Assembly Lines of Death: Extermination Camps

Abstract

The death camps were the most remarkable, inventive, unprecedented aspect of the Holocaust. Even finding a set of words to label them has proved elusive: I first heard the phrase ‘assembly line of death’ (‘Fliessband des Todes’) from the mouth of Franz Suchomel, an SS guard at Treblinka who was filmed secretly by Claude Lanzmann in his astonishing film ‘Shoah’. On these 6 spots of earth, over 3 million people were murdered in 3 years using the most highly developed industrial methods of transportation, killing, and disposal. The vast riches that Globocnik tallied up in the table shown previously (document 54) were carefully separated from the new arrivals, individually made destitute by previous persecution, but collectively a source of the resources needed to run the whole operation. At Treblinka the SS boasted ‘from door to door in 45 minutes’.