During the time Auschwitz was in operation, some of the residents of Oświęcim and the nearby localities rendered disinterested aid to prisoners, in spite of the penalties of death or imprisonment in the camp for doing so. They helped prisoners laboring outside the camp by covertly supplying them with food, medicine, and warm clothing and by serving as intermediaries in their secret correspondence with their families. Important forms of action for the sake of the prisoners were help in organizing escapes and hiding escapees, as well as receiving information and documents from prisoners that attested to the crimes committed by the SS. The conveying of an important number of valuable reports about the situation in the camp to the headquarters of the Polish Underground State and the Polish government‑in‑exile in London is one of the greatest accomplishments of the Polish resistance movement. The fact that the Allies never made the proper use of this information is another matter entirely.

According to the findings of historians, more than a thousand people living in the vicinity of the camp were involved in activities on behalf of the prisoners. Nearly two hundred of them were arrested by the German authorities, dozens of whom paid with their lives, mainly after being incarcerated in the camp.

Arbeit macht frei

(German: work will set you free) The inscription over the gate of the Auschwitz I camp comes from the title of a novel by the German writer Lorenz Diefenbach entitled Die Wahrheit macht frei (the truth will set you free).

Before the war, the slogan was used in Germany in programs to reduce mass unemployment. After the Nazis took power, the phrase appeared at the entrances to other concentration camps and ghettos aside from Auschwitz, including Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, Gross Rosen and Theresienstadt.

The letter B in the inscription above the gate was attached upside down, which some prisoners interpreted as an act of resistance aimed at the duplicity of the slogan above the gate. It is more probable, however, that it was merely accidental.

Asocial prisoners, category

Prisoners marked in the camp with a black triangle. The decision to incarcerate them in the camp was made by German criminal police posts on the basis of charges of vagrancy, alcoholism, prostitution, pimping, dodging work, and in fact many other deeds and behaviors that the police treated rather loosely. In the camp, their position differed little from that of criminal prisoners—the SS appointed them frequently to the functionary posts of Kapo and block elder. For other reasons, Roma and Sinti were also formally classed as asocial, although their status in the camp was completely different. In August 1944, Auschwitz held 437 Germans, 141 Poles, and 32 Czechs in the asocial category.

Auschwitz

The German name for Oświęcim, a town 70 km west of Krakow. Before the war, Oświęcim had a population of about 13,000, half of whom were Jews.

Immediately after the outbreak of World War II, on September 3/4, 1939, the town was occupied by Wehrmacht troops, then administratively incorporated into Germany and renamed Auschwitz. The name is often mistakenly identified solely with the concentration camp established in 1940 on the outskirts of the city. Nevertheless, in order to avoid semantic confusion, it has become accepted in the literature to refer to the concentration camp as Auschwitz, while the town, located on the opposite bank of the Soła River, is referred to by its pre-war and current name of Oświęcim.

KL Auschwitz

German Nazi concentration camp and center for the extermination of Jews, created during World War II on the outskirts of the city of Oświęcim annexed to the Third Reich together with this region of occupied Poland. Initially it consisted only of the Auschwitz I camp, later also of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, and later Auschwitz III-Monowitz and almost 50 sub camps created on the territory of Upper Silesia, Western Małopolska, and Bohemia. They all constituted a centrally managed administrative whole.

Of the approximately 1.1 million victims of Auschwitz, some 900,000 were Jews, murdered in the gas chambers immediately after their arrival. Another 200,000 were prisoners, at first exclusively men and later also women, of various nationalities (Poles, Jews, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war and others) registered at the camp, who died as a result of starvation, disease, devastating labor, executions and selection.

Auschwitz I

The first camp of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, it was established in June 1940 on the outskirts of the town of Oświęcim. It was established on the site of the former Polish Army barracks, at the forks of the Soła and Vistula rivers, near a large junction railroad station.

Outside the camp's fence, in a converted former ammunition depot, the first crematorium was put into operation in August 1940 to burn the corpses of prisoners. The crematory furnaces were supplied by the German company Topf und Söhne. In September 1941, the first gas chamber was set up in the crematorium building - in a room previously used as a morgue - for murdering with gas.

In 1940-‍1942, Poles predominated among Auschwitz I prisoners as a nationality group. Over time, these proportions reversed, for example, in August 1944, the main camp held more than 9,000 Jews, less than 4,000 Poles and almost 3,000 prisoners of other nationalities.

The highest number of prisoners in the main camp in 1944 was almost 18,000 prisoners.

Auschwitz I expansion plans

Initially, the main camp consisted of 20 prisoner buildings and two SS administration blocks. In the autumn of 1940, its successive expansion began, including the construction of 8 more blocks on part of the former roll-call square, and outside the fenced area also: an SS administration block, a new building for processing the transports, and in the area adjacent to the camp another 20 single-story buildings were built to form a so-called extension of the camp.

The plans included also the construction of SS residential area near the camp, with single-family and two-family houses with gardens, a school, kindergarten for children with a garden, garages, guest house and hospital. On the opposite side of the camp, military barracks including: residential and staff buildings, casino, garages, gunsmith shops, repair workshops, indoor riding halls, exercise halls and square as well as stables were planned. The plans were only partially realized.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau

A part of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, established in the immediate vicinity of the village of Brzezinka, about 2 km from the main camp, renamed Birkenau after the area was incorporated into the Third Reich. Originally planned as a camp for Soviet prisoners of war, it eventually became a concentration camp for prisoners of various nationalities and an extermination center. Two makeshift gas chambers were set up near the camp by adapting for this purpose the houses of Poles displaced from the village of Brzezinka, and four large crematoria with gas chambers were later built. There the Germans murdered most of the 1.1 million Jews deported to Auschwitz.

The camp reached its highest numbers in the summer of 1944, when there were nearly 90,000 prisoners (men, women and children) in the Birkenau camp: 68,000 Jews, 13,000 Poles, 8,000 prisoners of other nationalities.

Birkenau expansion plans

The construction of the Birkenau camp began in October 1941. Initial plans foresaw imprisoning 100,000 people in the camp. In 1942, this concept changed, and the planned number of prisoners to be kept in Birkenau increased to 150,000, and eventually to as many as 200,000. The camp was to be divided into four parts: the first was to house 20,000 people, and the remaining three were each to accommodate 60,000 people. The entire camp was to cover an area of 175 hectares.

These intentions were only partially realized. Three out of the four sectors were constructed: BI, BII, and BIII, the construction of the latter was not completed. By the spring of 1944 (when the expansion of the camp was halted), more than 300 wooden and brick barracks, administrative and economic buildings were constructed over an area of 140 hectares, a 16 km electrified barbed-wire fence was erected, several kilometers of roads were laid, and a drainage ditch system stretching 13 km was created. On the northeastern edge of the camp, barracks and a hospital for the SS personnel were established. Additionally, in May 1944, a three-track railway siding and a loading ramp located inside the camp, between sectors BI and BII, were put into operation.

