"Special Assignment". As we have seen with the language of the Final Solution, any job defined as "Sonder / Special" meant dealing with the carrying out of the Nazi genocide. SonderKommandos weren't only used at Auschwitz for the killing machine, but the majority of the young men employed in this kommando were supplied by Auschwitz.
The SonderKommandos were usually young, strong Jewish men selected specifically because their physical stature proved capable of carrying heavy loads. At Auschwitz the SonderKommando were used in every step of the mass murder process.
At Selections:
The SonderKommando stood to the side waiting for the new arrivals to clear the loading ramp. The arrivals were told to leave their possessions near the train, and that after showers their things would be returned to them. As the ramp cleared the SonderKommando were ordered to sort through the possessions and place each item in it's appropriate place in Kanada.
The Gas Chambers:
Once the prisoners were undressed and herded into the Gas Chamber the SonderKommando would wait in the background for the 30-60 minutes for the victims to die of the Zyclon B gas. Once all were dead the SonderKommando would enter wearing gas masks and begin the process of removing the bodies from the Chamber, which depending on the number of people who had been on the transport, which could take hours.
Searching Bodies:
Once removed from the Chamber the SonderKommando were forced to search the bodies for hidden valuables. The SonderKommando would search all body cavities to ensure no wealth would be lost to the 3rd Reich. This included gold and other metals used in teeth. To remove the gold the SonderKommando would break the jaw and place it in boiling acid to melt off all biological matter. Once clean the teeth would be shattered and the gold would be melted into huge ingots which would be sent to German dentists to be reused on the SS men in need of fillings.
Crematoria:
At the Crematoria the newly searched corpses would be loaded onto carts and thrown into the huge furnaces. The SonderKommando, in order to hasten the process, would sometimes throw up to 5 people into a furnace at a time, this also caused the furnaces to malfunction and when a furnace got too full, or broke down pits would be used to the rear of crematory 5 to burn the excess. The SonderKommando learned tricks as to how to make the bodies burn faster too. If one were to throw in a body of a longtime and emaciated prisoner, the low body fat content would slow down the burning, but if a newer arrival who still had a high percentage of fat were burned with a semi-skeletal corpse the burning would go faster.
Quarters:
Because of the special assignment, the SonderKommando were forced to stay separate from other inmates, the Nazis didn't want the SonderKommando telling others about the heinous crimes committed. Because of this they were forced to sleep away from the general prisoners. They slept in one of 2 places. One might have slept inn the furnace room itself, or one of the rooms surrounding it, or simply on the floor of the Gas Chamber itself. They stayed in the Crematoria they were assigned to, this made it easy to summon help when one of the many shipments of people arrived.
Punishment:
Some of the many punishments the SonderKommando underwent were purely psychological torment. The continual sight of death, touching, killing, and mutilating people on a daily basis was more than most could handle. Many SonderKommando became like machines, they couldn't cope with the job they were asked to do and retain their human characteristics. Sometimes when searching through possessions or through corpses the men would find a person that they knew or maybe had been related to and were forced to accept that they were dead and the SonderKommando had actually facilitated their death. Another punishment was that of certain death. No SonderKommando could ever, knowingly to the Nazis, be allowed to survive the war. The SonderKommando knew every intricacy of the murders at Auschwitz, and therefore were frequently killed. If a SonderKommando for some reason upset a SS guard, the punishment was to be thrown head first, and alive into the furnace along with the corpses.