A terrible Tragedy
...ivity, the Auschwitz record sheet showed close to two million immediate exterminations ( this figure can never be exact). The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum estimates the number to be 1.1 million to 1.5 million. 4 Jews were not the only victims.German -historians estimate that among the people sent to Auschwitz there were at least 1,100,000 Jews from all the countries of occupied Europe, over 140,000 Poles (mostly political prisoners), approximately 20,000 Gypsies from several European countries, over 5 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and over 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities. The need for large-scale efficiency, to cope with the astounding number of corpses produced by the gas chambers, eventually led to the design and construction of new crematoria, and daily capacity rose from as low as six hundred forty eight per day, to a high of 6 over ten thousand.but, the SS eventually had to employ large pyres and pits to dispose of the mounting pile of corpses. As early as June 13, 1943, all was not well with the new installation. ... Eventually the ovens seemed to fall apart. Crematorium Four failed completely after a short time and Crematoria Five had to be shut down 7 repeatedly. planned crematoria should have been able to handle the total project, but they could not. The whole complex had forty-six retorts, each with the capacity for three to five persons. The burning in a retort lasted about half an hour. It took an hour a day to clean them out. Thus it was theoret...