Auschwitz III-Monowitz

Initially, it was one of the sub-camps of KL Auschwitz, established in October 1942 on the site of the evacuated and demolished Polish village of Monowice (German: Monowitz), 7 km from Auschwitz I. It was created in connection with the construction by the German company IG Farbenindustrie of the Buna-Werke plant for the production of synthetic rubber and gasoline.

From November 1943, the former Monowitz sub-camp was elevated to the status of a concentration camp, to which all "industrial" sub-camps existing within the Auschwitz complex were subordinated. The camp's population gradually increased: from over 3,500 prisoners in December 1942 to over 6,000 in the second half of the next year, and over 11,000 in July 1944 (mainly Jews).

In January 1945, most of the Monowitz prisoners were evacuated on foot to Gliwice, and then transported by train to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps.

Auschwitz III-Monowitz was the first of the three main camps of the Auschwitz complex to be liberated by the soldiers of the Red Army. This occurred on Saturday, January 27, 1945, before noon. In the afternoon, the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps were liberated.

Bauabschnitte

Construction segments

BIa

(German: Bauabschnitt Ia – construction segment 1, sector a)

From August 1942 – a women's camp.

The first female prisoners were placed in 10 designated blocks within the main camp, Auschwitz I, in March 1942. In August of that year, they were transferred to the BIa camp, adjacent to the men's BIb camp. In July 1943, after the men were moved to the BIId camp, the women's camp expanded to encompass the entire first construction sector. A total of 62 barracks for prisoners, 10 barracks with washrooms and latrines, two kitchens, two baths, and four warehouses were constructed in Sector BI.

In the BIa sector, female prisoners employed within the camp lived, and some barracks were designated as the camp hospital, where selections were regularly conducted among the ill prisoners. The camp experienced dire hygienic and sanitary conditions due to overcrowding in the barracks and water shortages. In August 1944, there were 23,000 women in Sector BI. Jewish women predominated among the prisoners, but the camp also held women of other nationalities, primarily Poles, as well as Russians, Germans (mainly functionary prisoners), Czechs, Yugoslavians, and French. The Birkenau women's camp also housed children—Jewish, Polish, and Belarusian boys and girls.

BIb

(German: Bauabschnitt Ia – construction segment 1, sector b)

The first of the camps put into use at Birkenau. Its construction, which began in October 1941, resulted in the deaths of several thousand Soviet prisoners of war. It consisted of 12 prefabricated wooden barracks and 15 brick barracks, constructed using building materials from the demolition of houses belonging to Polish farmers who had been expelled from nearby villages.

The camp began operating in mid-March 1942, when about 600 surviving Soviet prisoners and the most severely ill inmates from the camp hospital were transferred there from Auschwitz I. Subsequently, it also housed penal company prisoners, Sonderkommando, and several thousand Jews.

Due to starvation, exhaustive labor, and particularly harsh living and sanitary conditions contributing to the outbreak of infectious diseases among the prisoners, the camp had an extremely high mortality rate.

In Sector BIb, there were typically about 10,000 prisoners. In July 1943, men were transferred from Sector BIb to the newly built men's camp in Sector BIId. The barracks they vacated were then occupied by prisoners from the women camp.

BIIa

(German: Bauabschnitt IIa – construction segment 2, sector a)

The quarantine camp for men which was put into operation in August 1943. It numbered 19 wooden barracks, three of which functioned as latrines and washrooms, with the other 16 serving as residential barracks. It was established in August 1943, a month after the opening of the BIId men’s camp. It held prisoners undergoing entry quarantine, which usually lasted three to four weeks.

Camp population underwent frequent fluctuations: at first, it held more than 7,000 prisoners, but in the spring of 1944 there were times when this figure fell below one thousand. From April, it was also used for exhausted prisoners arriving in evacuation transports from Majdanek, and later for other sick prisoners.
The quarantine camp was liquidated at the beginning of

November 1944, with the healthy prisoners transferred to sector BIId and the sick to the BIIf camp hospital.

BIIb

(German: Bauabschnitt IIb – construction segment 2, sector b)

So-called family camp assigned for Jews from the ghetto in Theresienstadt, probably set up for propaganda purposes. Prisoners of this camp mailed censored correspondence with mandatory content imposed by the Nazis in an effort to deceive relatives left behind in the ghetto about the nature of deportation.

Whole families of deportees were imprisoned in the camp; the men, however, were quartered apart from the women and children. Other living conditions were the same as in other camps—hunger, beatings, hard labor, and limited access to water.

Out of the total of about 46,000 people deported from the ghetto in Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, the SS registered about 18,000 of them in the camp. After the first selection conducted in this camp in March 1944, nearly 3,800 men, women, and children were murdered in the gas chambers. The camp was liquidated in July 1944 when, after another selection, about 3,000 men and women were sent to other camps and the remaining 7,000 killed in the gas chambers.

BIIc

(German: Bauabschnitt IIc – construction segment 2, sector c)

Women placed in this camp were not registered (they did not receive subsequent prisoner numbers) but were waiting for transfer to camps deeper within the Reich. According to survivor accounts, the food and sanitary conditions in the transit camps were catastrophic, even compared to other Birkenau camps.

In October, the camp was liquidated and the prisoners incorporated into the population of the women’s camp.

BIId

(German: Bauabschnitt IId – construction segment 2, sector d)

The men's camps of Birkenau that existed from 1943. It opened in July when prisoners were transferred there from camp BI b. Apart from BII d, men were also held in the quarantine (BII a) and the hospital (BII f) sectors. Prisoners occupied 25 of the 40 wooden barracks there. On average there were 8–12 thousand men in the camp, which meant that some 400 slept in each barracks. Two of them, additionally fenced in and isolated, were occupied by the prisoners in the penal company and the Sonderkommando.

BIIe

(German: Bauabschnitt IIe – construction segment 2, sector e)

So-called Zigeunerlager (German: Gypsy camp) - family camp for Roma and Sinti established in Birkenau in February 1943.

The camp was made up of 32 barracks for prisoners, together with utility buildings, washrooms and latrines. One of the barracks was set aside for Dr. Josef Mengele, who conducted medical experiments there.

Roma families were not separated in the camp, they were permitted to wear civilian clothing and only limited numbers of Roma were forced to labor. However, the starvation food rations, terrible living conditions and the spread of contagious diseases resulted in very high mortality in the “Gypsy camp”, reaching over 60% between March 1943 and June 1944.

In total, during 18 months of its existence, about 21,000 men, women and children (including 378 babies born in the camp) were registered in the camp. The camp was liquidated on the night of August 2/3, 1944, when the last 4,200 men, women, and children were murdered in the gas chambers.

