One of the sickening things about the Nazis is that their various forms of inhumanities ran the gamut from fatal human experimentation tests done in labs to mass killing operations done by hand. In the case of burning alive, this was a tactic used somewhat commonly on the Eastern front and the Balkans for anti-partisan operations and was used as a tactic fitfully on the Western front such as the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. The SS's anti-partisan Dirlewanger brigade, which consisted partly of paroled criminals and other unsavory individuals, became infamous in Belarus for rounding up a the inhabitants of a suspected pro-partisan village into a barn and then setting it on fire. Although the Dirlewanger brigade was famous for this tactic and put it to horrifying use in the 1944 Polish uprising, they did not invent it out of whole cloth and there were instances of this occurring during Operation Barbarossa. The purpose of this tactic was not only to punish suspected resistance to German occupation, but also explicitly to terrorize the surrounding population.

At the Jasenovac and Jadovno concentration camps in the Balkans, there were reports that the camp officials burned some living inmates to death. The camps in the Balkans were notoriously barbaric, with some of the killing methods employed being closer to the Rwandan genocide than Auschwitz, so these reports are plausible. But the history of the Balkan camps has become quite enmeshed into the politics of Balkan nationalism, and the camps' personnel tended to be drawn from German Ustaše collaborators. so this makes finding out the veracity of these claims somewhat difficult.

Finally, with regards to Maus and Night, what both Spiegelman and Wiesel convey, as well as other survivor literary efforts like those of Levi and Borowski, is that the mass extermination process in the Reinhard camps and in subsequent sites did not always function smoothly. Industrial mass murder was an unprecedented activity and there was a certain degree of friction involved in which mass killing did not go as planned. In one of Levi's accounts, for example, a Sonderkommando encounters an inmate that had miracously survived gassing and both the kommando and the German guards are at a loss as what to do with the survivor. While Levi's account is near impossible to verify, it is plausible. There were no standards for gassing large numbers of humans, and contrary to the stereotype of Nazi over-planning and regimentation, there was an ad-hoc quality of improvisation in the development of the SS's camp system. One of the values of literary accounts of the camp for historians is that they convey the very chaotic conditions of the camps in which both victims and perpetrators had to navigate. At the risk of engaging in too much conjecture, it might have occurred that some of the inmates gassed were still technically alive prior to their incineration. But unlike the anti-partisan operations, burning people alive was not a deliberate policy.