Auschwitz was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or main camp); Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp); Auschwitz III-Monowitz, also known as Buna, a labor camp; and 45 satellite camps.
Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, the town the camps were located in and around; it was renamed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby that was mostly destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp.
Auschwitz II-Birkenau was designated by Heinrich Himmler, Germany’s Minister of the Interior, as the locus of the “final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.” From spring 1942 until the fall of 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp’s gas chambers from all over Nazi-occupied Europe. The camp’s first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there, a figure since revised to 1.1 million, around 90 percent of them Jews. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and tens of thousands of other nationalities. Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported medical experiments.
On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, which by 1994 had seen 22 million visitors—700,000 annually—pass through the iron gates crowned with the infamous motto, Arbeit macht frei (“work makes you free”).
You have captured the most of the tragic views from Auschwitz. This place is horrifying. I remember was ten years old, my auntie took me to that Concentration Camp and I told my auntie “How this possible that man could do that to another man.” I was a child that was not able to comprehend the horror of this Camp where FOUR MILLION people died by hard work, starvation, gas chambers, and tortures or simply by shot at the “Death Wall.”
There are huge numbers of so-called “holocaust survivors” throughout the world today precisely because the Nazis kept them alive and never tried to kill them in the first place. Jews in Auschwitz were well-treated and that was why the vast majority still there in January 1945 preferred to go west with the retreating SS rather than be “liberated” by the Russians. Among those who chose freely to go west with the supposed Nazi mass murderers were Elie Wiesel and his father. Wiesel explained that in his famous book NIGHT on page 78 of the paperback edition by Bantam. Was Elie Wiesel a crypto-Nazi perhaps? Were most of the Auschwitz Jews admirers and supporters of Hitler? They expected to be well-treated by the SS in exchange for helping the German war effort with their labor.