STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE

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• Publication Date: January 1, 1978
• Content Type: STUDY

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'c'TUDIIES
IN
INT.ELII~,xE,NCE.
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
VOL. 22 No. 4 WINTER 1978
WITH CUMULATIVE INDEX TR-SINT 78-004
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STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE
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GEORGE ALLEN
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CONTENTS
Page
The Missing Link ................................................................... James D. Burke 1
The search for Soviet deep-space signals (Secret Noforn)
The Holocaust Revisited ................ Dino A. Brugioni & Robert G. Poirier 11
Photointerpreters look at Auschwitz (Unclassified)
Maxims for Analysts .......................................................... David S. Brandwein 31
Advice from a master practitioner (Confidential)
Communication from the Editor: Intelligence Vignettes ................................ 37
A new bottle for vintage wines (Unclassified)
Intelligence in Recent Public Literature ............................................................ 41
MORI/HRP THIS
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NOFORN
Through the third, fourth and fifth
dimensions in search of ...
For nearly sixteen years the Soviet Union has been using a deep-space radio link
that we have been unable to intercept. This is an account of our intelligence efforts
leading, first, to a conviction that the link exists, second, to a knowledge of many other
aspects of the Soviet planetary program, and finally to a determined but still
unsuccessful effort to find the unknown signal.
Deep-Space Information Systems
To explore the planets, automated spacecraft must return information over
distances of tens of hundreds of millions of kilometers. Because of the limits of
spacecraft transmitter power and antenna size, the radio signals reaching earth are
fantastically weak: many millions of times weaker than the energy collected by a car
radio antenna. Deep-space ground stations therefore must have huge antennas and
supersensitive receivers similar to the equipment used by radio astronomers. And even
then, the rate at which information can be sent is severely restricted. In the early
sixties, we and the Soviets received only a few symbols per second from our first
planetary probes. Today in U.S. missions the rate has grown to hundreds of thousands
per second, enabling the return of images such as those of Mercury from Mariner 10
and of Mars from Viking.' 2
Soviet progress has been less spectacular, but it has also led to a capability for
imaging the planets. Figure 1, a picture of Martian landforms returned by the MARS 5
spacecraft in 1973, is comparable to U.S. Mariner imagery. To send pictures such as
Figure 1., the Soviet spacecraft must have had some combination of the following:
a. a large directional antenna pointed accurately toward earth;
b. a powerful transmitter;
c. a high transmitting frequency (giving the most gain for a given antenna
size); and
d. on-board data storage so that the picture data could be slowed to a rate that
the radio link could handle.
Soviet planetary pictures, having been proved genuine by comparison with data from
U.S. missions, show that this design problem has been solved-though not, apparently,
in quite the same way or with as high a priority as in the United States. Soviet
planetary images have often been inferior in both quality and quantity to those from
contemporary U.S. missions; nevertheless it is clear that the Soviets are able to return
respectable quantities of data from planetary distances.
' Murray, B. C. and Burgess, E., "Flight to Mercury" 1976, Columbia Univ. Press. Lib. Cong. No. LC-76-
25017.
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SECRET The Missing Link
Fig. 1: Photo of a 100 x 100 km region of Mars, sent to Earth by MARS 5.
Soviet Deep-Space Communications
In their large program of flights aimed toward the Moon, Venus, and Mars since
1970,3 the Soviets have consistently used and improved a few basic communication
links, most of which have been described in public and confirmed by U.S. intercept.
The known links and their functions are listed in Table 1. One link remains unknown
and we are now confident that this is no accident, for it is the one that carries
prime, high-rate science data including orbital imagery such as Figure 1.
Soviet announcements from 1962 onward have acknowledged that this link exists.
The most explicit description of it appeared in Pravda, 19 December 1971, in
connection with the MARS 2 and 3 missions:
Two radio channels-one narrow-band and one broad-band-are utilized
for communication between the orbital apparatus and the Earth. The narrow-
band channel is designed primarily for making trajectory measurements and
transmitting telemetry information; it operates in the decimeter waveband. The
broad-band radio channel, which functions in the centimeter waveband, permits
'Sheldon, C. S. II, "United States and Soviet Progress in Space: Summary Data through 1976 and a
Forward Look" Lib. Cong. Document 77-99 SP, 5 April 1977.
