On a previous post on my blog, which you can read here, I wrote in the comments section that the Jews, who were immediately gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, were not registered in the camp, which makes it impossible for anyone to know how many Jews were killed at Auschwitz. A reader wrote this in answer to my comment:
I know Auschwitz Birkenau filed false death certificates for the new arrivals sent directly to the gas chambers.
Survivor Ernie Michel discussed his work assignment at Auschwitz was to create these certificates because they liked his handwriting.
This sounds plausible because we know that the German people are very neat and meticulous, so the Nazis would have wanted someone with good handwriting to write the false death certificates at Auschwitz.
In writing my comment on the previous post, I didn’t take into account that the Jews, who survived the first selection but were too weak to continue working, were gassed months, or even years, after they arrived. In the movie Schindler’s List, there is a famous scene where a number of Jews are forced to run naked as the German doctors decide whether they are still healthy enough to work. It is well known that Dr. Josef Mengele would regularly visit the women’s barracks to select sick prisoners for the gas chamber.
I did some research and found the details of Ernest Michel’s story here. The following quote is from that article:
It has been 67 years since another inmate, Stefan Heyman, saved Ernest Michel from what he considered certain death in Auschwitz.
As Michel recalls it, Heyman chose the young man to record in the Nazi’s logbook the names of all Jewish inmates who were murdered each day in the gas chambers there.
Michel, now 87, had studied calligraphy before the war, and the recording job ensured that he had extra food and would be protected.
“You won’t be sent up the chimney,” Michel said Heyman, who was not Jewish, told him.
Heyman’s help came at a time, Michel said this week, when he had “lost weight and I was ready” for the gas chambers. Michel, who said he saw Heyman only that one day, wrote in his autobiography, “Promises to Keep,” that “I never could have made it” without Heyman and a Jewish doctor, George Kovacz, who gave him a permanent job as an orderly at Auschwitz.
Ernest Michel had apparently passed the initial selection after he arrived at Auschwitz, and was put to work, but as he became too weak to work, he was in danger of being selected for the gas chamber. He was saved (by a non-Jewish prisoner) because of his nice handwriting.
Note that Ernest Michel was given the job of recording the names in a logbook, not writing false death certificates. Where are those logbooks now? They were probably confiscated by the Soviet Union and have never been released.
The reader also wrote in her comment: “But didn’t the American Red Cross keep death records?” As I understand it, the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross stored records from World War II and the aftermath, but did not keep records of deaths as they were happening. The records found in the camps were turned over to the ITS after the war.
This quote about the ITS is from Wikipedia:
The history of the service can be traced back to 1943, when, at the Allies’ initiative, a Tracing Bureau was opened with the British Red Cross in London. It was moved from London to Versailles, and later to Frankfurt am Main.
The case of the Dachau concentration camp illustrates how records were kept by the Germans and how these records were later used by the Allies.
Even before the war ended on May 8, 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered that as many American soldiers as possible should be brought to see the gas chamber in the crematorium at Dachau, where a sign outside said, “This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here. Please don’t destroy.” Since there were also 5,380 dead prisoners at Dachau whose bodies were buried at Leitenberg before the camp was liberated, this would mean that the death toll at Dachau, before the camp was liberated, was over 243,000. Since the total number of registered inmates at the main Dachau camp was 206,206, according to the camp records, this means that the US military claimed that there were 37,000 more deaths than the number of prisoners who were registered.
Later, a new sign was placed at the Dachau crematorium by Phillip Auerbach, a Jewish concentration camp survivor, who had been appointed the Bavarian Commissioner for Racial, Religious and Political Persecutees and the Commissioner for Restitution. This sign read “In the years from 1933 to 1945, 238,756 people were cremated here.” The Rev. Martin Niemöller, a former prisoner at Dachau, saw this sign in November 1945 and was very upset by the high number of alleged deaths in the camp.
There were 31,951 deaths at the main Dachau camp during the 12 years that the camp was in existence, according to a report made by the International Tracing Service at Arolson, Germany in 1977. This report was based on death records meticulously kept by the Nazis.
The Dachau camp records were confiscated by the American Army and are currently kept in the National Archives in Washington, DC.
According to the camp records, there were 3,752 deaths at Dachau in the first seven years that the camp was in operation, but the death toll escalated to 13,158 deaths in the first four months of 1945. Just in the month of February 1945, there were 3,977 deaths at Dachau, more than in all of the seven years before the war. Most of these deaths in 1945 were due to a typhus epidemic in the camp which began in the fall of 1944 when prisoners were evacuated from the camps in the East and brought to Dachau.
Tour guides at Dachau currently tell visitors that the total number of deaths at Dachau was around 41,000 and that the gas chamber was used to kill small batches of prisoners, although not for “mass gassing.”
