LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Auschwitz: Prisoners
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The main problem experienced by Höss at Auschwitz, was a similar problem to that experienced by the commandant of Treblinka – how to dispose of the bodies. At Auschwitz, the bodies were buried in fields. However, during the hot Polish summers, the bodies started to putrefy. Höss ordered that Jewish prisoners had to dig up the bodies that were then burned. Höss examined ways in which the bodies could be better burned after gassing. It was found that if they were layered with wood and other combustibles and placed on top of a large metal grate, so that you had bodies, wood, bodies, wood etc in layers, they burned well.
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Everyday Nazi authorities brought many prisoners by rail to Auschwitz. The Nazis separated these prisoners into three groups. Within hours they sent about 66% of prisoners to gas chambers where they died. This 66% generally included all children, all women, all elderly persons, and others whom SS officers thought not fully fit to do work. Everyday SS killed in gas chambers about 20,000 persons. They used a cyanide gas to kill these persons.
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Between 1.3-1.5 million people were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz -- more than 90% were Jews. The other ten percent were Poles, Soviet Prisoners of War, Sinti Roma, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals and others. The vast majority of the victims --who came from both Western and Eastern Europe including Belgium, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and other countries-- were unaware of their destination and of their fate. They were transported like animals in cattle-cars and arrived in a state of total collapse to the camp. Most of the people actually never really entered the camp, but just crossed it on the way to the gas chambers.
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On 7 April 1944 a Slovakian Jew, Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg), and a fellow prisoner, Alfred Wetzler, succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz-Birkenau. As block registrars both men had been allowed relative (though always risky) freedom of movement in the camp and ... had been able to observe the massive preparations underway at Birkenau of the entire killing machine for the eradication of Europe’s last remaining Jewish community, the 800,000 Jews of Hungary. The two men somehow made their way back to Slovakia where they sought out the Jewish Council (Judenrat) to warn them of the impending disaster.
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By 1943 many resistance groups had come up inside the camps of Auschwitz. These groups helped some prisoners to escape from Auschwitz. These persons brought the information to the world about the killings taking place inside the Auschwitz. If one prisoner escaped, the SS killed many other prisoners, and sometimes arrested the family members of the escaped prisoners and paraded them in the camps. This was to stop other prisoners from attempting any escape.
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It was a subordinate to Höss at Auschwitz who came up with a new idea. At Auschwitz, prisoner clothes had to be deloused and this was done using crystalised prussic acid. Manufactured for this purpose, it went under the industrial name of Zyklon B. The officer, Carl Fritsch, wanted to experiment on the prisoners held at Auschwitz.
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