BIIf

(German: Bauabschnitt IIf – construction segment 2, sector f)

A hospital camp for men opened in July 1943. It was made up of 17 wooden barracks and a washroom latrine. Barracks housed sick prisoners in surgical, internal medicine, dermatological, and contagious diseases departments. The most notorious block was number 12, used for patients unlikely to recover. SS physicians conucted there systematic selection for the gas chambers among Jewish prisoners.

SS physicians exercised formal supervision over the camp, with Josef Mengele among them. They were mainly responsible for documentation and reporting, and they also conducted selections on the ramp and in the blocks for prisoners. In practice, the organization and standard of care in the camp hospital was overseen by a prisoner doctor, who supervised other doctors and nurses in various blocks. Despite their efforts, many patients could not be helped due to the insufficient supply of medicines.

The peak population of the hospital camp was 2,700 in December 1943. Many of them were still in Birkenau when the evacuation began in January 1945.

BIIg

(German: Bauabschnitt IIg – construction segment 2, sector g)

The so-called Kanada II was a warehouse complex located in the Birkenau camp, near the building known as the New Sauna (which served as a bathhouse, a place for clothing disinfection, and a reception area for transport arrivals) and gas chamber and crematorium IV. It was used from 1943 to store the plundered property of Jews who were victims of the extermination. Earlier, similar warehouses (referred to in camp jargon as Kanada I) were established in the summer of 1942 next to the German Equipment Works (DAW) factory being constructed between Auschwitz I and Birkenau.

The barracks of Kanada mainly stored the luggage of Jews deported from Hungary and the Litzmannstadt ghetto starting in the spring of 1944. At its peak, about 2,000 male and female prisoners were employed in both Kanadas – directly transferring from trucks and sorting the property. Additionally, a separate "order squad" worked to collect suitcases and other items from railway wagons and the ramp.

Working in the property warehouses of deported persons was considered one of the best jobs in the camp, alongside working in the kitchen and food storages, as it provided opportunities to acquire additional food, clean clothing, hygiene products, and essential everyday items. This likely led to the colloquial name of the squad – Kanada, which was associated with a country of prosperity where life is plentiful and affluent.

BIII

The third construction sector of the Birkenau camp, commonly known in camp jargon as "Mexico", was initially planned to house 60,000 prisoners. The construction of this sector began in mid-1943. By January 1944, only 32 of the planned 188 barracks had been constructed, with another 35 in the stages of assembly or outfitting. Despite the incomplete construction, it was decided to establish a transit camp for women there.

When Jewish women from Hungary began to be placed there in mid-May, the camp still lacked kitchens, washrooms, and latrines, and many barracks for prisoners were without bunks. The women were dressed in damaged summer dresses, and some walked almost naked, covered only in rags and torn blankets. This likely inspired the colloquial name of the sector, as pre-war press had shaped the image of Mexico as a country of unrest, poverty, and disorganized administration.

Due to the influx of transports from Hungary, the Litzmannstadt ghetto, the Płaszów camp, and evacuated labor camps, and simultaneously due to the deportation of women to concentration camps in the Reich and frequent selections, the population of the camp underwent significant fluctuations, usually reaching several tens of thousands of women.

In early October 1944, the BIII camp was closed, and the remaining female prisoners were transferred to the women's camp (BIa).

Birkenau, Auschwitz II

Auschwitz II-Birkenau

Block 10

A prisoner block in Auschwitz I where, from April 1943, the gynecologist Carl Clauberg’s experimental station was located. From 150 to 400 Jewish women were quartered there, and he conducted sterilization experiments on them. They were officially listed in the camp records as “female prisoners for experimentation.” Some of them died during the experiments, and many were specially put to death for autopsy purposes. The windows of the building, looking out on the courtyard of Block 11 where the Death Wall was located, were permanently covered with wooden panels so that the women could not observe the executions taking place there. In May 1944, the experimental station was moved to the so called camp extension.

Block 11

A building in Auschwitz I that, in various periods, housed on the ground floor and first floor: penal company prisoners, so called police prisoners, new arrivals in the camp undergoing so called entry quarantine, and prisoners awaiting release undergoing. From 1943, the summary court held sessions in a ground floor room. In the basement, prisoners, both women and men, suspected of activities such as involvement in the resistance movement, contacts with the civilian population, or attempting to escape, were detained. Cells also held prisoners sentenced to starve to death as collective punishment for a fellow prisoner's escape. Executions by shooting and hanging were carried out in the courtyard of the block, where pole hanging punishments (people were hanged by their hands tied in the back) were also administered.

Block elder

This position in the so called prisoner self government was held by a prisoner whose duties were maintaining order and discipline in the block, distributing food, and keeping records on the prisoners (for which we chose a blok scribe). The block elders had almost unlimited power over the prisoners, which usually took the form of continually hurrying, beating them, and imposing arbitrary punishments. Block elders had their own room that, by camp standards, was “luxuriously” furnished with a single bed, sheets, a pillow, and a duvet, as well as a wardrobe for his clothes and personal effects. Young prisoners known as “Pipels” had to clean for them and, sometimes were also forced to render sexual services. Block leaders stood out in that they were better fed and better clothed than other prisoners; for instance, their clothing was clean and fitted, suitable for the season (they had jackets and leather shoes instead of camp clogs). They were distinguished by a red armband with the name of the function, worn on the forearm. Generally, they carried a stick or baton, with which they disciplined fellow inmates. In the early days of the camp, block elders were almost always German criminals. Later, Poles and Jews also became block elders. By that point, there were block elders who showed less brutality or even tried to protect their prisoner charges and exercise their power justly.

Bombing

The Auschwitz II-Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria never became targets for Allied bombing, despite reports about their existence forwarded by the Polish resistance movement. Instead, American bombers carried out several strikes against the IG Farben petrochemical installations located at the distance of seven kilometers from Auschwitz. The factory came under attack for the first time in May 1943. From the spring of 1944, Auschwitz camps came within range of American bombers flying out of bases in Italy. Reconnaissance aircraft, the task of which was to photograph the chemical plants, took also many photographs on which Birkenau gas chambers are, among others, visible. The first larger raid on the plant came only in August 1944, when 127 American bombers type B 17 dropped 1,336 bombs. This attack and the following ones seriously damaged the plant and made it impossible to resume production on any significant scale before the arrival of Red Army units in January 1945. Some of the bombs detonated far from the plant, including the grounds of Auschwitz complex camps, killing both the prisoners and SS men.

Burning pits

When the mass extermination of Jews began at Auschwitz in 1942, the corpses of the murdered people were initially buried in mass graves on the edges of the Birkenau camp. During his second visit to Auschwitz in July 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered that they be exhumed and burned. The execution of this order began at the end of August.

Initially, the bodies of the murdered people were burned on wooden pyres. However, as the process did not proceed as efficiently as expected, a method tested at the Kulmhof extermination center was adopted, which involved burning in pits, where layers of wood and bodies were alternately laid and additionally doused with oil or methanol. By the end of the year, about 107,000 bodies had been incinerated in this manner.