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Wavelength
SOVIET DEEP-SPACE DOWNLINKS
Frequency
(cm)
(MHz)
Use
163
183.6
Lunar telemetry
32
922.76
Lunar telemetry and imaging
32
928.4
Planetary narrow-band data (including some imaging)
8
3691 or
Coherent 4x multiple of 32-cm carrier, for dual-
3713.6
frequency plasma and occultation experiments
5?
?
Planetary broad-band data including orbital imaging and
science
the transmission of large volumes of information from the television assemblies
and scientific instruments.
Since all statements about the narrow-band channel were proved correct by
intercept, we have tended to give some weight to similar statements about the broad-
band channel. Given such a clear target, one may well ask why this signal has never
been intercepted. To answer this question, we must consider some technical matters
and also the intelligence environment within which deep-space SIGINT collection
occurs.
Early U.S. Deep-Space Collection Efforts
Twenty years ago both the United States and the USSR began trying to reach the
Moon. The Soviets succeeded first and then, in the decade 1959-1969, were overtaken
by the massive U.S. response that put Apollo astronauts on the Moon and caused the
Soviet manned lunar program to collapse. During the great lunar contest, both parties
also were active in automated exploration of the planets. The Soviet planetary
exploration effort was much larger than that of the United States, but its successes
were few.
At the outset of both programs in 1959, we had no capability for intercepting
Soviet signals from deep space, and there was some debate over the need to do so in
the absence of any evident security threat. In the end it was decided to build a
multipurpose station which could collect deep-space signals and also those from high
altitude communications satellites, the latter being, of course, of possible military
importance. Because the Soviets normally transmit only to stations on their own
territory, our station had to be in the Eastern Hemisphere. The site selected for it was
near Asmara, Ethiopia, in the vicinity of other existing U.S. facilities. From 1965 to
1975 this deep-space station, named STONEHOUSE (Figure 2) functioned with
increasing competence, recording signals from Soviet lunar missions, comsats, and
planetary spacecraft. Before its successful career was ended by political unrest and
terrorism in Ethiopia, STONEHOUSE-with the aid of several collaborating sites-
gave us a fairly full understanding of the Soviet lunar and planetary program." We
learned how the known data links listed in Table 1 were used, and we came to
understand much of the information that they carried. We even obtained some
scientific data superior to any released by the Soviets, indicating that STONEHOUSE
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"FAW
Fig. 2: STONEHOUSE deep-space receiving station near Asmara, Ethiopia. The antenna in
the foreground was 26 meters in diameter; the one in the background was 46 meters in
diameter.
was performing as well as or better than the Soviet Crimean deep-space stations, at
least for the decimeter-wave, narrow-band telemetry. In all this time, however, we
never acquired the centimeter-wave, broad-band signal. We came to know exactly
where to look and when to expect it to be on the air; we thought we knew its
approximate frequency; we searched and did not find it.
The problem in such searches is that one seeks a small needle in a large haystack.
The search dimensions are space, time, and frequency. In space, one must point the
receiving antenna precisely toward the signal source. We had to determine the
trajectory of each outbound spacecraft soon after it left Earth, so that we would know
where to point the antennas during the months of interplanetary flight. This was done
with the aid of radar tracking from Diyarbakir in Turkey and sometimes with angle
tracking, either radio or optical, from sites in Iran and California.
In the time dimension, one could try to search continuously whenever the
spacecraft is in view, but this would be very costly and frustrating because Soviet
planetary spacecraft transmit only for occasional short periods. We therefore had to
devise schemes, based on the behavior of other observed signals, to concentrate our
searches at the right times. STONEHOUSE was greatly aided in this task by
information from another site, in I which intercepted Soviet deep-space
command uplink transmissions from the Crimea.
As we went on trying, we thus developed reliable means for telling where and
when to look. The overseas sites were tied into a real-time system using NSA
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computers and secure communications centered in DEFSMAC. Though often plagued
by communications problems, this system essentially solved the space and time search
problems. This left the frequency dimension, which was and remains the chief
obstacle.
In a deep-space mission the expected radio signal power within any small
frequency interval is minute. If the receiver bandwidth is widened to admit more
signal power or to cover a larger search region, it also admits more cosmic radio noise
masking the desired signal. But to search a broad frequency band a little at a time
takes forever, and the Soviet signals are typically turned on only for an hour or two.
