Auschwitz concentration camp

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For other uses of the term, see Auschwitz (disambiguation).

Auschwitz is the name loosely used to identify three main Nazi German concentration camps and 45-50 sub-camps. The name is derived from the Germanized form of the nearby Polish town of Oświęcim, situated about 60 km southwest of Krakow. Beginning in 1940, Nazi Germany built several concentration camps and an extermination camp in the area, which at the time had been annexed by Nazi Germany. The camps were a major constituent of the Holocaust.

The three main camps were:

• Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp which served as the administrative centre for the whole complex, and was the site of the deaths of roughly 70,000 Polish intellectuals, gay men and Soviet Prisoners of War
• Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an extermination camp and the site of the deaths of roughly 1 million Jews, 75,000 Poles, gay men and some 19,000 Roma
• Auschwitz III (Monowitz), which served as a labor camp for the IG Farben company

See List of subcamps of Auschwitz for others. The total number of casualties is still under debate, but most modern estimates are around 1-1.5 million.

Like all Nazi concentration camps, the Auschwitz camps were operated by Heinrich Himmler's SS. The commandants of the camp were the SS-Obersturmbannführers Rudolf Höß (sometimes transliterated in English as "Hoess") until Summer 1943, and later Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer. Höß 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.

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.

Contents

1 The camp   1.1 Auschwitz I 1.2 Auschwitz II (Birkenau) 1.3 Auschwitz III and satellite camps 1.4 Women in the camps 1.5 Knowledge of the Allies 1.6 Evacuation and liberation   2 Well-known inmates   3 After the war   4 Criticisms   5 See also   6 External links

 

The camp

 

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. A group of 728 Polish political prisoners from Tarnów became the first residents of Auschwitz on June 14th that year. The camp 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 Tarnów). 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 (shall) make (you) free" (or "work liberates"). 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 SS selected some prisoners, often German criminals, as specially privileged supervisors of the other inmates (so-called: kapo). The various classes of prisoners were distinguishable by special marks on their clothes; Jews were generally treated the 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.

The harsh work requirements, combined with poor nutrition and hygiene, led to high death rates among the prisoners.

Block 11 of Auschwitz I was the "prison within the prison", where violations of the numerous rules were punished. Some prisoners had to spend several days in tiny cells too small to sit down. Others were executed by shooting, hanging or starving.

In September 1941, the SS conducted tests in block 11, 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 were 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. From April 1943 to May 1944, the gynecologist Prof. Dr. Carl Clauberg conducted sterilization experiments on Jewish women in block 10 of 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, Roma and Sinti.

The camp is located in Brzezinka (Birkenau), about 3 kilometers from Auschwitz I. Construction started in 1941 as part of the Endlösung. The camp was about 2.5 kilometers by 2 kilometers large and 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.

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 crematoria with gas chambers; each gas chamber was designed to hold up to 2500 people at one time. Large-scale extermination started in Spring 1942.

Most people arrived at the camp by rail, often after horrifying trips in cattle wagons lasting several days. From 1944 railway tracks extended into the camp itself; before that, arriving prisoners were marched from the Auschwitz railway station to the camp. At times, the whole transport would be sent to its death immediately. At other times, the Nazis would perform "selections", often administered by Josef Mengele, to the end of choosing whom to kill right away and whom to imprison as labor force or use for medical experiments. Young children were taken from their mothers and placed with older women to be gassed, along with the sick, weak and old.

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.

One section of the camp was reserved for female prisoners. In another section known as "Canada" (so named because Germans belived that Canada was a land of vast riches), the belongings of the arriving victims were sorted and stored, to be transferred to the German government. Items such as banknotes, coins, jewellery, precious metals and diamonds were removed from "Canada" and shipped off to the Reichsbank.

Those selected for extermination were sent to any of four massive gas chamber/crematorium complexes, all at the edge of the camp. Two of the crematoria (Krema II and Krema III) each had an underground undressing room and the underground gas chamber, capable of holding thousands of people. To avoid mass panic, the victims were told that they were going there for showering; to reinforce this impression, shower heads were fitted in the gas chamber, though never connected to a water supply. The victims were ordered to strip naked and leave their belongings in the undressing room in a location that they could subsequently remember, before being led to the adjacent gas chamber. Once the victims were sealed shut in the chamber, the toxic agent Zyklon B was discharged from openings in the ceiling. Gas chambers in crematoria IV and V were above ground and Zyklon B was poured through the special windows in the walls. An oven room, where selected camp prisoners called Sonderkommandos took out the dead bodies and burned them, was part of the same building.

Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944. Between May and July 1944, about 438,000 Jews from Hungary were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the majority were killed there. When the crematoria could not keep up, bodies were burned in open pits.