In the spring of 1943, when the crematoria went into operation, the burning of bodies in pits was limited. The burning of corpses in this way on a large scale resumed in the spring and summer of 1944 during so-called Sonderaktion “Ungarn” and the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt ghetto.

Camp extension

(German: Lagererweiterung)

A complex of 20 buildings erected in an area adjacent to Auschwitz I as part of plans for expanding the camp. These plans, only partially realized, envisioned more than 50 new buildings, including a new monumental commandant’s office. The new buildings were used as temporary SS barracks, workshops, and storage facilities for property plundered from the Jews exterminated in the gas chambers. From May 1944, women prisoners were moved there from Block 10 and the SS laundry, as well as women employed in the nearby Union‑Werke plant. At the end of 1944 there were three to four thousand women prisoners in the Lagererweiterung. The last public execution at Auschwitz was held there on January 6, 1945.

Categories of prisoners

    • asocial prisoners
    • Jehovah’s Witnesses
    • homosexual prisoners
    • criminal prisoners
    • political prisoners
    • Soviet prisoners of war (POWs)
    • reeducation prisoners

Children

From 1940, among the Poles incarcerated at Auschwitz were also children and minors. In the first transport of Polish men to Auschwitz on June 14, 1940, over 9% were boys under the age of 18, with the youngest of the prisoners brought at that time being 14 years old.

Larger groups of children, including infants, were deported to the camp with adults as a result of resettlement or ethnic cleansing operation aimed at the civilian population. For example, at the turn of 1942/1943, children from the Zamość region were sent to the camp along with adults, in 1944 from Warsaw Uprising, and during 1943 and 1944, children from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, mainly from Belarus, were deported to Auschwitz along with adults.

From 1942, Jewish children were also deported to Auschwitz with their families. The vast majority of them were selected directly to their deaths in the gas chambers upon arrival. Only a few managed to successfully pass the selection on the ramp and were registered in the camp. An exception was made for children from the Theresienstadt ghetto, who stayed with their families in the so-called family camp (BIIb) in Birkenau. Ultimately, however, this camp was liquidated, and the children living there were murdered in the gas chambers. The same fate befell many Roma children who were initially settled with their parents in the so-called Zigeunerlager and were murdered during its liquidation.

With the establishment of the women camp in KL Auschwitz, pregnant women also appeared. Until mid-1943, all children born in Auschwitz were drowned or murdered in other ways, most often by phenol injection. Later, non-Jewish newborns were kept alive and registered in the camp as newly arrived. Due to the catastrophic conditions in the camp and the lack of proper nutrition, most of the newborns quickly died. Children born to Jewish women continued to be murdered until the end of October 1944, i.e., until the decision was made to stop the mass killing of Jews.

Based on estimated data, it is assumed that over 230,000 children and adolescents were deported to Auschwitz, of which over 200,000 were Jews, 11,000 were Roma, about three thousand were Poles, over a thousand Belarusians, and several hundred were Russians, Ukrainians, and others. In total, about 23,000 children and adolescents were registered in the camp, including about 700 born in KL Auschwitz. On January 27, 1945, at least 750 children and minors were liberated at Auschwitz.

Construction segment

(German: Bauabschnitt)

The term that German architects used to refer to the different parts of the Birkenau camp. Of the four planned sectors, ultimately three were completed, within which ten camps operated: two in sector BI, seven in sector BII, and one in sector BIII. Hence, in memoir and academic literature, the individual sectors (camps) within KL II-Birkenau are referred to as “sections”: BI ("a" and "b"), BII ("a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", and "g") and BIII.

Sector BI: The first of the constructed sectors of the Birkenau camp. It was divided into two smaller parts:

BIa – where women prisoners were held from August 1942,
BIb – where the first men prisoners were placed in March 1942.

Sector BII: The second construction sector consisted of seven parts-camps, put into use successively from March 1943:

BIIe – known as the Zigeunerlager, or family camp for Roma and Sinti, started in March 1943.
BIIc – a transit camp for Jewish women, mainly from Hungary, launched in May 1943.
BIIg – known as "Kanada", a complex of warehouses initiated in mid-1943, where belongings looted from Jews deported to KL Auschwitz were stored.
BIId – a men’s camp, operating from July 1943.
BIIf – a hospital for prisoners, opened in July 1943.
BIIa – a quarantine camp for men, opened in August 1943.
BIIb – known as the family camp for Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto, started in September 1943.

Sector BIII, known as "Mexico." From mid-May 1944, it housed women from the transports of Jews from Hungary.

Crematoria

Similar to other German concentration camps, Auschwitz also had a crematorium (known as Crematorium I) from mid-August 1940 for incinerating the bodies of prisoners who died or were killed in the camp. The furnaces for this and subsequent crematoriums were supplied and installed by the German company Topf und Söhne from Erfurt. Crematorium I could incinerate up to 340 bodies per day.

By mid-1942, a decision was made to build four modern and efficient crematoria functionally combined with gas chambers. These were commissioned in Birkenau in 1943. According to SS planners, in Crematoria II and III, up to 1,440 bodies could be incinerated per day, and in Crematoria IV and V, up to 768 bodies each.

When in the spring of 1944, with the arrival of Jewish transports from Hungary, the extermination at Auschwitz reached such intensity that the crematoria could not incinerate all the bodies, victims' bodies began to be burned again in the open air.

Criminal prisoners, category

A category embracing two groups of prisoners marked with green triangles in the camp: so-called professional offenders and repeat offenders under preventive detention. They were obvious favorites of the SS. In practice, the German criminals were never assigned to hard labor and even the least competent among them were assigned to positions of functionaries. At the end of the summer of 1944, there were 1,372 Germans marked with the green triangle in Auschwitz. Many of them later volunteered for Oskar Dirlewanger’s Waffen‑SS unit, which committed numerous atrocities in rear areas on the Eastern Front.

Death Marches

In mid‑January 1945, the Red Army broke through the German lines. As Soviet units approached Cracow, about 70 km from Oświęcim, the Auschwitz authorities began the evacuation of prisoners to concentration camps in the depths of the Third Reich. From January 17 to 21, the SS marched about 56,000 prisoners - men, women and some children - out of the Auschwitz complex, those who were able to march. The prisoners were forced to cover scores of kilometers of evacuation routes to be then carried onwards by rail. On the way, the SS murdered those who came to the end of their strength and could not go on and shot at escapees. At least nine thousand Auschwitz prisoners perished in total during the evacuation.

Death Wall

A structure erected near the courtyard wall between Block 10 and Block 11 in Auschwitz I, where for two years, from the autumn of 1941 to the autumn of 1943, SS men conducted a few thousand executions. Prisoners were killed by SS men with a shot to the base of the skull from a small‑bore weapon. After the execution, the corpses were taken to the crematorium. From the autumn of 1943, executions by shooting were conducted in the Birkenau camp, near the crematoria. The wall was dismantled. In 1946, it was reconstructed by former prisoners of the camp employed by the Memorial, which was then being founded.

