This plan for a work camp, was the first of many for Auschwitz. .
Block 11 was created in the early months of the concentration camp. It was used as a place to experiment with torture, where the Police summary court was located, and also where the original Auschwitz executions were carried out. Dr. Mengele, Dr. Schumann and Dr. Clauberg carried out inhumane and disgusting experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, one of which sterilized Jewish women. Himmler even sold women prisoners to Bayer, which was part of I.G. Farben at the time, for them to use as human guinea pigs for their experiments. Auschwitz was also where the SS discovered and implemented the use of crystallized cyanide (also called Zyklon B) as a more effectice form of mass murder. They tested this in Block 11, "many of the inmates were still alive the next day. So they strengthened the dose. More crystals were poured in" (55). .
Ultimately Himmler wanted to move all the Jews out of Europe and into Africa, and wh1en Dr. Otto Ambros of I.G. Farben came into the picture Himmler saw an Economic life for Auschwitz. I.G. Farben was interested in building a synthetic rubber factory, but they were looking at Auschwitz not for the land, but for the slave labor. Hermann Goering approved this and demanded that the camp population to be increased from 10,000 to 30,000 prisoners. Auschwitz-Birkenau was down the road from where the I.G. Farben facility would be. Birkenau's had large gas chambers and crematoriums, and this would be where the Jews would be sent to when they were deemed no longer fit to work. Himmler saw this as a way to eventually continue his mass killing of the Jews, especially by increasing the population of Auschwitz. The first that were sent to the death chambers were the Slovakian Jews. One of the survivors, Otto Pressburger, talked about the gassings; "They never did it during the day; [because] people were probably shouting or trying to get out.
