Experimental gas vans had been used to kill mentally disabled people in Poland as early as Poisonous fumes were pumped into a sealed compartment to suffocate those inside.
By the winter of , the Nazis had constructed gas chambers at Auschwitz. Nazi leaders met in January at the Wannsee Conference to coordinate the industrial slaughter - what they called a "final solution to the Jewish question" - killing the entire European Jewish population, 11 million people, by extermination and forced labour.
Auschwitz was originally a Polish army barracks in southern Poland. Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland in September , and by May turned the site into a jail for political prisoners. This area - with the infamous lie Arbeit Macht Frei written above the entrance in German - meaning work sets you free - became known as Auschwitz I. But as the war and the Holocaust progressed, the Nazi regime greatly developed the site. The first people to be gassed were a group of Polish and Soviet prisoners in September Work began on a new camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the following month.
This became the site of the huge gas chambers where hundreds of thousands were murdered prior to November , and the crematoria where their bodies were burned. Other private companies like Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert also ran factories nearby, to use the prisoners as slave labour.
When Auschwitz was eventually liberated, it had more than 40 camps and subcamps. How Auschwitz became centre of Nazi Holocaust. People from all over Europe were crammed into cattle wagons without windows, toilets, seats or food, and transported to Auschwitz.
There they were sorted into those who could work and those who were to be immediately killed. The latter group were ordered to strip naked and sent to the showers for "delousing" - a euphemism used for the gas chambers.
More Facts See All. Why did the German authorities use gas chambers? Was Auschwitz the only camp built by the Nazis? Were all Jews who died during the Holocaust killed in gas chambers?
Those incarcerated and murdered in the camp included also the Roma , Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of more than 20 nationalities. In total almost 50 sub-camps of Auschwitz were established between In November , due to growing difficulties in managing the growing complex and more and the increasingly distinct functions of each part of it, the Auschwitz camps were divided into:. It included Monowitz as well as sub-camps that did not fall under the Birkenau camp, mainly those located near the industrial centers.
The Auschwitz I camp housed mainly the central employment office, the political department or the camp Gestapo, the garrison administration, central supply warehouses, workshops and SS enterprises — most of the camp prisoners were employed there. The largest mass murder installations in occupied Europe — in the form of gas chambers — were created in Birkenau, where the Nazis murdered most of the Jewish deportees. In the last period of operation it also became a concentration site and labor distribution point for the German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.
The tasks of the Auschwitz III camp mainly consisted of renting the slave labor of prisoners to German companies, therefore it included sub-camps established at the nearby industrial enterprises.
The second administrative division of Auschwitz, In November , two months before the liberation, another administrative division was carried out, and this division of the camps lasted until the liberation of Auschwitz in January Irrespective of the administrative divisions, commanders of all Auschwitz camps and sub-camps always reported to the main camp commander in Auschwitz I being, at the same time, the garrison commander and having the right to solve any disputes with respect to the remaining commanders.
From August through mid-January the Germans transferred approximately 65 thousand male and female prisoners out of Auschwitz to be employed as a slave labor force for various enterprises in the depths of the Third Reich. Movable property of the camp was transported away, mainly large amounts of construction materials as well as goods plundered from the victims of mass murder. The technical elements of all gas chambers and crematoria but one were dismantled or disassembled by the end of the year.
In mid-January , when the front line was broken by the Red Army and its troops were approaching Cracow, 70 km away from the camp, the final evacuation of prisoners started. From 17 to 21 January approximately 56 thousand male and female prisoners were taken out of Auschwitz and its sub-camps in marching columns. Having reached the indicated railway station they were transported farther to the west in freight cars. Both evacuation routes, by rail or on foot, were littered with the bodies of prisoners who had either been shot or had died due to exhaustion or cold.
