KL Auschwitz was the largest of Hitler’s death camps when it opened in 1940 as an initial concentration camp, then once Hitler declared the Final Solution to be official policy it also served as an extermination center.
At first, detainees were registered, tattooed with serial numbers, undressed and stripped before being exposed to Zyklon-B gas and sent out on death marches where many perished.
The camp’s origins
Auschwitz stands as an iconic site in our collective memory of the Holocaust, Nazi barbarism and extreme ideologies. It represents our refusal to repeat such darkness again and calls attention to creating a more inclusive Europe.
Auschwitz was a concentration and extermination camp (Konzentrationslager or KZ), consisting of three main sites equipped with gas chambers as well as multiple subcamps containing smaller detention centers for Russian prisoners of war, Poles Gypsies, and Jews alike.
Auschwitz initially served as a detention facility for Polish citizens arrested following Germany’s occupation of Poland in 1939; however, following Hitler’s mandate to exterminate Jews under Nazi policy, Auschwitz was transformed into a death camp.
Auschwitz I was home to prisoners living in preexisting brick buildings that had been converted from Polish army barracks, with first-story blocks housing up to 700 prisoners per two-story block. By June 1940, second stories had been added for even greater capacity in these camps.
However, most prisoners were not kept in brick buildings; rather they were divided up among SS physicians as unfit to work and shot immediately in gas chambers upon arriving at camp. Others were forced into work at factories producing munitions or synthetic rubber products or in labor camps across the country.
On Heinrich Himmler’s orders as camp commander of Auschwitz, SS officials began dismantling crematoria and forcibly marching prisoners out of Auschwitz to other locations to escape Soviet capture.
The construction of the camp
Auschwitz II or Birkenau was built as part of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution plan – mass murder of Jews throughout Europe – beginning construction in October 1941 in Brzezinka (Berliner-Auschwitz). Over time it would become comprised of six concentration camps and almost 50 subcamps used to exploit prisoners as slave labor.
Initialy, Auschwitz consisted of about 300 prison barracks; large bathhouses known as Badeanstalten with lethal gas chambers using Zyklon B; leichenkellers where bodies were stored and burned; as well as crematoria. While at first most prisoners were Poles, after January 1942 Jewish deportees arrived. Since then the rate of murder increased exponentially.
From its inception, conditions in the camp were intolerable: with limited water and food supplies and insufficient sanitation facilities leading to disease outbreaks that plagued prisoners daily. Prisoners relied on two wells for water while relieving themselves in unscreened outdoor latrines that weren’t even under screening; no indoor toilets had been built by SS. Water was provided by individual barracks according to number of prisoners housed within each barrack; lack of washing facilities created discomfort among inmates while contributing significantly to lice infestation and spread.
The SS organized their camp into several departments and divisions, the most critical being its political department led by Maximilian Grabner (later succeeded by Hans Schurz) as head. It oversaw interrogation units at the camp, managed crematoria, combated prisoners’ resistance movements and oversaw extermination campaigns.
The political department reported directly to both the camp commandant and RSHA apparatus. Comprised mainly of Gestapo and Kripo personnel from Katowice State Police post, its members worked alongside one another as a team.
The first deportations
People deemed suitable for slave labor were quickly registered, tattooed with serial numbers and led into the camp via its iconic gate marked “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Labour Will Set You Free”). Once inside they would be undressed and deloused before having body hair shaved off before showering with disinfected clothing before entering through one of four gas chambers where, if they survived long enough, they would eventually be incinerated.
Prisoners were loaded onto open freight trains for the long journey to other concentration camps across occupied Europe or even Germany itself, at times using death marches as transportation methods. At railway stations in Czechoslovakia locals often threw food into wagons passing them while these prisoners marched past; unfortunately however, many never reached their destinations before succumbing to death march conditions and died before reaching them.
In October and November 1941, Jews received orders to meet at assembly points so that they could be “evacuated” further east, specifically Riga, Minsk or Lublin. All their property was confiscated as was their civil identity card; in exchange they received a Red Cross identity card along with three-day rail ticket plus small ration of dry food.
Auschwitz was the world’s first mechanized system for extermination, killing almost 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, during a six month period between 1940-1943 – this event became known as “The Holocaust”; thus making Auschwitz one of the most iconic and terrifying locations ever created – it captures perfectly the horrors of mass murder never witnessed before by anyone before Auschwitz existed.
The extermination of the Jews
As soon as the last transports arrived at Auschwitz in late 1940 and 1941, their prisoners were immediately registered, tattooed with serial numbers, undressed, deloused, showered while their clothing was disinfected with Zyklon-B gas disinfection gas disinfection gas disinfection gas disinfection gas disinfection disinfected, and forced through Birkenau’s gates which had been transformed into an industrial killing site – this mechanised extermination operation was unprecedented and orchestrated by people from a cultured nation in Europe who knew exactly what they were doing.
Rudolf Hoess was given orders by Heinrich Himmler to find more efficient means of murdering unwanted inmates at the camp than working them to death. Hoess experimented using insecticide Zyklon B, usually employed for killing lice, to find that it could also be released in sealed spaces to kill people directly.
The camp’s gas chambers quickly became adaptable for this new purpose; at the same time, their death rates continued to skyrocket from disease, starvation and cold. Prisoners’ bodies were covered with lice, worms and open wounds while many suffered from tuberculosis or typhoid fever.
On 27 January 1945, only 2,200 prisoners survived to leave Auschwitz when it was liberated, mentally and physically exhausted by what they had endured and the knowledge that their time of death was inevitable. Apathy abounded at their liberation; further compounded by knowing their loved ones weren’t with them to celebrate it with them.
The camp’s liberation
As World War II drew to an end, German forces began evacuating concentration camps. Anticipating Red Army attacks, they tore down buildings and burned or otherwise destroyed much of their records of camp life; but occasionally prisoners defied SS orders and prevented documents from being destroyed.
On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. Most prisoners forced onto death marches had already been evacuated prior to liberation; however, about 7,000 individuals still resided in its main camp as well as its Birkenau and Monowitz subcamps.
Prisoners remaining in the camp welcomed their liberators’s, who understood its historic importance, with great enthusiasm. Some prisoners fearing that German forces might try to liquidate them again once their liberators was no longer visible.
This photograph depicts female prisoners leaving the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Oswiecim on January 27, 1945, just after dawn. Genowefa Marczewska can be seen here along with her six-year-old son Andrzej; they had been brought there from Pruszkow transit camp during the Warsaw Uprising on August 12, 1944.
Margarette Kantor (number 78161), was one of the former Auschwitz prisoners liberated after liberation. She suffered from third degree alimentary dystrophy and weighed 35 kilograms, bearing scars from beatings she endured at Auschwitz. Later she was moved to a care centre in Krakow before ultimately being adopted along with other children from this facility.