Dental gold

Dental gold recovered from deceased prisoners was delivered to the main office of the SS sanitary service, which in turn would distribute it to dental clinics where SS men and their families went for treatment. By the beginning of October 1942, the office had 50 kg of bullion in its possession, enough to cover the needs of the SS dental service for five years.

An unknown quantity of this bullion and other dental metals was shipped from Auschwitz. Partially extant reports from the camp dentist’s office indicate that 16,325 teeth made of gold or precious metal alloys were extracted from the mouths of 2,904 deceased prisoners in the second half of 1942. The decided majority of this metal, however, was recovered from the bodies of Jews murdered in the gas chambers. According to estimates by members of the camp resistance movement, the SS authorities obtained from 10 to 12 kg of gold per month from the victims’ teeth.

Diarrhea

(German: Durchfall)

One of the main symptoms of starvation disease, suffered by most Auschwitz prisoners, was diarrhea. Prisoners afflicted with frequent bowel movements were often forced to relieve themselves while working. This led to harassment by SS guards and prisoner functionaries, especially if, due to the inability to use toilets, prisoners soiled their clothing, which they could not wash or replace. This also provoked hostile reactions from fellow prisoners. Since medications for diarrhea were nearly inaccessible, those suffering attempted to treat themselves by undertaking several days of strict fasting or eating charred bread or pieces of burnt wood. If they were unable to halt the progress of the disease, the body's deterioration rapidly advanced, leading to what was known as "musulmanization" and ultimately death.

Durchfall

Diarrhea

Effacing the traces of crime

Initial camp evacuation and eliminating the traces of the crimes

From August 1944 through mid-January 1945 the Germans transferred approximately 65 thousand male and female prisoners out of Auschwitz to be employed as a slave labor force for various enterprises in the depths of the Third Reich. They also started the initial elimination and destruction of the evidence of their crimes – among others, the prisoners’ registers and records of the Jews murdered in gas chambers were burnt. Movable property of the camp was transported away, mainly large amounts of construction materials as well as goods plundered from the victims of mass murder. The technical elements of all gas chambers and crematoria but one were dismantled or disassembled by the end of the year.

Camp liquidation

In mid-January 1945, when the front line was broken by the Red Army and its troops were approaching Cracow, 70 km away from the camp, the final evacuation of prisoners started. From 17 to 21 January 1945 approximately 56 thousand male and female prisoners were taken out of Auschwitz and its sub-camps in marching columns. Having reached the indicated railway station they were transported farther to the west in freight cars. Both evacuation routes, by rail or on foot, were littered with the bodies of prisoners who had either been shot or had died due to exhaustion or cold. An estimated 9 thousand prisoners of Auschwitz died during that operation.

On 20 January 1945 the SS blew up the gas chambers and crematoria that had already been put out of service some time earlier while the last one, still fully operational, was blown up on 26 January. On 23 January the warehouses, where the goods belonging to the victims of the extermination were stored, were set on fire.

Escapes

In total, in the entire history of the Auschwitz camp, for over a million deportees, there were at least 928 prisoners who attempted to escape. Spontaneous escapes usually ended in the death of the escapee who, trying to escape from the workplace, was shot by the guards. Escapes prepared in advance were more likely to succeed. It became possible when the so-called large-cordon guard system was introduced. This line of guard posts surrounded a broad area around the camp where prisoners worked and were watched by SS patrols. Would‑be escapees tried to pick out a hiding place ahead of time. When a prisoner was reported missing, the Germans sent out patrols to search the area, which remained under surveillance day and night by the SS men posted along the large cordon. If this did not yield results, the guard posts were called in after three days and telegrams sent to nearby police stations containing information about the fugitive. Another method used by escapees was to obtain civilian clothing and passes in order to mix in with the crowd of civilian workers leaving the camp in the evening. Several prisoners escaped disguised in SS uniforms. Around a dozen tunneled under the fences in sub‑camps, where the guard system was not so highly developed.

There were three mass escapes from Auschwitz— prisoners from the penal company (June 1942), Soviet prisoners of war (November 1942) and Sonderkommando prisoners (October 1944). There were also several desperate attempts among groups of Jews deported for extermination to conceal themselves or escape (for instance in February 1943) right after arriving with the transport at the ramp.

The majority of fugitives were caught by police patrols or shot while being pursued. At least 196 people managed to escape.

Ethnic origins and number of victims of Auschwitz

1.3 million deportees

The German Nazis deported to Auschwitz at least 1.3 million people of more than 20 nationalities. Of that amount, 400 thousand were registered and incarcerated in the concentration camp as prisoners. The remaining 900 thousand people, almost exlusively Jews, were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival.

1.1 million murdered

From among 1.3 million Auschwitz deportees, at least 1.1 million were murdered:

• 900 thousand Jews murdered in the gas chambers immediately on arrival at the camp and several thousand Poles, Roma and Soviet POWs who were deported to the camp to be killed;
• Of the 400 thousand prisoners registered in the camp, 200 thousand people died there. They included some 100 thousand Jews, 60 thousand Poles, 18 thousand Roma, 12 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and more than 10 thousand prisoners of other nationalities.

Total number of deportees and murdered in Auschwitz

Nationality/Category	Number of deportees	Percentage of the total number of deportees	Number of victims	Percentage of murdered within the category/nationality	Percentage of all victims
Jews	1.1 million	85%	~1 million	90%	91%
Poles	140 thousand	10.8%	~64 thousand	50%	5.4%
Other groups	25 thousand	1.9%	~12 thousand	48%	1%
Roma and Sinti (Gypsies)	23 thousand	1.8%	~18 thousand	83%	1.7%
Soviet POWs	15 thousand	1.2%	~14 thousand	93%	1.3%
Total	~1.3 million		~1.1 million	85%

Jews deported to Auschwitz according to their country of origin

(according to the pre-1939 borders)

Country of origin	Number
Hungary (according to the borders during the war)	430 thousand
Poland	300 thousand
France	69 thousand
The Netherlands	60 thousand
Greece	55 thousand
The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Theresienstadt)	46 thousand
Concentration camps and other centers	34 thousand
Slovakia (according to the borders during the war)	27 thousand
Belgium	25 thousand
Germany and Austria	23 thousand
Yugoslavia	10 thousand
Italy	7.5 thousand
Latvia	1 thousand
Norway	690
Total	~ 1.1 mln

Prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp

The Germans regisered approximately 400 thousand people in the Auschwitz concentration camp:

    • 200 thousand Jews
    • 130 thousand Poles
    • 25 thousand peoples of other nationalities
    • 21 thousand Roma
    • 12 thousand Soviet captives

Among the 25 thousand people of different nationalities the most numerous were the Czech (9 thousand), followed by: Belarussians (6 thousand), Germans (4 thousand), French (4 thousand), Russians (1.5 thousand), Yugoslavians (mostly Slovenians but also Croatians and Serbs) and Ukrainians.

