In the Heidi Klum thread, commenter “JuliB” asks:
Any comment on the uproar over Joan Rivers saying that the last time a German looked so hot, they were pushing Jews into the oven?
Well, yes. When I read the Joan Rivers joke, my response to it was that the quip is very unfunny as a joke, so why bother?
But the thing that struck me most was that Rivers, in addition to being unfunny, was also historically incorrect. The Nazis actually didn’t sully their hands with that particular job—putting Jews and their other victims designated for death into ovens after they’d been gassed. While it is true that the victims were herded (and tricked) into the gas chambers by the Nazis, the task of incineration was delegated to special squads of inmates organized by the Nazis for that purpose: the Sonderkommando.
Anyone who has studied the Holocaust and how the death camps operated knows about this especially dreadful fact, as Rivers herself should have. It’s hardly esoteric knowledge. Here’s the Wiki entry:
Sonderkommandos were work units of Nazi death camp prisoners, composed almost entirely of Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during The Holocaust…Sonderkommando members did not participate directly in killing; that responsibility was reserved for the guards, while the Sonderkommandos’ primary responsibility was disposing of the corpses. They were forced into the position; in most cases they were inducted immediately upon arrival at the camp, and were not given any advance notice of the tasks they would have to perform. They had no way to refuse or resign other than by committing suicide. Because the Germans needed the Sonderkommandos to remain physically able, they were granted moderately less squalid living conditions than other inmates: they slept in their own barracks, which more than any other in the camp resembled normal human dwellings; they were allowed to keep and use various goods such as food, medicines and cigarettes brought by those who were sent to the gas chambers; and, unlike ordinary inmates, they were not subject to arbitrary, random killing by guards. As a result, Sonderkommando members tended to survive longer than other inmates of the death camps — but few survived the war.
Because of their intimate knowledge of the process of Nazi mass murder, the Sonderkommando were considered Geheimnisträger — bearers of secrets — and as such, they were kept in isolation from other camp inmates, except, of course, for those about to enter the gas chambers. Since the Nazis did not want Sonderkommandos’ knowledge to reach the outside world, they followed a policy of regularly gassing almost all the Sonderkommando and replacing them with new arrivals at intervals of approximately 4 months; the first task of the new Sonderkommandos would be to dispose of their predecessors’ corpses. Therefore since the inception of the Sonderkommando through to the liquidation of the camp there existed approximately 14 generations of Sonderkommando.
One of the Sonderkommando units at Auchwitz was famous for an organized rebellion:
There was a revolt by Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz in which one of the crematoria was partly destroyed. For months, young Jewish women, like Ester Wajcblum, Ella Gärtner, and Regina Safirsztain, had been smuggling small amounts of gunpowder from the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke, a munitions factory within the Auschwitz complex, to men and women in the camp’s resistance movement, like Róza Robota, a young Jewish woman who worked in the clothing detail at Birkenau. Under constant guard, the women in the factory took small amounts of the gunpowder, wrapped it in bits of cloth or paper, hid it on their bodies, and then passed it along the smuggling chain. Once she received the gunpowder, Robota passed it to her co-conspirators in the Sonderkommando. Using this gunpowder, the leaders of the Sonderkommando planned to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria, and launch the uprising.
When the camp resistance warned the Sonderkommando that they were due to be murdered on the morning of 7 October 1944, the Sonderkommando attacked the SS and Kapos with two machine guns, axes, knives and grenades. Over 70 SS men were killed, including two who were pushed alive into a crematorium oven after being stabbed by a member of the Sonderkommando. Some of the Sonderkommando escaped from the camp for a period, as was planned, however they were recaptured later the same day. Of those who didn’t die in the uprising itself, 200 were later forced to strip, lie face down, and then were shot in the back of the head. A total of 451 Sonderkommandos were killed on this day.
Words such as “terrible” do not begin to describe the moral and other dilemmas and trials faced by the Sonderkommandos. Their plight is a good example of just how vile the Nazis were, as if we needed reminding.
I guess some of us do.
[NOTE: I want to call attention to the fact that Rivers is also wrong in implying it was only Jews who were killed in the death camps (for example, gypsies were also targeted). However, it is correct that it was Jews who constituted the vast vast majority of the gassed, the inmates, and members of the Sonderkommando units.]