Crematoria During The Holocaust

When I look at this picture I don’t just see thousands of Jewish men and women being sent to the crematorium to be burned to death. I see the cloudy gloomy weather. It is such a depressing scene, imagine how they felt being marched to their death. You can help but wonder if some of the Nazis guarding them felt any sort of guilt as they were having all of these prisoners murdered right before their eyes or had their conscience grown silent from doing it so much. How their family’s felt when they what was happening but could do nothing for them, let alone had the strength to do so. Just think about it there were so many more prisoners than Nazis or Kapos but they were so weak from the lack nutrition that even their sere numbers couldn’t give
The first crematoria in the concentration camps were installed in late 1939/ 1940. Prior to this date the rate of deaths in the camps was relatively low. Up to late 1939 dead bodies and the registration of bodies followed the normal procedures used in the district in which the camp was located. As the rate of deaths in the camps increased use was made of local municipal crematoria for which the SS paid a fee to the crematoria as per any normal civil cremation. Burial urns of ashes were also delivered to the camp for purchase by relatives if they so wished. In some camps e.g. Gross Rosen the local municipal crematorium came to collect the bodies from the camp. The cremation of the camp prisoners was registered in the municipal crematorium record book as for any other person. So finally in 1940 Himmler issued a decree that all dead prisoners from the camps should a) be cremated and b) be cremated in a crematorium in the
The first crematoria installed in the camps were oil fueled Heinrich Kori single muffle mobile ovens and Topf & Sohne oil fueled mobile double muffle ovens. These types of ovens had been in manufacture for a number of years and used in for example agriculture for burning debris, animal carcasses etc. They were relatively easy to produce and install. Mobile crematoria of these types were installed in Sachsenhausen. These ovens were not built for mass incinerations and as the body count in the camps grew after 1941 became totally inadequate. The camps looked for larger and more efficient capacity. They therefore asked Kori and Topf to design more permanent structures with greater capacity that could also use a less expensive fuel than the oil. These companies designed cheaper and more cost effective ovens from the existing designs of the more expensive ovens used in the municipal crematoria. Any semblance of a correct cremation as defined in law was designed out of the process to achieve maximum efficiency at the lowest cost. Thus Kori produced a permanent bricked in single muffle oven that used coal as