Small numbers (several to several dozen persons) of people of the following nationalities were also imprisoned in the camp: Albanian, Belgium, Danish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourg, Dutch, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovakian, Spanish and Swiss (alphabetical order not reflecting the actual numbers).

Prisoners of Auschwitz concentration camp

Nationality	Number
Jews	200 thousand
Poles	130 thousand
Roma	21 thousand
Soviet captives	12 thousand
Czech	9 thousand
Belarussian	6 thousand
German	4 thousand
French	4 thousand
Russian	1.5 thousand
Yugoslavian	800
Ukrainian	500
Other	200
Total	~ 400 thousand

Executions

Prisoners held in the camp as hostages or sent there by Gestapo for political reasons were executed in Auschwitz. Prisoners jailed in the cells of camp prison (Block 11) for belonging to the camp resistance movement or caught in an attempt to escape were also put to death. So were Poles not registered in the camp but convicted by summary courts.

The death sentence was carried out by: shooting, hanging, killing in a gas chamber or starvation. At first, prisoners—mostly Poles but also Soviet POWs—were shot by a firing squad. From 1941 to 1943, the majority of the executions took place at the so called Death Wall. In 1944 they were carried out in Birkenau, either inside or just outside the crematorium buildings, as when 200 Jewish prisoners were shot in October 1944 after the Sonderkommando mutiny.

It is estimated that about 5,500 prisoners, jailed in the camp prison, and the so called police prisoners sentenced to death by the summary court, lost their lives by shooting. An important but unspecified number of prisoners were sent straight from the camp to be shot, as were Soviet POWs and Poles brought in from the outside.

Execution by hanging was carried out usually during roll calls, as a way of intimidating the prisoners. In July 1943, in the largest public execution, the Germans hanged 12 Poles from the surveyors’ Kommando in reprisal for the escape of three of their fellow prisoners. The last execution by hanging took place in the so called camp extension on January 6, 1945, when four Jewish women were executed on charges of supplying Sonderkommando prisoners with explosives that they used during their mutiny.

The camp authorities also sentenced prisoners to death by starvation in a cell of Block 11. This punishment was applied as part of collective responsibility for escape, and it was imposed on prisoners selected from that block or the work unit from which the prisoner escaped.

Expulsion

In connection with the founding of the Auschwitz camp, the German administrative authorities expelled the local Polish and Jewish civilians.

First, Poles living in immediate proximity to the camp were forced to leave their homes; then the same thing happened to residents of the Zasole district of Oświęcim. The area became part of the so-called camp interest zone. Some of the houses were adapted as dwellings for SS men and their families, and most of the other vacated buildings were demolished. When a decision was made to create SS farms in the vicinity of KL Auschwitz, Polish and Jewish civilians were expelled from eight villages near Oświęcim. The Auschwitz authorities confiscated all livestock, movable property and real estate in the vacated area. Almost a thousand houses and other buildings were demolished, and the material thus obtained used in building Birkenau and several of the sub‑camps. The entire Jewish population of Oświęcim was also expelled and their dwellings were assigned to German workers of the IG Farben plant. In connection with the construction by the company of the petrochemical plant, the majority of the residents of the village of Monowice were also expelled and the Auschwitz III-Monowitz camp was constructed there.

Apart from these expulsions, German authorities also removed the Polish population of other villages near Oświęcim. This was connected with the policy of “strengthening German nationhood” in Polish land annexed by the Third Reich. German colonists took the place of the expelled.

In total, over 15,000 people were forced to leave their homes.

First transports of Polish political prisoners

On 14 June 1940, the first transport of 728 Polish men was deported to KL Auschwitz from the Tarnów prison, located 150 km away. This event is considered the beginning of the camp's operation. Among the first prisoners were young men arrested for illegally crossing the border to Slovakia and Hungary, aiming to join the Polish Army being formed in France, activists of underground organizations, and individuals arrested during actions against the Polish intelligentsia. The first transports also included several dozen Jews.

In the following weeks, transports of prisoners from Silesia, the Warsaw, Lublin, and Radom districts began to arrive at KL Auschwitz. New arrivals were assigned consecutive prisoner numbers. In total, in 1940, 7,879 numbers were issued, with Poles making up the vast majority of the prisoners.

Food

Menus for prisoners of concentration camps were based on nutritional norms specifying the ingredients necessary for preparing meals, and their caloric value. However, the makeup and nutritional value of the meals did not correspond to the nominal specifications, either because functionaries pilfered food articles, or because the food was of low quality or spoiled.

Prisoners obtained three meals over the course of the day. In the morning they were given half a liter of liquid to drink. The midday meal consisted of about one liter of soup. Beginning in 1942, products originating in the baggage of Jews murdered in the gas chambers were also used in the soup. For supper, half a liter of liquid was given to drink along with approximately 300 g of black bread, to which a bit of the lowest‑quality sausage or margarine was added, or a tablespoon of marmalade or cheese. The bread obtained in the evening was supposed to suffice for breakfast as well, but the famished prisoners usually ate the whole portion at once; the fear that it would be stolen during the night was also a factor.

The low nutritional value of the meals and the associated insufficiency of animal protein, fat, vitamins and mineral salts led to the rapid wasting away of the organism (Muselmann).

Frauenlager

The women section at KL Auschwitz was established in March 1942. Initially, it was located in part of the main camp—in Blocks 1-10, which were separated from the men area by a concrete wall. During this early period, the women's section formally fell under the supervision of KL Ravensbrück. In July 1942, it was subordinated to the commandant of KL Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss.

In August 1942, the women prisoners were moved from the main camp to the Birkenau barracks in section BIa. Over time, the women camp was also expanded to include sector BIb. Women were also housed in other parts of the Auschwitz complex, including in transit camps, family camps, in blocks known as the camp extension, and in subcamps.

Supervision over the women was primarily exercised by SS-Aufseherinnen, the female SS guards, led by an SS-Oberaufseherin (senior camp overseer). Johanna Langefeld initially held this position, followed by Maria Mandel. Functionary prisoners were used to help maintain discipline among the inmates.

In total, approximately 131,000 women prisoners were registered in the Auschwitz women camp, the majority of whom were Jewish women from various countries (about 82,000). Besides them, the camp also imprisoned Polish women (31,000), Romani women (11,000), and women of other nationalities (about 7,000).

Functionary prisoners

Prisoners occupying positions in the camp's organizational structure were selected by the SS from among the inmates. In exchange for certain privileges, their task was to supervise other prisoners both in the blocks (block leaders and their subordinates, the room leaders) and at the workplace (kapo, vorarbeiter). The highest camp position was Lageraltester (Lageraltesterin in the women camp), or camp elder. In a broader definition, functional prisoners also included those holding minor roles, such as night guard (Nachtwache), door guard (Torwache), bunker attendant in Block 11, prisoner hospital nurses, etc.