Unless there is some clue as to where to look in frequency as well as in space and time,
the search may be hopeless.
Apart from the Soviet announcement quoted earlier, what clues do we have for
the frequency search? Over the years we have accumulated quite a few. Until the
signal is found, of course, we have no way to evaluate their validity. We could be the
victims of a prolonged deception-but we wonder if the Soviets would really deem
such an effort worthwhile. In other parts of their deep-space enterprise they seem to
have followed a fairly consistent pattern: reluctance to release information before
launch, lack of candor about failures, and accurate but incomplete information about
successes. Outright lies appear to have been rare. Therefore, in planning our searches
for the hidden signal, we have tended to give some weight to Soviet-released
circumstantial evidence.
The first announcement of our target was made in 1962, during the unsuccessful
MARS 1 mission. That spacecraft, the only survivor of six launched in that year for
Venus and Mars, was said to be transmitting on wavelengths of 1.6 meters and 32, 8
and 5 centimeters. Though we had no way to confirm these numbers at the time, on
later missions we found and identified the 1.6-m, 32-cm, and 8-cm signals as described
in Table 1. Therefore, we have always thought it likely that the remaining signal
would be in the 5-cm region of the radio spectrum. This belief was reinforced by the
next clue, presented to us in 1967 at Montreal. The Soviet EXPO-67 exhibit included a
spacecraft (Figure 3) purporting to represent ZOND 3, a camera-carrying planetary
spacecraft that had returned test photos of the Moon.' The ZOND 3 camera package
apparently contained a centimeter-wave transmitter whose output was conveyed to
the spacecraft's directional antenna by a waveguide. A waveguide is a pipe for
carrying radio waves, somewhat analogous to a speaking tube for sound, and its outer
dimensions give a rough indication of the design frequency. We measured the
EXPO-67 waveguide and found that it could indeed handle a 5-cm signal.
Over the next several years we pursued the subject of Soviet waveguides as shown
in various hardware exhibits and design handbooks, and we even found some (on
Molniya comsats) that could be clearly correlated with intercepted signals. On the
planetary spacecraft exhibits, however, the hardware varied and at times we suspected
a spoof; in the end we decided that the designs had been evolving and the exhibits
were just pieced together from available, perhaps partly obsolete, items. After
wondering about this problem with exhibits in Paris and Moscow in 1974, we finally
got a good look at a full-scale and obviously genuine spacecraft representing Venera 9
and 10 at Los Angeles in December 1977, where the waveguides and antenna
hardware appeared at last to be self-consistent. Figure 4 is a photo of this craft and
Figure 5 is a closeup of its antenna feed structure showing the waveguide and two
coaxial cables. Pride of place in the feed structure (on the antenna axis) is given to the
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Fig. 4: Venera 9/ 10 type spacecraft.
Parasol-like object is directional antenna.
"MOMMOMMOMM
Fig. 5: Venera 9/10 directional antenna
feed showing centimeter-band waveguide
and coaxial cables for two other signals
waveguide; the coaxial cables probably carry the narrow-band 32-cm and 8-cm
signals.
Just as spacecraft components give some information on intended radio
frequencies, so do ground installations. Figure 6 is a Soviet-released photo of inc pof the
Crimean deep-space sites, showing in the foreground the eight-dish array that
probably handles the 32-cm narrow-band signals, and in the background two 25-meter
antennas of unknown function. Figure '7 is another view of these, showing a feed
structure with four square horns and a central circular aperture. The horn, could be
for tracking the 32-cm signal and the on-axis circular feed could be for ,.cure higher
frequency--perhaps the broad-band, 5-cm transmission.
_Apart from hardware evidence, we have, over the years, gathered in a few other
clues to the unknown signal frequency. In 1973 the Soviets launched four spacecraft
toward Mars while we were preparing to launch Mariner 10 to Venus and Mercury. It
was suggested that NASA Deep Space Net stations should acquire signal,, from the
Soviet craft as a test of our new X-band (3-cm) radio system. Dr. John Naugle of
NASA wrote to Academician B. N. Petrov suggesting this test, offering to ;hare any
acquired data, and mentioning the U.S. X-band frequency, 8400 MIIz. Academician
Petrov politely declined, adding that the Soviet frequency was "more than two GIIz
below" the U.S. frequency; i.e., lower than 6400 MHz, in the 5-em wavelength region.
