Auschwitz refers to both Auschwitz Concentration Camp (Auschwitz I), the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination and Concentration Camp (Auschwitz II), and the nearby Auschwitz-Monowitz Concentration Camp (Auschwitz III), close to the town of Auschwitz (Oświęcim) in southern Poland. Auschwitz also had around 50 satellite camps at many other locations, mainly in the Polish region of Upper Silesia. Furthermore, Auschwitz is synonymous with industrialized mass murder and the Holocaust itself, even though more Holocaust victims died in mass shootings than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The command to build the main camp at Auschwitz in the annexed Polish territory of Upper Silesia was given by Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler on April 27, 1940; it was occupied by inmates at the end of May. The site was chosen because of its infrastructure – it housed Polish barracks left empty after the end of the blitzkrieg - and its link to a major railroad hub.
The first inmates were Poles, who were made to carry out forced labor for the Third Reich. The camp was expanded less than one year after it opened. It is presumed that Soviet POWs and weakened inmates were gassed at Auschwitz I as early as August 1941; there is no doubt that inmates were murdered by gas from September 5/6, 1941 on.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was built in the fall of 1941 with Rudolf Höss as its commandant. The Auschwitz camp complex served a dual purpose in the Nazi strategy of terror and annihilation: firstly, the mass murder of European Jews, particularly at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and secondly, the exploitation of prison labor. Unlike the Extermination Camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, the Auschwitz Camp Complex was not part of ’Operation Reinhard(t)‘; instead, like other concentration camps, it was under the jurisdiction of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Auschwitz II was originally intended to be a camp for 100,000 Soviet POWs who had fallen into German hands after the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Unlike the Nazi ‘euthanasia‘ program, the ‘Operation Reinhard(t)’ extermination camps, and the gas van, all of which used carbon monoxide generated by engines, prisoners at Auschwitz were murdered using the toxic gas Zyklon B. The ‘selection’ of Jewish victims began in June 1942, with only 10 to 15 percent of those deported to the camp being chosen for forced labor. The others were murdered outside the camp enclosure in two farmhouses that had been converted into gas chambers and were known as ‘Bunker 1’ and ‘Bunker 2’. In 1943, four crematoria with attached gas chambers were built at Auschwitz-Birkenau to supplement the two gas chambers already present. Special detachments of Jewish workers were deployed to work in the gas chambers and subsequently to incinerate the corpses in the ovens of the crematoria; these workers were killed at regular intervals. One of the crematoria was partially destroyed with explosives during a revolt by the special detachment in October 1944. In November 1944, the gas chambers were blown up on Heinrich Himmler’s orders to obliterate all traces of the atrocities.
The extensive site housing Auschwitz-Birkenau contained individual camp units that were isolated from the rest of the camp, such as the Theresienstadt ‘family camp’ for prisoners who had been deported to Auschwitz from the Theresienstadt ghetto. More than 22,000 Sinti*zze and Rom*nja were crammed into the ’Gypsy’ camp, which was also strictly segregated. Camp physician Josef Mengele performed pseudoscientific experiments on inmates.
The ramp and railroad siding leading directly into the camp, where the rail transports arrived and selections took place, was not constructed until 1944, when the camp was receiving mass deportations of Hungarian Jews; deportees had previously been forced to leave the trains south of Auschwitz station.
Auschwitz-Monowitz, also known as ‘Auschwitz III’, was originally a satellite camp but was given the status of a concentration camp in the fall of 1943. As was typical for satellite camps, it came to represent the cooperation between the industrial concerns (in this case IG Farben) and the SS. The SS sent inmates to carry out forced labor at the Buna works operated by IG Farben AG, while the concern constructed the barracks and paid the SS a daily rate for each inmate, amounting to 4 Reichsmarks for unskilled laborers and 6 Reichsmarks for skilled workers.
Around 400,000 inmates were registered at the Auschwitz camp complex between 1940 and the camp’s liberation on January 27, 1945. However, most of the Jews deported to Auschwitz from all over Europe were not registered as inmates and did not receive a number; instead, they were murdered in the gas chambers as soon as they arrived. It is estimated that around 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz, of whom approx. 900,000 were immediately murdered in the gas chambers, while around 200,000 fell victim to the wretched living and working conditions, human experiments, selections, and executions at the camp. Because of the racist persecution, which – unlike other groups such as ‘political’ inmates – always involved the whole family, the proportion of women and children at Auschwitz was high: around one third of the prisoners were women.
As the Red Army approached, Auschwitz was evacuated and tens of thousands of inmates forced to embark on ‘death marches’ towards the west. Weakened inmates were shot. Hundreds of inmates died of disease even after the camp was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945.
In all, more than 8000 people – most notably members of the SS Death’s Head units (Totenkopfverbände) – were involved in running and guarding the camp complex. After the end of the war, only a very few of those responsible were brought to justice at various trials: perpetrators from Auschwitz were prosecuted during the British Bergen-Belsen trial, the Polish Auschwitz trial in Krakow, or the American IG Farben trial in Nuremberg. Public prosecutors in East and West Germany started investigating the crimes in the late 1940s, with the first trials taking place in 1948/49 in Munich, Nuremberg-Fürth, and Berlin. The most extensive of these proceedings were the Auschwitz trials held at the regional court in Frankfurt am Main between 1963 and 1967. Auschwitz trials were also held in Austria.
The remains of the camp have been a memorial site since 1947 and were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. It now serves as a venue, e.g. for various exhibitions on the history and aftermath of Auschwitz.
