Burning two thousand people took about twenty-four hours in the five stoves. Usually we could manage to cremate only about seventeen hundred to eighteen hundred. We were thus always behind in our cremating because as you can see it was much easier to exterminate by gas than to cremate, which took so much more time and labor.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- The speaker notes that cremation was slower than gassing, creating a backlog of bodies.
- In plain terms
- Killing by gas was faster than burning bodies, causing a backlog.
- What can you take from it?
- Efficiency in killing outpaced disposal capacity.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- How does efficiency affect morality?
- What does this reveal about the regime?
Another view
Comparing killing speed to disposal time treats murder as an industrial problem.
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