Burning pits
When the mass extermination of Jews began at Auschwitz in 1942, the corpses of the murdered people were initially buried in mass graves on the edges of the Birkenau camp. During his second visit to Auschwitz in July 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered that they be exhumed and burned.
For fuel, at first, the wood from demolished houses, near the camp, that had belonged to expelled Polish farmers was used. Later, branches and scrap wood were brought by the truckload from the nearby forests.
About 107,000 corpses were burned in this way by the end of the year. In the spring of 1943, when the crematoria went into operation, the burning of bodies in pits was limited. The burning of corpses in this way on a large scale resumed in the spring and summer of 1944 during so-called Sonderaktion “Ungarn” and the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt ghetto.