My friend and I got into a debate, she said most people who died in Auschwitz, died from the gas chamber, I said the greater number perished from poor diet, overwork and disease. The average life expectancy was 6 weeks to 3 months. I have read numerous books and autobiographies and the gas chambers came later in the camp's life, I think it was 1943. As it is doubtful that we will ever know the exact details, the Germans were meticulous record keepers. Anyone have an idea which two categories did the most killing?
Your friend is right. The Germans got in over their head early on. They could not kill them fast enough using the methods of shooting and carbon monoxide. It took until 1942 for them to introduce Zyclon B and the showers into the mix. By that time they were up to their eyeballs in undesirables. Furthermore, the bodies were stacking up. Previously, they had been burying them in trenches, but that was too slow. Along with the showers came the crematoria. On a good day, the Germans finally got up to 6,000 head being processed at Auschwitz.
The thing folks leave out of these discussions was that one of the big reasons Germans resorted to these means was that they found the other methods were far too hard on the guards. A normal fellow can only take so much of this sort of atrocities. They were turning fairly healthy young men that were needed at the front into gibbering idiots in a matter of weeks. The ones that weren't totally debilitated by the job were monsters. The gas chambers were an efficient solution in this way. It minimized the muss and fuss, and you could bring in the Sodorkommando to clean up. They could keep things going and not trouble the guards.
One of the questions that has haunted me in all this was where was all this going? The Ruskies built cities during the Cold War where all they knew how to do was build ICBM's. If the Politburo ever decided to stop making ICBM's, entire cities were going to starve. Think of this in terms of German Extermination, and let's just say Germany had come out on top. Where would the cleansing have stopped?
KYHillChick has had a really hard time tracking down my Dad's ancestors. The Eighth Air Force did a pretty good job of wiping out all the birth records in Germany with the bombing. However, she has recently found a genealogy site that draws on the records the Nazi's kept. These records were volunteered by German citizens in the 30's. You could register with the local office and they would take down your genealogy and keep it on file. Now that this data is public, it is doing a lot to fill in the gaps left from the bombing.
So here is what bothers me. You've got this well-honed extermination industry cranked up. You manage to get the Jew, the Gypsy, the Slav, and the Defective into the Gas Chamber. Now what? This is far too easy. What's next? All the black haired people? The Gingers? The Brunettes? My guess was that the Nazi's had not really figured this out, and were heading for a real surprise. This was not a process that could stop easily, and they had a database on half the country to work from.
If you're looking for an analog to this problem in our own society, look no further than the BATF. At the end of Prohibition, Roosevelt had all these soon-to-be unemployed government employees that had previously been chasing down bootleggers. Next thing you know, they criminalize marijuana, make all sorts of firearms illegal, and start chasing down untaxed ciggies. That's a little cottage industry that is not going to stop very soon.
