Survivors of a Sonderkommando 1005 unit stand next to a mill used to crush bones at the Janowska concentration camp following its liberation in 1944.

Sondercommando 1005 survivors

The "Aktion 1005" (also known as the "Enterdungsaktion" unearthing action), the origin of which was the file number 1005, in which the correspondence between Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller and Martin Luther, who worked in the Foreign Ministry was stored, concerned the mass graves from which, by that time, foul-smelling decomposition gases escaped and whose crusts had broken open because the dead bodies had swollen. For this reason all the mass graves were to be opened and the bodies burned, every trace of the mass murders was to be removed. Jewish prisoners were to be used to carry out the work, and a "Sonderkommando 1005" was to be formed to guard them. The first planning dated back to spring 1942, but the situation became more urgent in the extremely hot summer of 1942, when more and more mass graves were being opened.
There were three main reasons for this decision:
1. the Allies had heard about the mass murders and not everyone believed that the German Wehrmacht would be permanently successful in the war
2 In Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Aktion Reinhardt camps, and other places where the various Einsatzgruppen had carried out their hineous work, the bodies lay in large mass graves. The horrible smell attracted millions of flies, making life in the surrounding settlements very difficult. Local authorities also feared poisoning of the ground water.
3 The Nazis feared that perhaps future generations would not understand the mass murders.
Aktion 1005 made use of the slave laborers from the concentration camps, mainly Jews, by having them dispose of the corpses after a mass execution. Workers in this capacity were officially called Leichenkommando (“corpse units”); they were often put in chains in order to prevent escape.
The operation was overseen by Sonderkommando 1005, along with squads of Sicherheitsdienst (SD, Security Service) and Ordnungspolizei (German police force).
In March 1942, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich met with SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel and placed him in charge of Aktion 1005. The assignment was initially delayed with Heydrich’s assassination in June 1942, but was initiated later that same month. Blobel was then officially tasked with the project by SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo.
Blobel began experimentation at Chelmno, digging up mass graves and using incendiary bombs, but this approach set the nearby forests on fire. Blobel then developed a more effective technique: alternating layers of bodies with firewood or the use of rails as giant grills, and then crushing the bones in a specialized machine. They built pyres made out of long wooden beams, soaked them with flammable liquid, arranged the corpses in layers between the beams, and burnt them. When this was finished, the area was flattened out, plowed, and replanted. The ash and bone fragments were then re-buried in the mass graves.
The operation was initiated in Sobibor, with slaves exhuming bodies from mass graves and burning them. While the principal effort was erasing evidence of Jewish exterminations, the Aktion also included places where non-Jewish victims were murdered. After the task in Sobibor was complete, the workers involved were executed, in accordance with the “top secret” mission, and the German police involved with the operation were not sent back to their units.
The process was then moved to Belzec in December 1942. Between the summers of 1942 and 1943, corpses were burnt in Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. In June 1943, the Germans began burning corpses in the occupied Soviet Union and Poland. Two Sonderkommando prisoner units were organized. One worked in areas such as Berdichev in the Ukraine and Zamosc in Poland, the other in areas including Riga and Dvinsk in Latvia. Aktion 1005 was also carried out in Belorussia and the Baltic countries, where the corpses of Soviet prisoners of war were burnt. Aktion 1005 was also carried out in Yugoslavia.
As newer extermination camps (such as Auschwitz) set up crematoria to dispose of bodies, the Aktion 1005 groups were dispatched to the scene of earlier mass killings, such as Babi Yar and the Ninth Fort.
By mid-1944, with Soviet armies advancing, SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe, head of the Reichsgau Wartheland (Nazi name for the largest subdivision in Greater Poland), ordered that each of the Generalgouvernement’s five districts set up its own Aktion 1005 group to begin “cleaning” mass graves in those areas of Poland annexed to Germany. The operations were not entirely successful, as advancing Soviet troops reached some sites before they could be “cleaned”; additionally, Leichenkommado laborers occasionally managed to sabotage operations.
In his affadavit submitted at the Nuremberg Trials, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny — a deputy of Adolf Eichmann involved in the Final Solution — submitted the following testimony regarding Aktion 1005:
In November 1942, in Eichmann’s office in Berlin, I met Standartenfuehrer Plobel [sic], who was leader of Kommando 1005, which was specially assigned to remove all traces of the final solution (extermination) of the Jewish problem by Einsatz Groups and all other executions. Kommando 1005 operated from at least autumn 1942 to September 1944 and was all this period subordinated to Eichmann. The mission was constituted after it first became apparent that Germany would not be able to hold all the territory occupied in the East and it was considered necessary to remove all traces of the criminal executions that had been committed. While in Berlin in November 1942, Plobel [sic] gave a lecture before Eichmann’s staff of specialists on the Jewish question from the occupied territories. He spoke of the special incinerators he had personally constructed for use in the work of Kommando 1005. It was their particular assignment to open the graves and remove and cremate the bodies of persons who had been previously executed. Kommando 1005 operated in Russia, Poland and through the Baltic area. I again saw Plobel [sic] in Hungary in 1944 and he stated to Eichmann in my presence that the mission of Kommando 1005 had been completed.
As a result of this operation many mass graves were obliterated, making it impossible after the war to ascertain the exact extent of the Nazi crimes, especially in the Soviet Union and Poland.
Blobel was sentenced to death by the US Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the Einsatzgruppen Trial. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison on June 8, 1951. Nearly 60,000 deaths are attributable to Blobel, but during his testimony at Nuremberg, he claimed that he killed only 10,000 to 15,000 people

