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. The average life expectation was between six and nine months only because of hard labour assignments and insufficient nutrition. In order to maintain discipline and to terrorize the prisoners, singular inmates were killed everyday. Shooting was not efficient for mass extermination: The high costs for munition, the noise which was heard all over, the psychic stress of SS-guards made the SS decide to use poison which was injected to prisoners. gas In the first years of Auschwitz' existence, the main strategy of destruction was hunger and work. The average life expectation was between six and nine months only because of hard labour assignments and unsufficient nutrition. In order to maintain discipline and to terrorize the prisoners, singular inmates were killed everyday.
Shooting was not efficient for mass extermination: The high costs for munition, the noise which was heard all over, the psychic stress of SS-guards made the SS decide to use posion which was injected to prisoners.
In August and September 1941, commander Rudolf Höß ordered first test to kill people with gas in Auschwitz I, the main camp. In the first half of 1942, two evacuated farmhouses in Birkenau were put in operation as gas chambers. These installations killed between 800 and 1200 people per day.
Until September 1942, the gassed people were buried in mass graves or burnt in the open air.
In addition, medical experiments aimed at mass-sterilisations, twin-research or testing of medicaments on inmates.
