History KS3 / GCSE: What happened in the gas chambers at Auschwitz?

BBC Teach > Secondary Resources > KS3 History / GCSE History > World War Two with Dan Snow

DAN SNOW: Hi, I'm Dan Snow, and I'm here in the Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, to show you some clips from the BBC archive that explore this most terrible of times. If you're learning about what happened to the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazi's during WW2, you'll have heard of the concentration camps where the killings took place. This next clip gives some detail about what actually happened in the gas chambers and the experience of some of the Jewish survivors. It also includes an account of the Commander of the camp at Auschwitz, a man called Rudolph Hoss, who oversaw the murders.

NARRATOR: In this field stood a Polish cottage which would be come to be known as the little red house, or Bunker one. Hoss and his SS comrades saw this as a step forward in the killing process at Auschwitz. Two separate gas chambers were quickly improvised by bricking up the windows and door and creating two new entrances.

NARRATOR: Unlike in the crematorium in the main camp, people could be murdered here in relative secrecy. In this shabby cottage tens of thousands of people would be murdered. The manner of killing remained the same. Jews would to be told they were to take a shower. They would be locked in the room, and Zyklon B thrown in through a hatch in the wall. Within weeks, the Nazi's had converted another nearby cottage, the little white house, in just the same way. Slovakian Jews arrived at the railway stop, two miles from the gas chambers, on the 29th of April, 1942, and faced selection by the SS. This was the first of hundreds of SS selections to be held over the next 30 months.

EVA VOTAVOVA: When they opened the train carriages and forced us out they shouted at us immediately. They were screaming in German. They were SS men who were dealing with us. We had to stand in line. Men had to step up first. Then women with children, and then old people. I looked at my father here and I saw a sad look on his face.

EVA VOTAVOVA: This is my last memory of him.

NARRATOR: The Slovakian Jews selected to die were taken up past the newly built buildings of Birkenau and towards the isolated gas chambers of the little red house and the little white house.

OTTO PRESSBURGER: When we were returning from work we saw people being bought over. They waited there the whole day. They sat there, they still had food from home. And SS men were around them with dogs. They didn't know what was going to happen to them.

NARRATOR: After the war, while he awaited trial, Rudolf Hoss wrote about the process of murder in the converted cottages in the spring of 1942.

RUDOLPH HOSS: "It was most important that the whole business of arriving and undressing should take place in an atmosphere of the greatest possible calm. Small children usually cried because of the strangeness of being undressed in this way. But when their mothers or members of the Jewish Sonderkommando comforted them, they became calm and entered the gas chambers playing, or joking with one another and carrying their toys. Hundreds of men and women in the full bloom of life walked all unsuspecting to their death in the gas chambers under the blossom-laden fruit trees of the orchard. This picture of death in the midst of life remains with me to this day. I looked upon them as enemies of our people. The reasons behind the extermination program, seemed to me, right."

NARRATOR: After the gassing, Hoss and the SS made other Jewish prisoners load the bodies onto trucks and wheel them down a make-shift railway line towards giant pits. Otto Pressburger was one of the prisoners forced to dispose of the bodies.

OTTO PRESSBURGER: We were digging holes and, in the beginning, we really didn't know what they were for. It was only when the holes were deep enough that we started to throw the bodies into them. It was appalling. New bodies were lying here every morning. And we had to bury them. When summer came, everything started to rot.

OTTO PRESSBURGER: It was terrible. The majority of the people working here were from my home city of Trnava. I knew all of them. And every day there were less and less of them. They must still be buried around here somewhere. My brother and my father are buried here as well, you know.

DAN SNOW: After being captured, and while awaiting trial, Hoss wrote an autobiography, which revealed terrible and sometimes horribly precise details of how so many people had been killed at Auschwitz. And it was at Auschwitz that he would die, executed there, after being found guilty of murder, two years after the war's end, in 1947.

Dan Snow introduces a report about the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

It explains how the first gas chambers were adapted houses where Zyklon B was thrown in through a hole in the wall.

The testimony of survivors from Auschwitz tells of the selection process at Auschwitz.

Rudolph Höss’ written testimony, from when he was awaiting trial after the war, gives an account of his view on the use of the gas chambers.

After the prisoners had been murdered, their bodies were moved by other prisoners to large pits to be buried in mass graves.

This short film is from the BBC series, World War Two with Dan Snow.

This short film contains scenes which viewers may find upsetting. The films are intended for classroom use but teacher review is recommended prior to watching with your pupils. You know best the limit of your pupils, and BBC Teach does not accept any responsibility for pupil distress.

Teacher Notes

Students could watch this short film and then be asked to discuss whether or not they think Rudolph Höss’ autobiography should have been available for people to read.

Is it an important historical document? Or does it’s account of the events at Auschwitz mean it should be banned?

This clip could be used in a lesson about how we should remember the Holocaust.

Students could be asked why they think it is important to remember the events of the Holocaust, then consider what are appropriate ways of remembering the Holocaust.

This could lead to a discussion about what should happen to Auschwitz.

There are people who say Auschwitz should be left to decay, whereas other people argue it is important it is preserved as a monument to the horrors of the Holocaust to warn future generations of what people are capable of.