We then looked for nearby regions of the radio spectrum allocated, by
international agreement, for deep-space use. (Such allocations, though unenforceable,
arc' often observed because they give mutual protection against radio interference.)
The nearest allocated band was the region from 5670 to 5725 MIIz, so we +,lecided to
look first in this hand.
Narrowing the Search
S'I'ONEIIOUSE searched diligently in the selected region against the 1973 Mars
missions and found nothing. In our post-mission reviews we concluded that uu r? had not
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The Missing Link
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The Missing Link
negated the signal: not all of the band had been swept out when the signal was known
to be present and with all equipment at peak sensitivity. We therefore resolved to go
after the 5670-5725 MHz band again at the next opportunity. This came in 1975, with
the successful launch of Venera 9 and 10. Unfortunately we no longer had
STONEHOUSE, and while the spacecraft were en route to the planet we also lost the
use of the stations in
We improvised a substitute search plan. While collaborating European sites
prepared to record the known 32-cm and 8-cm signals with mission support through
DEFSMAC, the CIA made an arrangement with lauthorities permitting
us to use the former NASA deep space station near to search for the
broad-band signal. Equipment was quickly designed, built, and flown to the site, and
high-sensitivity searches began before the Venera spacecraft arrived at Venus. By the
time this intercept effort ended without success, we believed that we had truly swept
out and negated a good part of the 5670-5725 MHz band, and there was a certain
amount of gloom. (All was not lost: a collaborating site produced excellent recordings
of the 32-cm data, including panoramas of the surface of Venus which were relayed
over the narrow-band link.)
In the aftermath of this first definitive but unsuccessful search, a review of all our
knowledge was organized. Its main conclusion was that the signal was still most likely
to be found somewhere in the 5-cm band, perhaps outside the allocated region but still
in a region relatively free from other interfering signals. This led us to scan lists of
known Soviet radar signals and other radio services; we concluded that there are
several reasonably quiet regions around 6 GHz, any of which could contain our target.
The haystack is a big one.
While we pondered what to do next, an exasperatingly specific clue came to light.
A source of unknown veracity5 said that one of the Venera 9/10 data links had
operated in the band 5532-5538 MHz. We went back and looked at our records and
found that valid searches had been made in this band, though not at peak sensitivity
since it was outside the prime target region, with no signal recorded. And there the
matter rests today.
Perhaps we will never know what we are missing. The whole problem is more an
annoyance than a crisis. Soviet planetary results have seldom been of primary
importance to the United States and, when unique data are obtained, they are
eventually published in the scientific literature. Because of the relatively low priority
of orbital planetary imaging in the Soviet program, our own planetary mapping has
been much better than theirs. And yet there may be valid reasons for pursuing the
search. In both our program and theirs, the tendency has been for communication
links to move upward in frequency with time: as technology has advanced, more
efficient links can be designed for shorter and shorter wavelengths. If the centimeter-
band signal ever replaces the decimeter-band ones in the Soviet scheme and we have
not yet found it, even our present limited source of prompt and objective deep-space
information will disappear. Also, any such search is an exercise of techniques that have
other uses. Should it turn out that the Soviets have been deliberately hiding the signal
by any of several possible spread-spectrum or suppressed-carrier techniques, we will
have learned something important. There is some evidence that a similar signal may
be in use as a privacy link from certain Soviet Earth satellites.
5 (SECRET) FTD Message 091845Z Jan. 78, Quoted in NSA W14/Vista Conf. 001-78, 11 Jan. 1978.
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SECRET The Missing Link
Finally, in pursuing this deep-space search whenever opportunities appear, we
will be gathering rudimentary experience toward the much greater problem of
searching the whole sky for signals from other civilizations in the cosmos. That effort,
which both the United States and the USSR are now beginning to pursue seriously, will
involve development of vastly more powerful search techniques.' Systems will exist a
few years from now, able to scan in space and frequency at rates thousands or millions
of times as great as those of our present intercept sites-as if one could toss the entire
haystack at once in search of the needle. When these techniques are in hand we may
look back on our present efforts as feeble ones. Meanwhile, however, our target
remains in view. We expect Soviet Veneta missions in 1978, encountering the planet
during December. As political conditions change, so does our access to collaborating
deep-space sites; we just have to make the best of whatever resources come to hand.