Many Roma had been imprisoned in a special section of the camp, mostly in family units. They were gassed in July 1944. On October 10, eight hundred Roma children were systematically murdered at Birkenau.

On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos (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 by an explosion. 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 and mines. The largest work camp was Auschwitz III Monowitz, starting operations in May 1942. It was associated with the synthetic rubber and liquid fuel plant Buna-Werke owned 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.

Also see List of subcamps of Auschwitz

Women in the camps

In March 1942, the first female prisoners and female overseers arrived from Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. Head Aufseherin (overseer) Johanna Langefeld butted heads with then commandant Höß so she was placed back at Ravensbrück. The women's camp was moved to Auschwitz Birkenau in October 1942, and Maria Mandel was brought in as the new head overseer. Over 7,000 SS men and only 200 female supervisors served in Auschwitz I, Auschwitz Birkenau and Auschwitz III Monowitz. Women guards served in a limited capacity in Monowitz, as well as in the Auschwitz subcamps. But, in Auschwitz I and II they were their own masters. A female prisoner commented at the Nuremberg Trials that "they did not see many female guards at Auschwitz Birkenau, but, the ones you did see were worse than the men." We know fifty of these women guards, or Aufseherin by name: Elisabeth Arneth, Erna Bodem, Juana Bormann, Hanna Bormann, Therese Brandl, Luise Brunner, Florentine Cichon, Luise Danz, Margot Dreschel, Charlotte Ebert, Herta Ehlert, Martha Grasse, Irma Grese, Elisabeth Haase (who served as a Rapportführerin and Kommandoführerin and was Maria Mandel's sister), Elisabeth Haselof, Elly Hartmann, Anni Fanny Hausherr, Irmgrad Hausherr, Gertrud Heise, Aloisje Irmler, Johanna Jaeger, Hildegard Lachert, Johanna Langefeld, Maria Mandel, Karla Mayer, Monika Miklas, Elfriede Misch, Maria Mullenders, Alice Orlowski, Ella Pessiner, Rosa Reischl, Elfriede Runge, Elisabeth Kaethe Ruppert, Luise Rust, Hermine Schachtner, Friederike Schneider, Maria Schreiber, Bertha Schurr, Anna Schuster, Elfriede Seidel, Hanne Snurova, Else Sollich, Rose Suess, Marianne Thiel, Erna Tietje, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Gertrud Weniger, Emma Emmi Zimmer, and Gertrud Zlotos and a wardress named Bruno. Women guards were also stationed in several subcamps, mainly those surrounding Birkenau at Budy and the experimental plant growing station at the Rajsko subcamp. Others served at Hindenburg and Lichtenwerden. As the Soviets neared the camps in January 1945, twelve female overseers remained in the complex and helped guard the death marches to Loslau, Poland. Among them was SS Kommandofuhrerin Alice Orlowski.

Knowledge of the Allies

Some information regarding Auschwitz reached the Allies during 1941-4, such as the reports of Witold Pilecki and Jerzy Tabeau, but the claims of mass killings were generally dismissed as exaggerated. This changed with receipt of the very detailed report of two escaped prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, which finally convinced most Allied leaders of the truth about Auschwitz in the middle of 1944.

Detailed air reconnaissance photographs of the camp were taken accidentally during 1944 by aircraft seeking to photograph nearby military-industrial targets, but no effort was made to analyse them. (In fact, it was not until the 1970s that these photographs of Auschwitz were looked at carefully.)

Starting with a plea from the Slovakian rabbi Weissmandl in May 1944, there was a growing campaign to convince the Allies to bomb Auschwitz or the railway lines leading to it. At one point Winston Churchill ordered that such a plan be prepared, but he was told that bombing the camp would most likely kill prisoners without disrupting the killing operation, and that bombing the railway lines was not technically feasible. Later several nearby military targets were bombed. One bomb accidentally fell into the camp and killed some prisoners. The debate over what could have been done, or what should have been attempted even if success was unlikely, has continued heatedly ever since.

Evacuation and liberation

The gas chambers of Birkenau were blown up by the Germans in November 1944 in an attempt to hide their crimes from the advancing Soviet troops. On January 17, 1945 Nazi personnel started to evacuate the facility; most of the prisoners were marched West. Those too weak or sick to walk were left behind; about 7500 prisoners were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.

'Liberation' was not necessarily the end of the ordeal for many prisoners. Soviet POWs were accused of collaborating with their captors and were either executed or sent to gulags in the Soviet Union. Some female prisoners fared even worse. A female Jewish prisoner has stated that Soviet troops repeatedly raped female inmates, sometimes strangling them afterwards.