My thinking as well. I remember an Austrian guard interviewed on TV who was at one of those camps recall how, when they opened the doors of the gas chambers, saw a bluish wisp of smoke over a pyramid of bodies. The poor devils scrambled over each other trying to get to fresh air. He took one look and said it was his image of Hell, and refused to work there, even under threat of going to the Russian front.
He said women who were near term aborted and the fetuses were mixed in with the bodies. They had prisoners whose job it was to probe the body cavities of the dead for any gold or other valuables the condemned had hidden in their bodies. You had to wonder at how people could perform such tasks and keep their dignity, let alone their sanity.
[sidebar] I was just a 12-year-old kid in 1945 when the veterans came home. One guy mentioned how, despite the horror of the camps, he could handle it - until he went into a room that had a bin that was full of baby shoes. He went outside and shot dead a couple of German prisoners and said that even after he found they were innocent, being sent there a day or two before the end of the war, he felt no guilt. As far as he was concerned, they should have plowed Germany uder and salted the earth.
That Austrian guard is lying through his teeth about being sent to the Russian Front if he refused to serve in the camps. First of all he was an SS man and believe it or not there was no punishment of any SS man who didn’t want to be part of the ‘’special action’’ details. There’s a twisted logic to this. Those involved in such horrifying work who would have any moral reservation about committing such acts might be likely to talk about it and that’s not what the SS wanted. Truth is, if you research it no more than four or five SS were ever present during the selection and gassing process. So confident were they(the SS) that their victims were trapped with no way to escape they didn’t need more SS men on hand. Again, the fewer who actually saw the crime committed the less witnesses to talk about it.