In the initial period of the camp's existence, functionaries were typically selected German criminal and asocial prisoners who exhibited brutality and ruthlessness towards fellow inmates. Over time, as the overall number of prisoners increased and there was a shortage of German criminals, political prisoners of other nationalities, including Poles and Jews, were increasingly appointed to functional positions. If a functionary was unable to maintain rigor or was deemed too lenient towards the prisoners under their charge, they were quickly demoted and replaced by someone more ruthless.

Gas chambers

After a successful trial of killing people with poisonous gas Zyklon B in the basement of Block 11, the first gas chamber in Auschwitz was established. It was activated in the autumn of 1941 in a room previously serving as a morgue in the Crematorium I building within the main camp. Soviet prisoners of war and the first groups of Jews deported to Auschwitz were murdered there. The last known case of killing with gas there occurred in December 1942.

In the spring of 1942, a second gas chamber, known as the Little Red House (Bunker no. 1), was put into operation in Birkenau, and by the middle of that year, another, known as the Little White House. Both continued to function until the spring of 1943, when four large crematorium buildings (II, III, IV, and V) with gas chambers were completed in Birkenau.

In Crematorium II and III, the gas chambers (disguised as showers) were underground. Zyklon B pellets were dropped through holes in the ceiling. In Crematoria IV and V, the gas chambers were at ground level, and Zyklon B was thrown in through holes in the walls. Each of the four gas chambers could accommodate up to about 2,000 victims at a time.

The building of Crematorium IV along with its gas chamber was partially destroyed during the Sonderkommando revolt in October 1944. The remaining chambers continued to operate until the cessation of the extermination of Jews in early November 1944, after which they were blown up in January 1945 – only their ruins remain. The building of the first gas chamber located in Auschwitz I survived.

German companies

Nearly 2,000 German companies were involved in cooperation with Auschwitz. The extent of their direct contact with the camp (and knowledge of the events taking place there) varied. Some companies supplied the camp with products and materials, such as Siemens, which provided various types of electrical equipment. Most were small trade companies, wholesalers, drugstores, and shops, primarily operating in Upper and Lower Silesia.

Some firms performed specialized repair and construction work within the camp, and many employed prisoners both in Auschwitz itself and in its subcamps, or subcontracted them to other companies—for instance, IG Farben "lent" prisoners to at least 81 construction firms.

The leadership of some companies had extensive knowledge of what was happening in Auschwitz. This definitely included Topf und Söhne, which designed and supplied parts for the crematoria furnaces, and likely Tesch und Stabenow GmbH, which supplied Zyklon B, as well as the owners and employees of firms engaged in the construction of the crematoria and gas chambers: Josef Kluge from Gliwice, Schlesische Industriebau Lenz u. Co. from Wrocław, and Huta Hoch u. Tiefbau AG from Katowice, among many others.

Hair

In Auschwitz, as in other German concentration camps, prisoners had their hair shaven from their heads and intimate areas during the admission procedure. This practice was carried out for hygienic reasons and to hinder escape attempts, as a shaven head made it easier to identify escapees. The SS Main Economic and Administration Office ordered the storage and sale of prisoners' hair to German companies as an industrial raw material. Particularly, the long hair of Jewish women murdered in the gas chambers underwent industrial processing. In the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, women were shorn of their hair before being led into the gas chambers, whereas in Auschwitz, members of the Sonderkommando shaved the heads of the corpses. The hair thus collected was then disinfected, dried, packed into bags, and sold to German companies, which used it as a raw material for manufacturing textiles (such as haircloth) and felt. At the Auschwitz Memorial exhibition, one can see a bale of haircloth and nearly two tons of hair.

Himmler, Heinrich

(1900-1945)

He associated himself with the Nazi movement almost from its beginnings: he took part in the Munich putsch in 1923, joined the SS two years later and, as Hitler’s confidant, became its leader in 1929. His influence in the party and state apparatuses grew systematically as he became among others head of the German police and minister of the interior. To a large degree, he was responsible for creating the system of state concentration camps, and for the extermination of the Jews during World War II.

He inspected Auschwitz twice—in March 1941 when he approved the decision to expand the camp and create the so-called interest zone and in July 1942 when he observed the process of murdering Jews deported from the Netherlands in a gas chamber.

Homosexual prisoners, category

These were German nationals arrested under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code. Tens of thousands of homosexual men arrested in Nazi Germany before the war were incarcerated in concentration camps such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen, or Flossenbürg. There, they were marked with a pink triangle defining the reason for their imprisonment. In the camps established during the war, when their persecution in Germany lessened, there were relatively few prisoners of this category. In Auschwitz, a total of over one hundred thirty homosexual men were imprisoned, most marked with a pink triangle, and some with a red triangle.

Hospitals

A so-called “sick bay” was the starting point for the hospital in Auschwitz I. It was set up in June 1940, immediately after the opening of the camp. In the years to come, hospitals were also created in Birkenau (among others in the part of the women's camp BIa and in the camp BIIf), as well as in Monowitz and several of the larger sub‑camps.

The overcrowding of hospital blocks caused high mortality. Living conditions in the camp were such that prisoners quickly came down with various illnesses. Colds, pneumonia, and frostbite were common in winter. Brutal treatment by SS men and functionaries resulted in broken limbs and damage to muscles. Because of vitamin insufficiency and contagion, prisoners came down with boils, abscesses, and ulceration. Starvation sickness was common (Muselmann). The hospital crawled with fleas and lice, and rats were an additional plague in Birkenau.

Selections, conducted by SS doctors until November 1944, nevertheless represented a constant danger to prisoners in the hospital. All sick prisoners were originally subject to selection, but after mid‑1943 it was confined to Jews.

Höss, Rudolf

(1900-1947)

The founder and first commandant of Auschwitz. He joined the NSDAP in 1922 and the SS in 1933. In May 1940, he was named commandant of the newly created Auschwitz concentration camp. In the course of three years he turned it into the largest center for the extermination of the Jews and the largest Nazi concentration camp complex, with prisoners hired out to German companies.

While serving at Auschwitz, he lived—with his wife and five children—in a villa standing only 30 m from the camp fence, and 170 m from the crematorium chimney. Horses were his life’s passion. Arrested in March 1946 in Germany, where he was in hiding, he testified in one of the Nuremberg trials. In May 1946, he was extradited to Poland. The Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw sentenced him to death. The sentence was carried out in April 1947, at the site of the former Auschwitz I camo, between the crematorium and the house where he had lived during the war. The gallows at which he was hanged still stands on the grounds of the Auschwitz Memorial.

