Selections

Selection is a term used by witnesses and postwar historical accounts about the alleged process whereby German wartime-camp officials picked out inmates presumably unfit for work or otherwise deemed unworthy of living. The supposed aim was to murder these inmates either in gas chambers (large batches of inmates) or by way of individual executions, prominent among these being lethal injections of phenol into the heart. (See the entries on Lethal Injections and Phenol.)

The orthodox narrative has it that deportees arriving at the Auschwitz Camp were selected according to their fitness status already when descending from the railway cars. Those deemed fit went to one side, to be admitted as slave laborers to the camp, while those deemed unfit had to line up on the other side, slated for instant murder by mass gassings without registration.

It is further claimed that inmates admitted to a camp faced the danger of getting selected for murder later, if they became unfit for work either due to injuries or diseases. Especially those admitted to camp hospitals are said to have undergone frequent selections, where those deemed incurable, or curable only with too much effort, were slated for murder; in Auschwitz, this presumably meant primarily lethal injections.

The German term equivalent to selection — Selektion — cannot be found in any authentic German wartime document. Instead, German synonyms were used, such as Auswahl, Musterung, Aussortierung.

There can be no doubt that large-scale selections inevitably happened at the arrival of large batches of deportees at any camp, as those batches consisted of men and women, and in the case of deportation of entire Jewish families also of children. Photos taken by the SS during the deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 clearly show that inmates were ordered to line up at the railway ramp by gender: men at one side, women and children at the other. These photos also show that men and women fit for labor deployment then underwent admission procedures, among them certain hygienic procedures (haircuts, showers, issuance of camp clothes), whereas the elderly and women with small children were not subjected to these procedures (see the entry Auschwitz Album). In other words, after the primary selection to separate the genders, there was a second selection for fitness.

Since the Germans tried to maximize the efficiency of their slave-labor force, it stands to reason that some effort was made to register each inmate’s skills and vocations, if they had any, in order to deploy them at an activity where those skills could be exploited. Hence, there probably were tertiary selections after the admission procedures, based on specific skills.

Many camp infirmaries had limited capacities and were often ill-equipped to address more severe or complicated ailments that inmates might have developed. In these cases, inmates were indeed selected and taken away. However, the vast documentation of the Auschwitz Camp proves incontrovertibly that no effort and expense was spared in attempts to cure those inmates, after they had been transferred to hospitals where they could be treated. (See the entry on Healthcare.) Furthermore, Auschwitz’s vast documentation on labor deployment and non-deployment proves that tens of thousands of registered inmates who became unfit for work were kept alive rather than getting killed. (See the figures of those reports as chronicled in Mattogno 2023, Part 1.)

A detailed study of the Monowitz labor camp — for most of its existence a satellite camp of the larger Auschwitz complex — shows that its undersized and ill-equipped inmate infirmary did indeed sort out those inmates it could not adequately treat, and transferred them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were admitted to the much larger and better-equipped local inmate hospital (see Mattogno 2024).

Inmate anecdotes are full of testimonies describing selection, where co-inmates were taken away to unknown destinations, or where the reporting witnesses were themselves selected and taken elsewhere. In the first case, claims that those taken away ended up in gas chambers or with lethal injections are based solely on rumors. The many witnesses who reported themselves as having been selected and transferred elsewhere, or who admitted having been cured by successful medical treatments, point to the truth of the matter. This is also substantiated by a large number of wartime documents.

Selections usually did not equate to murder. In a few cases, however, this may have been true, where a death penalty was enforced — the Auschwitz Camp was the execution site for death penalties issued in the wider region — or where euthanasia had been ordered. (Himmler had extended Hitler’s civilian euthanasia program to the camp system, but documents show that only small numbers of inmates, after thorough medical review, were subjected to it; see the entry on Euthanasia). These cases are probably the true core of the selection rumor mill.