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Auschwitz

Redirected from Auschwitz
Concentration Camp

Auschwitz is the German name of the Polish
town Oswiecim (Polish name Oświęcim) situated in
Malopolskie
voivodship,
about 60 km
southwest of Krakow.
The town numbers 43,000 inhabitants (1998).

Nazi
Germany built here several concentration
camps and an extermination
camp during World
War II. There were three main camps, and thirty-nine subcamps. The
three main camps were:

Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp which served as the
administrative centre for the whole complex, and the site for murder of
roughly 70,000 Polish intellectuals and Soviet Prisoners of War

Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination camp and the site of the
murder of roughly 1 million Jews
and Romany

Auschwitz III (Monowice), which served as a labour camp for the IG
Farben company

About 700 prisoners attempted to escape from the Auschwitz camps during
the years of their operation, with about 300 attempts successful. A common
punishment for escape attempts was death by starvation; the families of
successful escapees were sometimes arrested and interned in Auschwitz and
prominently displayed to deter others.

Rudolf Höss[?],
who served as first commandant of the camps until summer 1943, provided a
detailed description of the camp's workings during his interrogations
after the war and also in his autobiography. He was hanged in 1947 in
front of the entrance to the crematorium of Auschwitz I.

Table of contents

1
Auschwitz I
2
Auschwitz II (Birkenau)
3
Auschwitz III and satellite camps
4
Evacuation and liberation
5
After the war
6
Criticisms
7
External
links

Auschwitz I

Entrance Auschwitz I
"Arbeit macht
frei"

Auschwitz I served as the
administrative center for the whole complex. It was founded on May
20, 1940,
on the basis of old Polish
brick army barracks. It was initially used for interning Polish
intellectuals and resistance movement members, then also for Soviet
Prisoners of War. Common German criminals, "anti-social elements" and homosexuals
were also imprisoned there. Jews
were sent to the camp as well, beginning with the very first shipment
(from Tarnow).
At any time, the camp held between 13 and 16 thousand inmates; in 1942 the
number reached 20 thousand.

The entrance to Auschwitz I was (and still is) marked with the cynical
sign "Arbeit
Macht Frei", "work liberates". It is reported that the camp's
prisoners who left the camp during the day for construction or farm labor
were made to march through the gate at the sounds of an orchestra.
Contrary to what is depicted in several films, however, the majority of
the Jews were imprisoned in the Auschwitz II camp, and did not pass under
this sign.

The Germans selected some prisoners, often German criminals, as
specially privileged supervisors of the other inmates. The various classes
of prisoners were distinguishable by special marks on their clothes; Jews
were generally treated worst. All inmates had to work; except in the
associated arms factories, Sundays were reserved for cleaning and
showering and there were no work assignments.

In September 1941, the SS conducted tests in block 10 of Auschwitz I,
killing 850 Poles and Russians using Zyklon
B gas, a pesticide
that had previously been used to kill lice. The tests deemed successful, a
gas chamber and crematorium was constructed by converting a bunker. This
gas chamber operated from 1941 to 1942 and was then converted into an
air-raid shelter.

The first women arrived in the camp on March
26, 1942 and from April 1943 to May 1944, the gynecologist Prof. Dr.
Carl Clauberg[?]
conducted sterilization experiments on Jewish women in Auschwitz I, with
the aim of developing a simple injection method to be used on the Slavic
people. Dr. Josef
Mengele experimented on twins in the same complex. Prisoners in the
camp hospital who were not quick to recover were regularly killed by lethal
injection employing phenol.

The camp brothel, established in the summer of 1943 on Himmler's
order, was located in block 24 and was used to reward privileged
prisoners. It was staffed by women specifically selected for the purpose,
and by volunteers from the female prisoners.

Auschwitz II (Birkenau)

Auschwitz II (Birkenau) is the camp that most people know simply as
"Auschwitz". It was the site of imprisonment of hundreds of thousands, and
the murder of over one million people, mainly Jews and Roma
and Sinti.

The camp is located in Brzezinka (Birkenau), about 3 kilometers from
Auschwitz I. Construction started in 1941. The camp's size was about 2.5
kilometers by 2 kilometers. It was divided into several sections, each of
which was separated into fields. Fields as well as the camp itself were
surrounded with barbed, electrified wire (which was used by some of the
inmates to commit suicide). The camp held up to 100,000 prisoners at one
time.

