So only the people directly responsible for introducing gas into the gas chambers, either by dropping bug spray into the room or actually firing up the captured Soviet submarine engine, are murderers?
No. Those carrying out selections, choosing who lived and who died, are also murderers. Those who shot people in the Lazarett or for resisting during the entire process are murderers. Armed guards are accessories to murder (Beihilfe zum Mord) in such situations.
Being told, directly witnessing killings of anyone who stepped out of line.
How high was the turnover rate?
Several hundred percent turnover rate as a minimum.
What percentage of the sondercommando had only been on the job for a day or two at any given time?
At Treblinka under Eberl, 25-33% a day it would seem. Under Stangl, a much lower turnover rate.
How many sondercommando killed themselves?
Quite a few according to the surviving members.
Why didn't others refuse to work? They all knew they were going to be killed after a few weeks anyway.
Human behaviour varies. The desire to live is extremely powerful and will make people do almost anything to stay alive. But not everyone would react like that. Which is why the reactions varied.
Once over the initial shock, routinisation and desensitisation will keep people doing even the most unpleasant things. I presume you accept that desensitisation is a fairly well proven psychological phenomenon.
What is the relevance of documents 'accepted as genuine by all leading revisionists' pertaining to the work force at Birkinau? Nobody claims there wasn't a place called Birkinau, that there were not crematoria there or that prisoners worked as trusties at the facility. As a side note, how many guards were supervising those workers? Nine hundred heads that need to have a gun pointed at each of them for motivation would require a lot of hands to hold a lot of guns.
The relevance of the documents is they prove that there were 900 prisoners working in the crematoria in the summer and autumn of 1944, up from 200 in February as it happens (also documented), and up from 400 circa April 1944. There are other documents referring to this unit as the Sonderkommando quite explicitly. So we know it existed.
The Birkenau Sonderkommando was kept inside the crematoria living in roof-spaces, inside barbed wire fences which were guarded, which in turn were inside further barbed wire fences which were guarded. In such an institution, you do not need to hold a gun literally to someone's head when it is clear to them that any attempt to escape will have to negotiate multiple barriers and run a gauntlet of guards who are armed.
Ultimately, there was a whole battalion directly on site, and more units nearby. When the Birkenau Sonderkommando revolted, they killed SS guards from two Birkenau companies and one Auschwitz main camp company which was obviously brought in as a reinforcement.
If all they were doing was cremating large numbers of bodies, they should have reacted as they did. Because they reacted as they did, it would indicate that they were merely cremating large numbers of bodies.
Except there is no evidence of mass suicides, multiple escape attempts or revolts from any other crematorium work crew in the Nazi camp system.
Yes, I do have only my own incredulity to believe that Jewish men would react differently to being forced to perform an unpleasant task vs being forced to perform an unpleasant task in the service of exterminating all the Jews.
But feel free to argue that Jews don't care if they're merely performing an unpleasant task or if they're performing an unpleasant task that is part of the process of killing their own family, neighbors, co-coreligionists and eventually themselves. .
Trying to escape, revolting, committing suicide and refusing to work don't add up to "don't care". Nor, one might add, does saying kaddish over the victims which was widely practiced by religious Jews caught up in such a situation. Nor does burying manuscripts describing the conditions in the Sonderkommando. Nor do the descriptions of life in the Sonderkommando indicate that they 'didn't care'.
No, it wouldn't. Crematorium stokers in other camps had to burn the bodies of those who had been executed with firearms, in addition to emaciated Muselmaenner and other horrors. Birkenau crematorium stokers had to burn the same kinds of bodies, plus gassing victims.
There is plentiful evidence that human beings can compartmentalise in factory environments and can deal with extremely unpleasant working conditions. But not everyone can, which is why there were refusals to work, escape attempts, revolts and suicides.
But imagine being an undertaker who's clientele was primarily elderly men and women who had all died peacefully in their sleep or a clientele who was primarily children who had been beaten to death.
Feel free to argue that all you would care about is keeping the stiff from rotting before the funeral. As long as you get paid, cause of death wouldn't matter to you at all.
This is a very dumb analogy since undertakers are not crematorium stokers.
So you're not a killer if all you do is perform all the necessary functions of an industrialized killing machine except for the actual killing itself?
Selections, shootings in the camps, using the threat of armed force to carry out the process, and dropping in gas/turning on engines. Those involved murder or made the SS and Trawnikis accessories to murder, especially because there is no evidence of an imminent threat to life for anyone who refused.
Whereas the Sonderkommandos were under an imminent threat to life if they chose not to sort clothing or burn bodies, which means that no court in the civilised world would ever convict them as accessories to murders because they were threatened with being killed if they did not comply.
It's very simple, and it's why your incredulity is simply antisemitic nonsense.
