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Why were bodies burned in open pits at Birkenau during the deportation of Hungarian Jews?
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Auschwitz
The entrance gates to the Auschwitz concentration camp, near Kraków, Poland; the sign reads “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Liberates”).
During the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, the sheer volume of victims arriving at the camp overwhelmed the capacity of the existing crematoria. To maintain the pace of the Holocaust and the systematic murder program known as the final solution, the SS utilized open pits to incinerate the bodies of those who had been gassed. This brutal measure was implemented to dispose of the massive number of corpses as quickly as possible, as the industrial-scale killing process exceeded the operational limits of the camp's permanent cremation facilities.12