Nevertheless it is possible that this year there may again be an opportunity to seek, and
perhaps this time to find, the missing link.
' "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" NASA SP-419, 1977. U.S. Gov't. Printing Office Stock No.
033-000-00696-0.
Acknowledgement
To pursue a search of the kind described in "The Missing Link" takes
advanced equipment, fast international action, discipline, devotion and skill.
An acknowledgement is due the many dedicated people here and abroad
who have, usually in the presence of other priority tasks, given their energies
to this search.
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New photointerpretation illuminates
a grim chapter of history.
THE HOLOCAUST REVISITED:
A RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE
AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU EXTERMINATION COMPLEX
The authors have been strong advocates of the application of aerial photography
to historical research and analysis. * Our convictions about the utility of this medium to
the professional historian have been strengthened as we became increasingly aware of
the many historical problems to which the exploitation of aerial photography can
contribute an added dimension. In this paper, we attempt to demonstrate the
application of aerial photography to a historiographical problem.
Our interest in the subject of Nazi concentration camps was rekindled by the
television presentation "Holocaust." In the more than thirty years since VE Day, 8
May 1945, much has happened to these , amps. Some, like Treblinka, have been
completely obliterated; others, such as Da(hau and Auschwitz, have been partially
preserved as memorials.
Aerial reconnaissance was an important intelligence tool and played a. significant
role in World War II. We wondered whether any aerial photography of these camps
had been acquired and preserved in government records. If imagery was available, we
thought it likely that the many sophisticated advances in optical viewing, and the
equipment and techniques of photographic interpretation developed at the National
Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in recent years would enable us to extract
more information than could have been derived during World War II.
We had a number of advantages not available to the World War II photographic
interpreters. Instead of 7X tube magnifiers, we had micro-stereoscopes. Our modern
laboratory photo-enlargers were vastly superior to those available to earlier
interpreters. While the World War II photointerpreter performed his analysis by
examining paper prints, we would use duplicate film positives allowing detailed
examination of any activity recorded on the film. The present day imagery analyst
also has the advantage of years of training and experience, while the World War II
photointerpreter was extremely limited in both. Most importantly, for this project, we
have the advantage of hindsight and abundant eyewitness accounts and investigative
reports on these camps.' We therefore had the opportunity to study the subject from a
unique perspective.
We faced two immediate problems as we began our investigation. We knew that
the cameras carried by World War II reconnaissance aircraft were limited to about
150 exposures of Super-XX Aerocon film per camera and that this film resolved about
35 lines per millimeter. The film was exposed at "point" rather than "area" targets
*"Rome East of the Jordan: Archaeological Use of Satellite Photography," Studies XXI/1. p. 13; "Satellite
View of a Historic Battlefield," Studies XXII/1, p. 39.
' The "intelligence collateral" for this paper was drawn mainly from 0. Kraus and E. Kulka, The Death
Factory, New York, 1966; N. Levin, The Holocaust, New York, 1973; and the official Polish government
investigations, German Crimes in Poland, 2 Vols., Warsaw, 1946-47, which draw on primary sources.
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The Holocaust Revisited
which were selected for their strategic or tactical importance. Thus, when the
reconnaissance aircraft approached the target, the pilot or aerial photographer would
switch on the cameras shortly before reaching the target and then turn them off again
as soon as the target was imaged. There was nothing like the broad area coverage
which modern photoreconnaissance makes available to the photo researcher. To find
photos of a concentration camp, therefore, we would have to identify one which was
located close to a target of strategic interest.
Since the Nazi concentration camp system was so widespread, we also had the
immediate chore of narrowing the scope of the investigation to manageable
proportions. Our research revealed that the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination
complex was only 8 kilometers from a large I. G. Farben synthethic oil and rubber
manufacturing facility. We knew that oil and rubber production plants were high on
the Allied bombing list. Auschwitz, then, in addition to providing us with a high
degree of name recognition, offered a strong probability of having been filmed as a
by-product of tactical reconnaissance. Our research soon produced positive results.
The Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the custodian of World War II aerial
reconnaissance records, was given the coordinates for Oswiecim (Auschwitz), Poland,
through NPIC's film distribution and control center. DIA ran a computer search
against the coordinates within the time frame we had selected and produced a print-
out of all the unclassified photographic references to film stored in the National
Archives' records center at Suitland, Maryland. From this list we were able to order
the photography we desired sent to NPIC for photographic analysis. On off-duty
hours, we examined all the available unclassified aerial imagery for evidence of the
holocaust at Auschwitz.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex
The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex had its origins in spring 1940. A concentration
camp was organized in a former military camp in the suburbs of Oswiecim
(Auschwitz), Poland. When the first trainload of German criminal prisoners arrived in
JTme 1940, it marked the beginning of a system which would eventually total some 39
subsidiary camps and make the name of Auschwitz synonymous with terror and
death.'
In the fall of 1941, the Auschwitz concentration camp entered the most sinister
phase of its expansion with the construction of a camp on the moors of Brzezinka
(Birkenau). Under cover of a prisoner of war camp, it would become a center for
Sonderbehandlung, i.e., "Special Treatment," the Nazi codeword for extermination.
During the following three and one-half years, an estimated two to three and one-half
million people would meet their deaths on this remote Polish moor.
Details of the horrors perpetrated at Auschwitz have been reported many times
and at length. It is not our purpose to reiterate that type of detail but rather to see if
any of that activity had been recorded by the World War II aerial reconnaissance
cameras.
Auschwitz is located in a remote area southwest of Warsaw on the Krakow-to-
Vienna rail line. We found no evidence of any Allied reconnaissance effort in the
Auschwitz area prior to April 1944. On 4 April 1944, an American reconnaissance
aircraft approached the huge I. G. Farben facility for the first time.
The format employed in the balance of this paper will present the background
information for a particular topic and then a photographic analysis of the pertinent
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imagery. All available imagery on Auschwitz acquired between 4 April 1944 and 21
January 1945 was examined.
Background: Construction of the various Auschwitz camps began in spring 1940.
Auschwitz I, the so-called Main Camp, was operational by fall of that year. The
development of Birkenau (Auschwitz II), began in fall 1941 with Russian prisoners of
war as construction crews. The I. G. Farben industrial facility, referred to as "Buna"
(Auschwitz III), was begun at Monowice in April 1941. Expansion of these facilities
was virtually continuous until the evacuation of the area by the Nazis in January 1945.
The operation of these vast petrochemical facilities was a joint SS and I. G. Farben
venture. Farben had full access to a source of slave labor-prisoners from Auschwitz
and local British prisoners of war-and the SS received the salaries paid their
prisoners.
Crippling the German petrochemical production system was a high Allied
priority, so the targeting of the Farben complex was inevitable. The late date of the
reconnaissance effort is probably attributable to the plant's production status; it
produced no significant amounts of fuel until 1944. Another factor was probably the
distance from Allied air bases-about 750 miles from England and 700 miles from
Italy.
Photo Evidence: The mission of 4 April 1944 produced very little photographic
coverage of the I. G. Farben complex. It was not until the 26 June 1944 mission
(Photos 1 & 1A) that an overall view of the complex, both as to extent and purpose,
could be interpreted. For our study, however, even the partially successful mission of 4
April provided positive evidence.
Auschwitz I
Background: Details of the origin of the camp have been outlined earlier, but
some additional comments are appropriate. It was at this facility that experiments in
mass extermination by using Zyklon-B gas were first carried out. Rudolf Hoess, the
notorious camp commandant, initially tested the use of that gas on Russian prisoners of
war in 1941. The first gas chamber and crematorium, number I by the Nazi
numbering system, was later constructed at this camp. The Main Camp penal barracks
for problem prisoners (Barracks Block 11), and the medical experimentation barrack
located here would both become infamous.
Photo Evidence: Analysis of the facilities at Auschwitz I (Photo 2) combined with
the collateral information, corroborate eyewitness accounts of its description. We can
identify Gas Chamber and Crematorium I, the Commandant's quarters, the camp
headquarters and administration buildings, the prisoner registration building, the
individual barrack blocks and the infamous "execution wall" between barrack blocks
10 and 11. This latter facility was used for the exemplary execution of "problem"
prisoners. Death was inflicted either by hanging or shooting against the execution wall.
In addition to the above, the camp kitchen, guard towers, and the security fencing can
all be identified.
