In October 1944, killing operations were slowing down at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. As the Soviet Army approached from the east, the German guards began turning their attention to destroying evidence of their atrocities. This especially worried the men of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who had been forced to operate the crematoria and gas chambers. As firsthand witnesses to the specific details of the killing operations, they knew that the SS would kill them rather than let them be liberated by the Allies. With nothing to lose, the Sonderkommando at one of the four crematoria staged the only organized uprising which would ever occur at Auschwitz. Using dynamite courageously smuggled into the camp by Jewish women from a nearby factory, they blew up one of Birkenau’s four crematoria and killed several SS guards. During their chaotic attempt to escape from the camp, all of the participants of the uprising were killed or captured. Four of the dynamite smugglers were also caught and publicly hanged.
Although none of the participants survived, the Sonderkommando uprising established disorder at Auschwitz-Birkenau which never quite dissipated in the three months before the Soviets arrived. At a high point of this chaos, some members of Sonderkommando units which had not participated in the uprising were able to sneak into the general population of prisoners. Many of these men survived the war.
