NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP OVERSEERS: Sonderkommandos

Rare photographs from wartime archives, many of which are very distressing showing heaps of dead bodies, elderly Jews, women and children, wearing the star of David waiting selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sonderkommandos assisted the newly arrived transports. The other principal groups of 'helpers' were Kapos and Trawniki. The Nazis' vast concentration camp network and later the Final Solution programme made heavy demands on the SS whose responsibility it was. The use of 'overseers' minimised costs and enabled the camps to run with fewer SS personnel. The super commandoes' duties included unloading Jews from trains, collecting their possessions and sorting them for storage. Under the supervision of the SS, their main assignment was to run the gas chambers and crematoria. The Kapos oversaw the Sonderkommandos. Many were originally prisoner functionaries recruited from violent criminal gangs and they had a well-deserved reputation for brutality. The third group known as Trawniki or Trawnikimänner were Central and Eastern European collaborators recruited from Russian PoW camps. While some served in a military capacity, others played an instrumental role in the Holocaust programme, rounding up and transporting Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps. Whilst the Sonderkommandos were forced to undertake various grisly tasks, with the added fear of being killed at any moment, the Kapos and Trawniki competed without scruple to maintain the favour of their SS masters while pitting victim against victim. Very little text, the book is in the Images of War series and reproduces approximately 200 rare contemporary archive images of forced labour, known personnel and very harrowing images such as skeletal corpses being dragged in irons by the head and pushed into the oven for incineration (which normally took 45 minutes to one hour). 114pp, large softback.