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In April 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered changes to the Korherr Report, the SS’s statistical account of the “Final Solution" he considered as quite good "for camouflage purposes". A letter dated April 19, 1943 instructed that the term “special treatment of the Jews” be removed from the report. The euphemism "passed through the camps in the General Government and the camps in the Warthegau" was to be used to denote the death toll from the extermination camps at Bełżec, Treblinka, Sobibór, and Kulmhof (Chełmno).
A brief letter written by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, on April 9, 1943, to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Security Police and SD, makes direct reference to the so-called Korherr Report – a statistical analysis compiled by Richard Korherr, the SS’s chief statistician, on the progress of the "Final Solution". In it, Himmler acknowledges the report’s value as "material for possible later times" and, above all, "for camouflage purposes". At the same time, he orders that the report must not be published or circulated further. Himmler closes the letter by stressing his overriding concern that "what remains most important to me is that Jews are now being shipped off to the East as much as is at all humanly possible."
On January 29, 1943, the Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS at Auschwitz reported to SS-Brigadeführer Hans Kammler on the near-completion of Crematorium II. Despite severe frost and construction difficulties, the ovens were tested and confirmed operational in the presence of Topf & Sons engineer Kurt Prüfer. The document also notes delays in the delivery of the ventilation system and explicitly refers to the use of the "gassing cellar" in the crematorium.
On December 7, 1942, a German city medical officer named Dr. Wilhelm Hagen wrote an extraordinary letter addressed directly to Adolf Hitler. Hagen, who was the City Medical Officer of Warsaw, and claimed that during a government meeting on tuberculosis control, a senior official had revealed – as a “classified Reich matter” – that during the planned resettlement of 200,000 Poles to make way for German settlers, "to deal with a third of the Poles – with 70,000 old people and children under the age of 10, as with the Jews, that is, to kill them". Hagen also wrote that "if this information had not come in an official capacity, I would dismiss it as mere fantasy.”
In February 1944, Swiss intelligence received one 106-page report by a defector (agent code D 143) from Nazi Germany’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS’s intelligence branch. Dated 9 February 1944, this report offers an insider’s view of the internal disintegration, moral collapse, and infighting that plagued the Nazi foreign intelligence service, known as Amt VI. The SD defector described various Nazis' extermination methods, experiments, and plans. He reveals that the commandos in the East adopted "the GPU method of a shot to the back of the neck" which was "widely used" with "in total, up to 100,000" victims. He also described the use of homicidal gas vans, known as "Nebe gas vans" after Arthur Nebe, the former head of Einsatzgruppe B and chief of the Criminal Technical Institute. Accordi…
Copy of a report dated 5 July 1945 by Wilhelm Boger, given while in U.S. custody, on his personal background, his rise through the ranks of the Nazi security apparatus, and his period in the Auschwitz concentration camp. In December 1942, Boger was transferred to Auschwitz, where he served in the camp’s Political Department, responsible for interrogations, internal investigations, and handling escape cases. He also provides an account of the SS trial of Maximilian Grabner, the head of the Political Department in Auschwitz, at which Boger testified as a witness. During the proceedings, he stated that "Grabner had ordered the killing of people." In the report, Boger claims that, according to SS-Oberscharführer Erber, "the total number of inmates killed at Auschwitz – by gassing, shooting, ha…
Report by German Journalist Hans-Joachim Kausch dated June 26, 1943 on a tour through occupied Ukraine and Crimea organised by the Ministry of the East. The report contains blunt and unambiguous admissions regarding the extermination of Ukraine’s Jewish population. Kausch writes that in Ukraine, "there had been 1.1 million Jews. They have been completely liquidated". He notes that “some Hungarian and Slovak officers took photographs of executions, which later reached America”. According to Kausch, "Ukrainians mostly watched the executions with indifference". He quotes a high-ranking official of the Reich Commissariat that "Jews were exterminated like bedbugs".
In correspondence dated September 5, 1944 SS-Standartenführer Wolfram Sievers discusses the fate of Nazi's "Jewish skeleton collection" housed in Strasbourg’s anatomy institute. As Allied forces advanced, Sievers requested a decision from the Personal Staff of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on whether to preserve or “dissolve” the collection. He noted to Rudolf Brandt that one "can proceed with defleshing the bodies, thereby rendering them unrecognizable, but this would make much of the overall work pointless and result in a major scientific loss for this unique collection". By October 1944, SS-Hauptsturmführer Bruno Beger claimed to Brandt that the collection had been "completely dissolved".
This post reproduces the so called Korherr Report, a statistical report on the "Final Solution of the European Jewish Question" up to 1943 and its accompanying cover letter from April 1943. Authored by SS statistician Richard Korherr for Heinrich Himmler, the report presents – through a veneer of euphemism and bureaucratic precision – the numerical decline of European Jewry via excess of deaths over births, emigration, deportation and so-called "evacuations" and "special treatement". The report concludes that "European Jewry since 1933 … likely lost nearly half of its population". A substantial portion of this loss is attributed to 1,274,166 Jews "processed through camps in the General Government" (i.e. Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor), 145,301 Jews "processed through camps in the Warthegau"…
In June 1943, SS officials completed a selection process at Auschwitz and choose 115 prisoners – mostly Jews – for execution and use in an anatomical collection in Strasbourg. SS anthropologist Bruno Beger and Ahnenerbe director Wolfram Sievers coordinated the operation authorised by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and pressed the Reich Security Main Office to conduct the victims’ transfer to Natzweiler for killing. In a letter dated June 21, 1943, Sievers informed Adolf Eichmann that "79 Jewish men, 2 Poles, 4 Inner Asians, and 30 Jewish women" had been selected and requested "their immediate transfer to Natzweiler concentration camp" along with arrangements for "short-term housing accommodations."
