to death. So those from the block were already brought out dead before midday. The rest were finished off in the gravel pit situated just behind the wires, opposite Hospital Block 20. From the windows of the corridor of that block, from the first floor, I for a time observed how Jews working with the entire penal company were being finished off there, in the gravel pit.

Source: Kazimierz Hałgas, A-BSMA, Testimonies Fonds, vol. 89, pp. 165, 166.