Daily construction report from the firm W. Riedel & Sohn, dated 2 March 1943, detailing the work carried out on Crematorium IV at Auschwitz. The document records the number of workers present, the hours they worked, and the tasks completed that day—from plastering walls and fitting ventilation elements to “concreting the floor in the gas chamber.”
War Diary no. 1 of the Operation Staff Minsk, compiled by SS-Obersturmführer Fritz Biermeier for the Higher SS and Police Leader for the Ostland, documents the anti-partisan and extermination action Operation Swamp Fever (“Sumpffieber”) carried out in the Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien in August-September 1942. The report statess that “8350 Jews were executed”, while “389 armed bandits were shot in combat”.
A report dated 1 August 1941 by Higher SS and Police Leader SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln describes a three-day “cleansing operation” carried out by the 1st SS-Brigade RFSS across Volhynia. Framed as a military and anti-partisan sweep in the army’s rear, the documents records mass shootings of 73 Russian soldiers, 165 officials and civilians accused of supporting the Soviet regime and 1,658 Jews portrayed as “given significant support to the Bolshevik system and who had betrayed Ukrainians to the Bolshevik authorities”.
In this secret directive (telex dated 25 October 1942), SS-Obersturmbannführer Arthur Liebehenschel instructed SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Aumeier that any inspection of the Auschwitz camp’s “special installations” for “special accommodation” (Sonderunterbringung) was strictly prohibited, and that “escape shootings” were to be avoided during the visit of a French construction commission inspecting the labor facilities of the Auschwitz complex.
On April 19, 1943, SS statistician Richard Korherr submitted a shortened version of his Korherr Report – the SS’s statistical account of the “Final Solution of the European Jewish Question” – to the personal staff of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, for presentation to Adolf Hitler. In the report, Korherr estimated that “the reduction of Jewry in Europe from 1937 to the beginning of 1943 is to be estimated at 4½ million” and noted that “only part of the deaths of Soviet-Russian Jews in the occupied eastern territories could be recorded, while those in the rest of European Russia and at the front are not included at all.” He concluded that “European Jewry since 1933 has probably lost almost half of its total population,” of which “only about half has flowed to other continents.”
On July 20, 1943, SS-Obersturmbannführer Eduard Strauch, Commander of the Security Police and the SD in White Ruthenia, issued a memorandum on a confrontation with Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube after Strauch had that morning “delivered for special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung) the entire Jewish staff of the General Commissariat in Minsk – an euphemism for their execution. Kube condemned the actions of the Security Police as “unworthy of a German human being and of a Germany of Kant and Goethe” and accused Strauch’s “men derived a kind of perverse pleasure from these executions”. Strauch, in turn, complained that “even the fact that the Jews who were to undergo special treatment had their gold dental fillings properly removed by medical specialists had become the subject of gossip”.
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.”