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Today in Labor History October 7, 1944: Uprising at Birkenau extermination camp (associated with Auschwitz). Jewish Sonderkommando, mostly from Greece and Hungary, attacked the SS with stones and hammers, killing three of them, and set crematorium IV on fire and threw their Oberkapo into a furnace. Sonderkommando were Jewish prisoners who were forced by the Nazis, on threat of their own deaths, to dispose of gas chamber victims). After escaping, the rebels reached Rajsko, where they hid in the granary, but the SS pursued and killed them by setting the granary on fire. By the time the rebellion at crematorium IV had been suppressed, 212 members of the Sonderkommando were still alive and 451 had been killed.