taken from fb/Source : Bob Roberts

Blobel

Having taken part in the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union, major Joachim Kuhn experienced firsthand the mistreatment of the local population. In 1942, he met Claus von Stauffenberg, who recruited him for the resistance and the two became close friends.
In 1943, Kuhn was promoted to major and in the same year he was in charge of hiding the explosives for a planned attack on Hitler’s life during a uniform presentation. In May 1944, he organized the bomb that Stauffenberg was to use on the 15th of July, the first date when he was designated to carry out the assassination.
On 20 July 1944, Kuhn spent the day at the Eastern front, waiting for news anxiously from Berlin. A day after the plot failed, he accompanied General Tresckow, the leader of the conspiracy in the East, to inspect the frontline. In reality, Tresckow told him that he was about to commit suicide. Kuhn tried to talk him out of it with no success, and it was him who carried Tresckow’s body back in his car. Kuhn later remembered: "When I was about a hundred yards away, I heard the hand grenades exploding. On my official account of his death by a partisan attack, General von Tresckow was buried with full military honors."
The Gestapo issued an order to arrest Kuhn not long after, when they learned about his key role in the coup. When the order reached his commanding officer, General von Ziehlberg, he refused to arrest Kuhn, and told him to go to the front and seek an honorable death. Ziehlberg was later executed in relation to this incident.
Kuhn was captured by the Red Army and remained in Soviet custody for the next 12 years. In 1945, he was sentenced to death by the National Socialists as a traitor (in his absence). In 1951, he was sentenced to 25 years of hard labour by the Soviets as a war criminal. His wrongdoing was assumed on his German uniform.
During his internment he was subjected to repeated torture and kept under such inhumane circumstances that he developed severe schizophrenia. Upon his return to Germany in 1956, his application for financial compensation was not granted because according to the ‘competent’ authority, he was expelled from the German Armed Forces on 4 August 1944, by the then head of state.
Kuhn never publicly spoke about his role in the resistance, never married or had any children. In 1994, he died alone in nursing home near Frankfrurt. Four years later he was rehabilitated by the military court of Moscow, "in the absence of crime in his actions". His honor was also restored in Germany, and he took his rightful place among those who are being remembered today.
taken from fb/German resistance 1933-1945
