Auschwitz's No.1 Jew: The Bone Crusher

"As a Jew, I had the Number 1 position in Auschwitz." 

- Hermann Gruenwald, one of the strongest Jews in Auschwitz

interview

In 2007 Canadian businessman Hermann Gruenwald published a book regarding the few months

he spent in Auschwitz 61 years prior. He describes how he crushed the bones of gassed Jews:

"I was made part of a group taken to pick up material outside the camp walls, close to the crematorium. I discovered we were carrying bags of bones, which we later ground up. We used something like an electric meat grinder. Standing on a chair, I forced the bones down in the grinder with my hands and pushed a button. I thought at first they were animal bones. But later I was told I had been grinding the bones of human beings. This had to be done because not every corpse could be disposed of in the overworked crematoriums. While it was easy enough to kill large numbers of people quickly with gas, disposing of thie bodies was another story. So some bodies were burned in pits, where the fire didn't get hot enough to consume them completely. The bones that remained had to be dealt with, and apparently that was my job. ... the experts say, the ground-up bones were used as fertilizer."

Hermann Gruenwald's assertion they used a machine to crush bones is
contrary to Raul Hilberg's opinion that bones were crushed at Auschwitz
using hammers, as they failed to obtain a bone crushing machine:

"On July 16, 1942, the deputy chief of the Gettoverwaltung, Ribbe, sent a letter to "Eldest of the Jews" Rumkowski requesting a canvass of the Lodz ghetto for a bone crusher, "whether manually operated or motor driven". He added openly, "The Sonderkommando Kulmhof is interested in this crusher". The ghetto apparently had no such machine, for a few months later Biebow sent to the Lodz Gestapo the papers concerning the purchase of a mill from the firm Schriever and Company in Hamburg. Biebow asked the Gestapo to keep the sales record. "For certain reasons" he himself did not wish to keep it. When Höss visited Kulmhof, Blobel promised the Auschwitz commander that he would send him a mill "for solid substances". However, Höss preferred to destroy his bone material with hammers."

David Olere the former Auschwitz-Birkenau sonderkommando, whose questionably

dated cartoons are considered some of the strongest evidence of the Holocaust, drew a

cartoon of his fellow sonderkommandos crushing bones with.. erm..  carved tree trunks?

click image to enlarge

Gruenwald, Herman. Demchinsky, Bryan. After Auschwitz: One Man's Story.

McGill-Queen's Press, Montreal. 2007. p.55

Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews Revised & Definitive Edition.

Holmes & Meier, New York and London. 1985. p.997