Selection at the Birkenau ramp, 1944
Birkenau main
entrance visible in the
background

The camp's main purpose,
however, was not internment with forced labor (as Auschwitz I&III) but
rather extermination. For this purpose, the camp was equipped with 4 gas
chambers with crematoria. Large-scale extermination started in Spring
1942.

Most people arrived at the camp by rail (from 1944 railway tracks
extended into the camp itself; before that, arriving prisoners were
marched from the Auschwitz railway station). Often, the whole transport
would be sent to its death immediately. Sometimes, the Nazis would perform
"selection", choosing whom to kill right away, and whom to imprison as
labor force. The weak, sick or old were killed immediately. Dr. Mengele
often participated in these selections.

Those arriving prisoners who survived the initial selection would go on
to spend some time in quarantine quarters and eventually work on the
camp's maintenance or expansion or be sent to one of the surrounding
satellite work camps.

The gas chamber/crematorium complexes were all constructed alike: an
underground undressing room holding around 2000 victims, adjacent to the
gas chamber with fake shower heads. The toxic agent Zyklon
B was discharged from openings in the ceiling. The crematorium was
part of the same building. When the crematoria could not keep up, bodies
were burned in open pits.

On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommando (those prisoners
kept separate from the main camp and involved in the operation of the gas
chambers and crematoria) staged an uprising. Female prisoners had smuggled
in explosives from a weapons factory, and crematorium IV was partly
destroyed. The prisoners then attempted a mass escape, but all 250 were
killed soon after.

Auschwitz III and satellite
camps

The surrounding satellite work camps were closely connected to German
industry and were associated with arms factories, foundries or mines. The
largest work camp was Auschwitz III Monowice, which was associated with
the synthetic rubber and liquid fuel plant Buna-Werke by IG
Farben. In regular intervals, doctors from Auschwitz II would visit
the work camps and select the weak and sick for the gas chambers of
Birkenau.

The allies were in possession of detailed air photographs of all camps
since May 31, 1944. On September 13, 1944, American bombers flew an attack
on the Auschwitz III factory camp, partly destroying it.

Evacuation and liberation

The gas chambers of Birkenau were blown up by the Nazis in November
1944 in an attempt to hide what they had done from the advancing Soviet
troups. On January
17, 1945
Nazi personnel started to evacuate the facility; most of the prisoners
were marched West. The camps were liberated by the Red
Army on January
27, 1945.

After the war

After the war, Auschwitz remained in a state of disrepair for several
years; then the Polish government decided to restore Auschwitz I and to
preserve but not to restore Auschwitz II (where buildings were prone to
decay).

Auschwitz I was made a museum site. As such, it combines elements from
several periods into a single complex, for example restoring the gas
chamber at Auschwitz I (which did not exist by the war's end), or moving
the fence (because of building being done after the war but before the
establishment of the museum). The camp was never intended to stand for
centuries to come, and because of that, some of its elements are subject
to reconstruction. However, in most cases the departure from the
historical truth is minor, and is mentioned as such.

Auschwitz II is also open to the public.

The Auschwitz concentration camp is part of the UNESCO
list of World
Heritage Sites.

Criticisms

Several authors, sometimes sympathetic to holocaust
revisionism, have criticised what they claim to be historical
inaccuracies about Auschwitz, perpetrated by the Polish government, Jewish
lobby groups, popular literature and Hollywood as part of the holocaust
industry.

They sometimes point out that the communist Polish government used to
cite numbers of 3-4 million murders in Auschwitz, which later scholarship
has corrected to the figures given above.

External links

Auschwitz
Museum home page
(http://www.auschwitz-muzeum.oswiecim.pl/html/eng/start/index.php)

The
Auschwitz Album
(http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/home_auschwitz_album.html)
Online exhibition featuring SS photos and Allied aerial photos taken in
1944

Photo of the
entrance area of Auschwitz II Birkenau
(http://www.remember.org/jacobs/BirkEntrance.html)

References:

Y. Gutman and M. Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death
Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994

Elsewhere

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The source of this article is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text
of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
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