The first victims of mass murder with Zyklon B at the German concentration camp at Auschwitz were Soviet prisoners of war and Poles. People suffocated and their internal organs bled.

The death caused by Zyklon B is extremely cruel. People suffocate, become dizzy and, and their eyes tear. Victims vomit and their internal organs bleed. Such death in the conditions of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp usually lasted between 20 and 30 minutes. But not always.

They were murdered twice

The first mass murder with Zyklon B at the German concentration camp in Auschwitz probably took place on 3 September 1941. In the previous month at this camp, the Germans had carried out attempts to kill first about 30 and then 100 people in this way.

When the evening roll call ended, the camp guards rounded up some 600 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union, 250 Poles previously lying in the camp hospital and 10 prisoners serving criminal sentences. They locked them in 28 underground cells. The Germans covered the cellar windows with earth and let in gas.

In the morning, SS-man Gerhard Palitzsch came inside and found that some of the prisoners were still alive, so the murderous procedure was repeated. They murdered about 850 people.

“What I saw upon entering the cellars I will never forget. The tangled dead bodies of prisoners and Soviet POWs lay in disarray. Their eyes and mouths were wide open”, said Jakub Wolny, a paramedic from the camp hospital, in his report. He was one of the people ordered by the Germans to go inside the scene of the murder and take the bodies away.

Development of the crime

Over time, the Germans began to adapt more isolated locations for gas chambers. In 1942, they started building 4 crematoria and gas chambers in part of the Birkenau camp system. For the Polish and European Jews, they became places of cruel death.