Based on the schematics/blueprints put on a sign outside the crematorium itself
https://m.imgur.com/duS3xZA?r (specifically the 1942 one)
I can only conclude that the people about to be gassed had to walk in front of (and see) the cremation ovens themselves right before entering the the gas chamber, as the other way in passes through rooms filled with stuff that those about to be executed are not supposed to see (human remains/ashes more specifically).
So my question is, wouldn’t they have started to panic even before entering the gas room when they would have seen the ovens + the smell, making the SS’s work much harder? Were they told it was for heating the water? I feel like I’m missing some details about how the process in that particular crematorium worked, if anyone would like to fill me in on that.
Also, as a side question, what were the Jews and prisoners in general usually told about the smell and smoke stacks coming from the crematoriums themselves (not just in Auschwitz, but also other extermination camps)?
(Double also, before anyone decides to call me something I’m not, these questions are purely out of curiosity. I’m not a denier, never will be.)
The description in that diagram is misleading, as far as the period when the crematorium was used for gassings is concerned. The urns with the ashes were in the room to the right of the room "f", according to this original plan from 25.09.1941 (J.-C. Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, 1989, p. 151):
The room "b" was a washroom and thus its designated function was not storage of ashes, and there's no evidence that it was so used during the gassing phase (but see below). The room "a" was, theoretically, the laying-out room, but since hardly any laying-out of corpses would have taken place in Auschwitz, it could have been used to store something, as indicated in the diagram, or could be empty *if needed*.
So the victims would be forced through the rooms "a" and "b" into the morgue that served as a gas chamber.
Don't forget that it was a purely ad hoc and provisional design used to gas a relatively few people (maybe up to 10000 in all) until the gas chambers could be constructed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the actual mass extermination took place.
But why does the diagram say what it says? Turns out it is based on the testimony of Henryk Tauber, who worked for about a month in the crematorium no. 1 in early 1943, after the gassings there stopped.
https://phdn.org/archives/www.mazal.org/archive/documents/Tauber/Tauber03.htm
He testified:
"There were two (other) doors of this type. The first door, on the right of the corridor, opened on an auxiliary store where the spare fire bars were kept. The men from small transports, brought by truck, used to undress there. When I was working at Krematorium I, they were shot in the bunker of the crematorium. Such transports arrived once or twice a week and comprised 30 to 40 people. They were of different nationalities. During the executions, we, the members of the Sonderkommando, were shut up in the coke store. Then we would find the bodies of the shot people in the bunker. All the corpses had a firearm wound in the neck. The executions were always carried out by the same SS man from the Political Section, accompanied by another SS from the same Section who made out the death certificates for those shot. Capo Morawa was not with us in the coke store during the shootings. I don't know what he did during this time. We carried the still warm and bloody bodies of the shot people from the bunker to the boiler room. The second door on the right of the corridor led to a small room where the human ashes were put. We passed through this room to reach the bunker proper, used during my time there for shooting the victims and which previously had been used for gassing people."
Tauber also mentions the urn room separately: "Behind the boiler room there was a small coke store with a little office beside it and then on the right the store for the urns containing human ashes."
It is entirely possible that the (now former?) washroom was used to temporarily store ashes in 1943 (there is no evidence this was the case in 1942). Tauber doesn't mention urns in his description of the washroom, but does in his description of the urn room, so it is probable that *sacks* with ashes were meant (it goes without saying that it wouldn't be simply piles of ashes lying around in the room). Such storage would be purely temporary, before the ashes were transported elsewhere (e. g. to the nearby river) at regular intervals, so such sacks wouldn't necessarily be there for any victims to see. Of course, the victims to be shot (as described by Tauber above), led into the morgue one by one, wouldn't have known what was in the sacks even if those did, by chance, happen to lie around there at that particular moment. (This also applies to the unevidenced possibility that ashes were also temporarily stored in the washroom in this manner in 1942. The gassings in the crematorium 1 were few, there's no evidence the sacks, had they been there, would have accumulated to become a hindrance to the sporadic gassings.)
In any case, it was misleading of the Museum to apply these post-gassing descriptions to the situation during the gassing phase without a clarification.