Someone asked me where the ashes of the 1.1 million people who were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau are located. I had to look it up because I really don’t know. At Birkenau, there is no huge memorial that holds the ashes, as at Sobibor and Majdanek.

I found an article on this web site which mentions the “Field of Ashes” at Birkenau. So where is the Field of Ashes? A news article in the N.Y. Times on December 13, 1997 mentions “a large swath of land, known as the field of ashes, that stretches behind the gas chambers at the Birkenau camp.”

The “large swath of land” must be where the “little white house” was formerly located; the house was one of the two little houses that were used as gas chambers while Krema II and Krema III were under construction.

The photo above shows a “swath of land” which is behind the Birkenau camp. Note the mound on the right. Is this the Field of Ashes?

The remains of the little white house, known as Bunker 2, are just west of the Sauna. Bunker 2 had four small gas chambers, no larger than 8 feet by 8 feet, that had to be put into service again in 1944 for the gassing of the Hungarian Jews, since the four gas chambers at Birkenau could not handle such large numbers of people. I found the remains of Bunker 2 by accident when I continued walking north along the road at the west end of the camp, instead of following the arrow which directs visitors to take a road that goes east to the Sauna building. The road curves back around to the Sauna building after passing the little white house.

When I visited Birkenau in October 1998, my private tour guide did not tell me anything about the Field of Ashes; she claimed that she did not know where “the little white house” had been located. When I asked about the location of the ashes, she told me that the ashes were thrown into the pond shown in the photo below, which I took on my 2005 trip to Birkenau.

In the photo above, you can see the ash pond for Krema IV in the foreground and the Central Sauna in the background. On the right in the background, you can see the ruins of Krema IV. The ruins of Krema V are located to the right on the other side of a road that runs east and west. It has its own ash pond that has now dried up.

I found this on the official web site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum:

On the other side of the road dividing Krematoria IV, and V, was Krematorium IV, with an identical cremation rate as K-V, 768 corpses in a 24-hour period. Both K-IV and V had been built above ground for financial reasons. Each gas chamber was divided into at first three, and later four, rooms with a total capacity of 2,000 victims. The holes for dropping the gas were in the walls. Between it and the Little Wood is a pond, one that was used to dump the ashes of the murdered victims. It sits there today, still, quiet, as is the whole of this part of Birkenau, eerily quiet now. In the distance is The Sauna and between it and the Pond, the ruins of Krematorium IV.

Note that this quote from the official web site is remarkably similar to my description of my photo above.

Behind the International Monument is a road that leads to the ruins of Krema IV and Krema V and the Sauna. Tour groups usually don’t go down this road. After seeing the monument, the tour groups return, along the main camp road, to the gate house at the entrance. I was all alone in this area on two different days in October 2005.

The location of the Krema IV ash pond is near the birch tree grove, where the Hungarian Jews had to wait for their turn in the gas chambers in 1944.

Each of the four crematoria at Birkenau had its own ash pond. The ash pond for Krema III was completely dried up when I saw it in 2005.

The black markers in the photo above have information in four languages about the Krema III ash pond. Notice the water treatment plant in the background.

Krema II and Krema III were the main gas chambers at Birkenau. Robert Jan van Pelt visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1998 and referred to the ruins at Auschwitz as “the Holy of Holies.” Van Pelt estimated that 500,000 Jews were gassed in Krema II alone.

The photo below shows the ash pit where the ashes from the crematory ovens in Krema II were thrown. In the background on the left is the ruins of the underground gas chamber in Krema II. On the right is the collapsed roof of the brick building where the bodies were cremated.

I recall reading in several books that the ashes from the crematoria at Birkenau were thrown into the Sola river. As the photo below shows, the river is quite shallow and it was used for swimming by the people in the town and by the SS men at the camp.

The nearby Vistula river is bigger and there are claims that the ashes were hauled to that river and dumped. Heinrich Himmler had a degree in Agriculture so I don’t think he would have allowed that. The Germans were way ahead of other countries in taking care of the environment so I don’t think they would have dumped ashes into the rivers.

In a book entitled “Secretaries of Death,” a survivor named Irka Anis wrote that one night in the middle of January 1945, she and several other female prisoners were ordered to work for three days removing about 6,000 huge urns containing ashes from a crematorium at Birkenau; the ashes were loaded onto trucks and removed from the camp just before the Nazis fled.

Before the Krema I gas chamber was converted into an air raid shelter in 1944, the crematorium in the building was used to store urns for ashes, according to a book entitled “Anatomy of Auschwitz Death Camp,” edited by Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum.

At Sobibor there is a pile of ashes in a memorial, which is shown in the photo above. This memorial contains the ashes left from the bodies of 170,000 to 250,000 prisoners.

At Majdanek there is a similar monument with ashes from a compost pile where the ashes of 18,000 prisoners were allegedly thrown. I blogged about this here.

The pile of ashes at Majdanek is larger than the pile at Sobibor. The ashes from the burning of 1.1 million bodies would have been enormous. The two ash ponds at Birkenau have no visible ashes. All you can see is water. These are natural ponds created by the water that was close to the surface at Birkenau. The Nazis tried to drain the area, but the drainage system was not adequate and there was always mud and standing water there when it was a concentration camp.

There were no bodies buried at Auschwitz-Birkenau, except for the bodies of thousands of prisoners who died in the typhus epidemic, that was out of control by July 3, 1942. The bodies were later exhumed and burned.

Commandant Hoess wrote in his autobiography that “The number of corpses in the mass graves amounted to 107,000.” Otto Moll, the SS man who was in charge of digging the mass graves at Birkenau in 1942, disputed Hoess’ version of the story; on April 16, 1946, Moll told an interrogator at Nuremberg: “When I was in charge of these excavations, as I told you about before, together with another comrade, which was confirmed by Hoess today, we put between 30,000 and 40,000 people in these mass graves. It was the most terrible work that could be carried out by any human being.”