Editing Auschwitz concentration camp (section)

===Functionaries and ''Sonderkommando''{{anchor|functionaries}}===
[[File:Bloki Auschwitz.jpg|thumb|Auschwitz I, 2009]]
Certain prisoners, at first non-Jewish Germans but later Jews and non-Jewish Poles,{{sfn|Strzelecka|2000a|p=49}} were assigned positions of authority as ''Funktionshäftlinge'' (functionaries), which gave them access to better housing and food. The ''Lagerprominenz'' (camp elite) included ''Blockschreiber'' (barracks clerk), ''[[Kapo (concentration camp)|Kapo]]'' (overseer), ''Stubendienst'' (barracks orderly), and ''Kommandierte'' (trusties).{{sfn|Steinbacher|2005|pp=35–36}} Wielding tremendous power over other prisoners, the functionaries developed a reputation as sadists.{{sfn|Strzelecka|2000a|p=49}} Very few were prosecuted after the war, because of the difficulty of determining which atrocities had been performed by order of the SS.{{sfn|Wittmann|2003|pp=519–520}}

Although the SS oversaw the murders at each gas chamber, the forced labor portion of the work was done by prisoners known from 1942 as the ''[[Sonderkommando]]'' (special squad).{{sfn|Piper|2000b|p=180}} These were mostly Jews but they included groups such as Soviet POWs. In 1940–1941 when there was one gas chamber, there were 20 such prisoners, in late 1943 there were 400, and by 1944 during the Holocaust in Hungary the number had risen to 874.{{sfn|Piper|2000b|pp=180–181, 184}} The ''Sonderkommando'' removed goods and corpses from the incoming trains, guided victims to the dressing rooms and gas chambers, removed their bodies afterwards, and took their jewelry, hair, dental work, and any precious metals from their teeth, all of which was sent to Germany. Once the bodies were stripped of anything valuable, the ''Sonderkommando'' burned them in the crematoria.{{sfn|Piper|2000b|pp=170–171}}

Because they were witnesses to the mass murder, the ''Sonderkommando'' lived separately from the other prisoners, although this rule was not applied to the non-Jews among them.{{sfn|Piper|2000b|p=189}} Their quality of life was further improved by their access to the property of new arrivals, which they traded within the camp, including with the SS.{{sfn|Piper|2000b|pp=190–191}} Nevertheless, their life expectancy was short; they were regularly murdered and replaced.{{sfn|Piper|2000b|pp=180–181}} About 100 survived to the camp's liquidation. They were forced on a death march and by train to the camp at [[Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex|Mauthausen]], where three days later they were asked to step forward during roll call. No one did, and because the SS did not have their records, several of them survived.{{sfn|Piper|2000b|pp=188–189}}