LOCATION OF
BIRKENAU DELOUSING, DISINFESTATION
AND
DISINFECTION INSTALLATIONS STUDIED
IN
CHAPTERS 5,6 AND 7
Bauleitung drawing 3764 |
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General plan of KGL Birkenau with its
"sanitary" equipment: the delousing, disinfestation and disinfection
installations (in red), the sewage treatment plants (in yellow) and the four
Krematorien (in black and grey).
LAGEPLAN DES KRIEGSGEFANGGENENLAGERS.
AUSCHWITZ O/S
MASSSTAB 1:5000 General plan of the Auschwitz prisoner of
war camp. Upper SilesIa.
Drawing 3764 , scale 1:5000
Drawn by
prisoner 63003 on 25/3/44
checked he ZA (Zivil Arbeiter / civilian employee
) Teichmann
on 25/3/44
and approved the same day by SS Lieutenant
Jothann.
This was the basic drawing for the projected development in
Birkenau, With respect to the original. the following have been highlighted for
this study: |
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In
black: |
Krematorien II, III, IV, and V |
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In red:
|
The positions of delousing, disinfestation and disinfection
installations known and realized: BW 5a and 5b, the ZentraI Sauna the
“Entwesungsanlage / disinfestation installation” of B.a.IIe
(Gypsy camp) |
| · |
In
yellow: |
The sewage treatment plants: Kläranlage I,
Kläranlage II, and the Provisiorische Erdbechen of B.a,III [these last.
provisional decantation basins, dug in the ground, are very often taken, to be
cremation pits for corpses, However, those associated with Bunker I were dug
300-500 meters to the west of the Bunker. This error of interpretation is found
above all in German works on KL. Auschwitz]. |
| Black arrows indicate the entrances to
the different sectors of Birkenau. |
|
The areas roughly ringed in pencil contain ruins,
buildings, and installations that were preserved by the Polish authorities
after the war. All the accommodation huts were dismantled and reinstalled near
big urban centers that had been destroyed during the fighting, in in order to
accommodate the homeless Poles.
The network of drains and sewers, that
criss-crossed the camp is not shown. In the case of B.a.I these drained to
Kläranlage 1, Ba.II to Klärnlage II and B.a.III, under construction,
to the provisional decantation basins, a stop-gap measure installed while
awaiting the building of a sewage plant which would have been, according to the
project drawing, made, either the mirror image of Kläranlage II or of a
different type, more concentraded and directly connected to the four
provisional sedimentation basins which would then become sludge putrification
basins.
While Klärnlage I became operational after various
transformations, Klärnlage II never did despite the advanced state of its
construction . Virtually the only sewage treatment at Birkenau was primary
decantation in the open air, in long basins where the water, circulated slowly
at a fixed rate. The secondary stage, biological purification, was never
completed. Despite the efforts of the SS, the waste waters designated
"gereinigten / purified" after treatment in the three plants, I, II and
provisional, and released into the“Königsgraben / King’s
ditch” which flowed into the Vistula, had in fact been only very
partially treated.
It may sound surprising that an extermination camp
like Birkenau had any sewage treatment plants at all, even incomplete. After
the screening of the human mass sent to Auschwitz, the disposal of the
“waste” (children, women and old men) by means of gas chambers and
incineration furnaces, the recuperation of the elements that could be exploited
(men) by the Reich war machine, the three completed construction stages of the
camp would have contained 140,000 prisoners, if not more — the population
of a moderately sized town. Crowded together on an area of about 1.2km2, this
swarm of people needed for its survival some sanitation and health arrangements
apart from Krematortien. Without a certain minimun, no collective life would
have been possible on the marshy land of Birkenau, where it was already
necessary to fight for survival in a pitiless selective environment against the
weather conditions, famine and typhous diseases.
Former prisoners often
speak of the pestilential odour that they breathed in Birkenau. implicitly
accusing the smoke belching forth from the chimneys of the four Krematorien.
This picture needs slight modification, however. for there were many periods
when the furnaces were not working. The sewage plants treating waste water and
excrement must have been responsible for a good deal of the unpleasant smell.
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