On October 7, 1944, in a bold act of resistance, several hundred prisoners incarcerated in the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau stage the Sonderkommando revolt, destroying most of the gas chambers and crematoria where they were forced to work. While some of the inmates manage to kill a handful of Nazi officers and briefly escape the camp, the uprising is swiftly crushed and its perpetrators executed.
Originally a single concentration camp, Auschwitz expanded over the course of World War II to comprise a complex of three main camps (I, II and II) and 40 smaller satellite camps. In March 1942, the SS established Auschwitz II at Birkenau, where they had constructed a complex, monstrously orchestrated killing ground: 300 prison barracks; four “bathhouses,” where prisoners were gassed; corpse cellars; and cremating ovens. More than a million Jews and other people the Nazis considered undesirable perished in the industrial-size genocide facility. Thousands of prisoners also suffered massively as fodder for ghastly medical experiments, overseen and performed by the camp doctor, Josef Mengele (a.k.a. “the Angel of Death”).
The 1944 uprising was led by inmates called the Sonderkommando, whose unthinkable daily jobs involved herding thousands of victims into the gas chambers, then carrying their corpses to the crematoria and loading them into the ovens.
Their revolt involved more than a year of planning, collaborating with the camp's active Polish Underground resistance movement and smuggling in needed supplies. After hundreds of Sonderkommando were executed by the Nazis, those remaining learned that they themselves were being targeted for gassing, setting the plan in motion. On October 7, they blew up one of the gas chambers and set fire to another, using explosives smuggled to them by Jewish women who worked in a nearby armaments factory.
Of the roughly 450 prisoners involved in the sabotage, about 250 managed to escape the camp during the ensuing chaos. They were all found and shot. Those co-conspirators who never made it out of the camp were also executed, as were five women from the armaments factory—but not before being tortured for detailed information on the smuggling operation. None of the women talked. The few Sonderkommando who survived until the camps were liberated went on to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nazi killing machine they were forced to be a part of.
