Sonderkommando

Sonderkommando
Survivors of Sonderkommando 1005 posing next to a bone-crushing machine at the site of the Janowska concentration camp. Photograph taken following the liberation of the camp.
Location	German-occupied Europe
Date	1942–1945
Incident type	Removal of Holocaust evidence
Perpetrators	Schutzstaffel (SS)
Participants	Arbeitsjuden
Camp	Extermination camps including Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka among others
Survivors	Filip Müller, Henryk Tauber, Morris Venezia, Henryk Mandelbaum, Dario Gabbai, Antonio Boldrin

Sonderkommandos (German: [ˈzɔndɐkɔˌmando], lit. 'special unit') were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. 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").