A classified Nazi Party circular dated July 11, 1943, on the "Handling the Jewish Question" issued by Martin Bormann and distributed among Nazi party and state officials. In this document, Bormann instructs that any public mention of "a future final solution must be avoided". Instead, officials were to state that Jews were being “brought in collectively for appropriate labor deployment.”
In 1942, the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, authorized the killing of 150 prisoners – primarily Jews – from Auschwitz to create an anatomical skeleton collection for the SS-Ahnenerbe. On November 2, the Ahnenerbe’s executive director Wolfram Sievers formally requested Himmler’s directive to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), stating that "150 skeletons of prisoners or Jews […] are to be made available by the Auschwitz concentration camp." Just four days later, on November 6, Himmler’s Personal Administrative Officer, Rudolf Brandt, conveyed the order in a letter to Adolf Eichmann: "On behalf of the Reichsführer-SS, I therefore request that the establishment of the planned skeleton collection be enabled."
In February 1943, RSHA chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner reported to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler on the recent deportation of 5,000 able-bodied Jews from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. He also "urgently" requested to "remove 5,000 Jews over the age of 60 from Theresienstadt and to transport them to Auschwitz or to the General Government". Kaltenbrunner described these elderly individuals as "who are primarily carriers of disease and who also bind a large number of able-bodied Jews that could be used more purposefully for labor deployment".
Carbon copy of letter issued by the Central Construction Office at Auschwitz, dated March 31, 1943, mentions "three gas-tight doors" (misspelled in the original) for Crematoria 4 and 5, as well as a "gas door" with "peephole made of double 8 mm glass" for Crematoria 2 and 3. This letter confirms the use of gas-tight installations within the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
On October 27, 1942, Heinrich Himmler issued an order to Hans-Adolf Prützmann, the Higher SS and Police Leader in Ukraine, commanding to "immediately clear and annihilate the Ghetto in Pinsk". The only exemption was to be 1,000 Jewish forced laborers, who were to be handed over to the Wehrmacht. However, if their secure confinement could not be guaranteed, they too were to be "annihilated."
A radio message from the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (SS-WVHA) to the Auschwitz concentration camp, dated 26 August 1942, shows how SS officials used euphemistic language to arrange the delivery of Zyklon-B supplies. In the message, the SS camp administration was granted authorization for a 5-ton truck to travel from Auschwitz to Dessau and back to collect "material for special treatment" (Material für Sonderbehandlung). The phrase "special treatment" was an euphemism for extrajudicial killings carried ou by Nazi police and security forces.
This post presents the testimony of SS-Unterscharführer Richard Böck, recorded on February, 5 1959 by the Baden-Württemberg State Criminal Police. Böck, who served as a driver at Auschwitz, recounts his observations of executions, prisoner mistreatment, and extermination. He testified that "Dr. Mengele oversaw the extermination operations on the ramp at Birkenau", and "Moll killed prisoners who did not enter the gas chambers quickly enough by shooting them in the neck with a 9mm air rifle".
In October 1958, Wilhelm Boger, a former SS officer known for his role at Auschwitz, was arrested and interrogated by Stuttgart police. Over two days, Boger gave a lengthy statement about his background, duties at the camp, and the charges brought against him. Boger served in the camp’s Political Department, dealing with criminal investigations, escape attempts, and intelligence gathering. He admitted to overseeing and participating in “enhanced interrogations” involving beatings and suspension torture – a method prisoners later dubbed the “Boger swing.” Though Boger repeatedly denied involvement in selections or executions, he acknowledged being present during some shootings and described how prisoners unfit for labor were sent to the crematoria for gassing. He also confirmed his presence…
German military report from March 19, 1942 on the mood and conditions of the civilian population in Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) located in the General Gouvernement during the Nazi occupation. The document mentions that "among the Jewish population of Lemberg, noticeable anxiety has arisen in connection with a resettlement action that has begun, by which approximately 30,000 elderly and otherwise non-working Jews of Lemberg are being gathered and, according to reports, transported to the Lublin area. To what extent this evacuation will amount to a decimation remains to be seen." The deportations were the beginning of mass transports to the Bełżec extermination camp as part of Operation Reinhard.
On September 16, 1942, SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, sent a letter to Heinrich Himmler summarizing a recent meeting with Albert Speer, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. Among the topics discussed was the planned expansion of Auschwitz concentration camp and its role to supply the armaments industry with Jewish forced labor. Pohl reported that Auschwitz was to be enlarged to accommodate up to 132,000 prisoners and that "the labor force available in concentration camps must now be used for large-scale armaments tasks." He explained that the primary source of this labor would be Jews drawn from deportation transports to Auschwitz: "Able-bodied Jews designated for eastern migration will have to interrupt their journey an…
Transcript from June 8, 1943, of a meeting between Adolf Hitler and Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command. Hitler recounted a conversation with Erich Koch, Reichskommissar for Ukraine. Koch stated, “I am losing 500,000 Jews here. I have to remove them, because the Jews are the element of unrest,” and went on to explain, “there are no craftsmen left. The Jews are all gone.”