On the photography of 4 April 1944, a small vehicle was identified in a specially
secured annex adjacent to the Main Camp gas chamber. Eyewitness accounts describe
how prisoners arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau, not knowing they were destined for
extermination, were comforted by the presence of a "Red Cross ambulance." In
reality, the SS used that vehicle to transport the deadly Zyklon-B crystals. Could this
be that notorious vehicle? While conclusive proof is lacking, the vehicle was not
present on imagery of 25 August and 13 September 1944 after the extermination
facility had been converted to an air raid shelter.'
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'Che preferred method of shipping prisoners to Auschwitz was by rail. Large
transports arrived in the railyards of Auschwitz from all sections of Europe. To the
west of the camp, as shown in Photo 2, a number of transports are present in the
railyard and an additional train is arriving. A new rail spur from the main line into
Birkenau is under construction. Eyewitness accounts indicate that work on this spur
continued round the clock in anticipation of special shipments of Hungarian Jews in
May-July 1944.? Some equipment, probably construction gear, appears to be at work
on the new spur. It was complete and operational when seen on imagery of 26 June
1944.
Birkenau
Background: Birkenau, the "Birch Wood," underwent continuous expansion from
autumn 1941 until the suspension of the extermination effort in November 1944. As a
"Special Treatment" facility, it had a planned capacity of 200,000 prisoners. Had Nazi
Germany won the war, evidence presented at the War Crimes Trials revealed that it
was destined to he the extermination center for the Czech and Polish nations.' The
camp contained more than 250 barrack blocks subdivided into sections and some 95
support buildings. Four large gas chambers and crematoria were contructed here in
1943.
Photo Evidence: A 7X enlargement of the 26 June 1944 imagery reveals the camp
layout in considerable detail (Photo 3). The rail spur and debarkation point near Gas
Chambers I and II are complete. A rail transport is present within Birkenau. The site
of the four gas chambers and crematoria can be identified. The locations of the various
1irkenau sub-camps, e.g., the "Gypsy Camp," the "Women's Camp," could also be
traced. Expansion of the facility into Section III is under way. The SS Headquarters
and Barracks complex is seen east of the camp. The security arrangements can be
traced in considerable detail.
Several indications of extermination activities can be identified in the camp.
Smoke can be seen near the camp's main filtration facility. While this is to be expected
near the camp crematoria, where bodies had to be burned in open pits during the
hectic days of the Hungarian Jewish influx, it is a surprise to see it here. There are a
number of ground traces near Gas Chambers and Crematoria IV and V which could
also be connected with extermination activities. Ground scarring appears to the rear of
Gas Chamber and Crematoria IV and is very noticeable to the immediate north and
west of Gas Chamber and Crematorium V. These features correlate with eyewitness
accounts of pits dug near these facilities; they were no longer present on coverage of
26 July and 13 September 1944. The small scale of the imagery, however, prevents
more detailed and conclusive interpretation.'
In portions of the imagery not shown in Photo 3, activity in the rail yards, the
layout of the surrounding countryside, to include several of the Polish villages forcibly
evacuated when the Nazis established Auschwitz, and the marshes south of the camp
used for human ash disposal can be identified.
Imagery acquired on 26 July 1944 added little new information to the study. The
first evidence of Allied bombing at the I. G. Farben complex and a very large
transport of prisoners in Birkenau could be identified. While an overall view of the
complex was obtained, the exceptionally small scale of the imagery precluded detailed
interpretation.
'Kraus and Kulka, The Death Factory, p. 132.; German Crimes in Poland, Vol. I pp. 88-89.
Kraus and Kulka, The Death Factory, p. 17.
'German Crimes in Poland, Vol. I, pp. 88-89.
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?icackground: (Extermination operations in progress at Birkenau were n orded on
acrit,J photography of 25 August 1944. By that time, rail transports of prkv,tiers were
boom; channeled into Auschwitz I rorn locations throughout occupied Fn ope in a
despcrale attempt to achieve the "Final Solution" prior to the collapse of tht Nazi war
rnactinc. After a trip lasting from a few hours to days, those who survived tlrc journey
faced a selection process. SS "doctors" screened the prisoners to determirw those fit to
1)0 used as slave laborers and those to be exterminated. Those selected as lal