Sonderkommando (Special unit)

Units assigned to special roles and tasks. Two main types of Sonderkommando are known:

1. Units composed of Jewish prisoners, mainly in the death camps, employed at the gas chambers and crematoria. Their job was to transfer the corpses of the murdered victims from the gas chambers to the crematoria or to mass graves. The unit members were changed every few months, and the former members were murdered. One of these units revolted at Birkenau in 1944.

2. Units, mainly of the SS, which were assigned special tasks. They were included in the Einsatzgruppen -- units which carried out the mass extermination of Jews and Soviet citizens in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. A Sonderkommando unit was in charge of extermination in the Chelmno death camp.

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