An estimated 9 thousand prisoners of Auschwitz died during that operation. On 20 January the SS blew up the gas chambers and crematoria that had already been put out of service some time earlier while the last one, still fully operational, was blown up on 26 January. On 23 January the warehouses , where the goods belonging to the victims of the extermination were stored, were set on fire. After the final evacuation almost 9 thousand prisoners, mostly the ill and exhausted left behind in the camp by Germans, found themselves in an uncertain situation.
Approximately Jewish prisoners were murdered in the period between the forced departure of the last evacuation columns and the arrival of the Soviet soldiers. It was only a matter of coincidence that the most of the remaining prisoners survived. More than Soviet soldiers died while liberating the area. Approximately other prisoners were liberated in the sub-camps before 27 January and shortly after that date. The ill were taken care of by several Soviet field hospitals and the so-called Camp Hospital of the Polish Red Cross which was set up by Polish volunteers, mainly residents of Cracow and nearby towns.
Those prisoners who were in a relatively good physical condition left Auschwitz immediately after the liberation, going home on their own or in organized transports. Most patients admitted to hospitals did the same three or four months later. The German Nazis deported to Auschwitz at least 1. Of that amount, thousand were registered and incarcerated in the concentration camp as prisoners while thousand were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival. They included almost thousand Jews , 70 thousand Poles , 21 thousand Roma , 14 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and more than 10 thousand prisoners of other nationalities.
Number of deportees. Percentage of the total number of deportees. Number of victims. Percentage of all victims. Other groups. Roma Gypsies. Soviet POWs. Country of origin.
Hungary according to the borders during the war. The Netherlands. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia Theresienstadt. Concentration camps and other centers. Slovakia according to the borders during the war. Germany and Austria. Among the 25 thousand people of different nationalities the most numerous were the Czech 9 thousand , followed by: Belarussians 6 thousand , Germans 4 thousand , French 4 thousand , Russians 1. Small numbers several to several dozen persons of people of the following nationalities were also imprisoned in the camp: Albanian, Belgium, Danish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourg, Dutch, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovakian, Spanish and Swiss alphabetical order not reflecting the actual numbers.
Soviet captives. During the Second World War as a result of the German aggression and its consequences approximately six million Polish citizens died:. From the moment when the Polish State established the Auschwitz Memorial on the site of the former camp, it committed itself to preserve the memory of the crimes committed in that Nazi German Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp.
Common words do not describe this site properly. Nowadays it is called a graveyard, a monument, a memorial site, a museum. But those words cannot express the full meaning of Auschwitz which is so hard to grasp and express.
It is the best preserved evidence of the greatest fall of mankind and an enormous tragedy in the history of Europe. This is a symbol of the whole Shoah history, the system of concentration camps and an unrecorded crisis of evil. Our main goal is to protect and conserve camp relics or in other words to keep the authenticity and the thrust of the biggest concentration camp and the only extermination center that the SS did not manage to raze to the ground.
To support the efforts the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation was established in It created the Perpetual Fund to provide means for the planned and systematic realization of the conservation works at the Memorial Site.
Education, understood in a broader sense, is an equally important task. One can teach about Auschwitz and the Holocaust anywhere. Only at the Auschwitz Memorial, however, is it possible not only to get to know the history of the camp operation and gain direct access to the first-hand accounts of witnesses, but also to see the evidence of the Extermination with our own eyes: the ruins of the gas chambers , crematoria and other leftover camp remains. It is also a monument to the strength of the human spirit which in appalling conditions of adversity resisted the efforts of the German Nazi regime to suppress freedom and free thought and to wipe out whole races.
The site is a key place of memory for the whole of humankind for the holocaust, racist policies and barbarism; it is a place of our collective memory of this dark chapter in the history of humanity, of transmission to younger generations and a sign of warning of the many threats and tragic consequences of extreme ideologies and denial of human dignity. Images from www.
Their use must not tarnish the good reputation of the victims of KL Auschwitz. Any interference in the integrity of the images — including cropping or graphic processing — is prohibited. Publishers undertake to indicate the authors and origin of the images: www.
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