At the side of the death house is a stairway leading into a basement. This basement is paved with concrete sloping toward drains and equipped with hoses. Beside the stairway, a chute led down into this basement on the outside. Prisoners told me, and the equipment fitted their accounts, that it was the practice of the SS executioners to bring truckloads of Jews into the courtyard and drop them one by one down the chute. At the bottom one SS guard slipped a noose around the victim’s neck while his companion brained the victim with a club. Then they dragged his body across the floor to a large, electrically operated elevator. Calculated, mechanized murder.

Jewish Black Book Committee, “The Black Book - The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People”, 1946