They were composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust.

[1][2] The death-camp Sonderkommandos, who were always inmates, were unrelated to the SS-Sonderkommandos, which were ad hoc units formed from members of various SS offices between 1938 and 1945.

The German term was part of the vague and euphemistic language which the Nazis used to refer to aspects of the Final Solution (e.g., Einsatzkommando, "deployment units").

[9] Because the Germans needed the Sonderkommandos to remain physically able, they were granted much less squalid living conditions than other inmates: they slept in their own barracks and were allowed to keep and use various goods such as food, medicines and cigarettes brought into camp by those who were sent to the gas chambers.

[11] There was a belief that every three months, according to SS policy, almost all the Sonderkommandos working in the death camps' killing areas would be gassed themselves and replaced with new arrivals to ensure secrecy, and that some inmates survived for up to a year or more because they possessed specialist skills.

[14] Fewer than 20 of several thousand members of the Sonderkommandos are documented to have survived until liberation and to have testified about the events (although some sources claim more).

[15] Among them were Henryk (Tauber) Fuchsbrunner, Filip Müller, Daniel Behnnamias, Dario Gabbai, Morris Venezia, Shlomo Venezia, Antonio Boldrin,[16] Alter Fajnzylberg, Samuel Willenberg, Abram Dragon, David Olère, Henryk Mandelbaum and Martin Gray.

Exceptions are Herman's letter (kept in the archives of the Amicale des déportés d'Auschwitz-Birkenau) and Gradowski's texts, one of which is held in the Russian Museum of Military Medicine in St. Petersburg, and another in Yad Vashem, Israel.

[23] The Scrolls of Auschwitz have been recognised as some of the most important testimony to be written about the Holocaust, as they include contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the workings of the gas chambers in Birkenau.

[29] These include Richard Glazar, Chil Rajchman, Jankiel Wiernik, and Samuel Willenberg, who co-wrote the Treblinka Memoirs.

Miklos Nyiszli, in Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, described the Sonderkommando as enjoying a virtual feast, complete with chandeliers and candlelight, as other prisoners died of starvation.

Nyiszli, an admitted collaborator who assisted Josef Mengele in his medical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners, would appear to have been in a good position to observe the Sonderkommando in action, as he had an office in Krematorium II.

[39] Among other incidents he related, Müller recounted how he tried to enter the gas chamber to die with a group of his countrymen but was dissuaded from suicide by a girl who asked him to remain alive and bear witness.

"[41] The first depiction of the Sonderkommando revolt was titled Ikh leb (I live), a play written by Jewish author Moshe Pinchevski.

[42] A theatre play that explores the moral dilemmas of the Sonderkommando was The Grey Zone, directed by Doug Hughes and produced in New York at MCC Theater in 1996.

[44] The film took its mood, as well as much of its plot, from Nyiszli, portraying members of the Sonderkommando as crossing the line from victim to perpetrator.

Sonderkommando Hoffman (played by David Arquette) beats a man to death in the undressing room under the eyes of a smiling SS member.

Géza Röhrig, who starred in the film, reacted with anger to the suggestion, made by a journalist, that members of the Sonderkommando were "half-victim, half-hangman".