Memo on a telephone call on 17 February 1943 between Topf engineers Karl Schultze and Fritz Sander, in which Sander noted that the “ventilation blower No. 450 for the gas cellar” (Gaskeller) of the crematorium 2 in Auschwitz- Birkenau could not be located. Schultze requested that the blower should be produced on an expedited basis and dispatched, as it “is urgently required” in Auschwitz.
On February 3, 1944, Eichmann’s office dispatched a letter, signed by the head of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The letter sought a decision regarding the handling of SS and police personnel implicated in the escape of Jewish prisoners from Sonderkommando 1005 at Fort Kauen (Kaunas in Lithuanian). Kaltenbrunner asked that “the matter be concluded within our jurisdiction”, keeping the the SS and police judiciary out of it to prevent “another group of persons gaining insight into the operation of the Sonderkommando”. Led by Paul Blobel, Sonderkommando 1005, was tasked with the responsibility of erasing evidence of Nazi atrocities in the East by exhuming and incinerating bodies from mass graves.
The memo dated April 5, 1943, from Adolf Windecker (Representative of the Foreign Office to the Reich Commissioner for the Eastern Territories) discusses the “treatment of Jews of foreign nationality in the Eastern Territories.” It specifies that all Jews confined to ghettos cannot be deported to other countries due to “significant security police concerns.” Windecker acknowledges the large-scale killings in Riga noting that “many thousands of the local and Reich German Jews in the Riga area have been shot over time.” As a result, he questions the feasibility of using any Jews for exchange purposes, as he fears that doing so would “be exploited abroad as evidence of the executions carried out here.”