Human ashes

The corpses of the murdered were burned in the crematoria. Sonderkommando prisoners used wooden mallets to crush not fully burnt bones into powder. Everything was then loaded onto trucks and carried to the banks of the Vistula river, beyond the woods in Birkenau, where it was shoveled straight into the waters of the river. Human ashes were also dumped into the Soła river near the Auschwitz I camp, and into holes and depressions in the terrain. They were used as a base for building roads or reinforcing dikes, and as an additive to the compost heaps used on the camp farms. Significant deposits of human ashes are extant in the vicinity of the crematoria, the burning pits, and in the clearings and at the edge of the woods in Birkenau.

Hygiene

SS men and functionary prisoners paid close attention to the appearance and cleanliness of the inmates. Due to poor sanitary conditions in the camp, maintaining cleanliness and a neat appearance was very difficult for most prisoners. The insufficient number of sanitary facilities meant that the opportunity to use them was limited. Access to sanitary facilities was also restricted by functionary prisoners. At the same time, dirty clothing, unwashed bodies, or unshaven faces often became pretexts for administering punishments.

Limited opportunities for washing and laundering clothes, along with overcrowding in the barracks, meant that parasites, especially lice spreading typhus, were rampant. Although there were baths in the camp, prisoners used them irregularly, generally as part of what was called a "general delousing." Before bathing, they had to undress and hand over their clothes for disinfection, and regardless of the weather conditions, they waited naked, usually outside the barracks. For many, this became a cause of illness and death.

IG Farben

A German chemical conglomerate resulting from the 1925 merger of such leading firms as Bayer, Agfa, and BASF. In the 1930s, owing to technological advances and state subsidies, it almost monopolized the production of many goods vital to the Third Reich war economy. The most important of these were liquid fuel and synthetic rubber, which could not be imported to Germany after the sea lanes were cut at the start of the war. The conglomerate was one of the first companies to employ concentration camp prisoners on a mass scale—above all from subcamps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz III)— and to demand that the SS maintain their capacity for labor, mostly through the replacement of the sick (selection) and weak with healthy, strong new arrivals from the transports arriving in the camp. After the war some members of IG Farben management were tried at the American Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and sentenced to up to eight years in prison, but all the convicted men were released at the beginning of the 1950s.

Informing the world about Auschwitz crimes

• Aid to prisoners
• Reports by escapees

Interest Zone of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp

(German: Interessengebiet des KL Auschwitz)

An SS‑administered area of over 40 sq. km established in early 1941 after the expulsion of Poles and Jews from the villages near the camp. The inhabitants of one of the Oświęcim districts were also expelled. Its creation reflected the desire of the camp authorities to remove witnesses to the crimes of the SS, as well as to impede contact between prisoners and the outside world; Rudolf Höss wrote in one of his reports that “the surrounding populace is fanatically Polish” and ready to help escapees “as soon as they reach the first Polish farmstead.” Another important motive was the confiscation of land for camp farms. By 1943, as a result, about nine thousand people were expelled from the area and more than a thousand houses demolished. The construction material thus obtained was used to build barracks in the Birkenau camp. Later, the SS organized eight sub‑camps in the area. Prisoners from these sub‑camps worked in the fields, raised animals and maintained fish ponds.

Jehovah's Witnesses, category of prisoners

Activities by the Jehovah’s Witnesses were banned in the Third Reich in 1933 because of the Witnesses’ religious principles and pacifistic views, as well as their organization’s international connections. As a result, many of them were imprisoned in concentration camps. Almost 400 Witnesses were in total incarcerated in Auschwitz. Some of them were marked in the camp with a purple triangle sewn on their prisoner clothing, some were placed in other categories, above all that of political prisoners. Germans were the most numerous in this group, followed by Poles and smaller numbers of Dutch, Yugoslavian, Russian, and Czech prisoners.

Jews

The extermination of the Jews by the Germans during World War II, within the framework of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” was the largest mass act of genocide in human history. One‑fifth of the almost six million murdered Jews perished in Auschwitz.

In total, in the years 1942-1944, more than a million Jews were deported to the camp:

• 430,000 from Hungary

• 300,000 from Poland

• 69,000 from France

• 60,000 from the Netherlands

• 55,000 from Greece

• 46,000 from Bohemia and Moravia

• 26,000 from Slovakia

• 25,000 from Belgium

• 23,000 from Germany and Austria

• 10,000 from Yugoslavia

• 7,500 from Italy

• 690 from Norway

About 900,000 of them were murdered in the gas chambers immediately after arrival and selection on the ramp. About 200,000 were registered in the camp, where more than half died as a result of brutal treatment by SS men and prisoner functionaries, work exceeding their strength, malnutrition, terrible hygienic conditions and the associated sicknesses and epidemics (living conditions) and selection in the camp.

Kanada

(German: Bauabschnitt IIg – construction segment 2, sector g)

One of the nine camps in Birkenau, used to store the plundered property of Jews who were the victims of extermination. The first storehouse of this type (called Kanada I in the camp jargon) was set up in the summer of 1942 next to the site where the DAW German Equipment Works factory (German companies) was being built, between Birkenau and Auschwitz I. A much bigger complex of 30 storage barracks built on the grounds of Birkenau, near one of the gas chambers, became operational in December 1943 (Kanada II).

This was the main depository for luggage that arrived from the spring of 1944 with Jews from Hungary (Sonderaktion “Ungarn”) and the Litzmannstadt ghetto. At the peak period, up to two thousand prisoners were directly employed at the two Kanada complexes unloading items from trucks and sorting them. A separate “order Kommando” collected suitcases and other items from the train cars and the ramp.

Kanada was universally acknowledged to be one of the best places to work, along with the kitchen and the food pantries. This surely explains the name of the Kommando—Canada was then regarded as a land of prosperity and abundance.

Kapo

Under the so‑called prisoner supervistion structure, this was the term for the supervisor of a work unit - a Kommando. Its etymology derives from “capo,” the Italian word for head or boss. Responsible for maintaining discipline and the work rate of the prisoners in his charge, the Kapo had almost unlimited power and could punish, whip, and even kill prisoners as he saw fit. Many Kapos were distinguished by particular cruelty intended to intimidate and terrorize the prisoners. Their duties also included forming up the Kommandos, reporting on the number of prisoners, and preventing escapes. After the prisoners returned from work and stood for evening roll call, the Kapo handed them over to the block elder. Kapos lived apart, usually with other privileged prisoners in much more comfortable, separated rooms inside the prisoner blocks.

Kommando

A prisoner work unit, ranging from a few to over a thousand individuals. It was supervised by an SS officer and his subordinate prisoner functionaries. In the early months of Auschwitz's existence, units were primarily directed to work related to adapting former barracks for concentration camp use. Prisoners were also assigned to demolish houses of displaced Poles, for agricultural work, and for the expansion of the camp and construction of the IG Farben chemical plants. Throughout the camp's existence, as it developed and its functions changed, new work units were formed depending on needs. Some were related to the operation of the camp itself (prisoners were directed to work in administration, kitchens, warehouses, camp hospitals, etc.).

A prisoner's survival largely depended on securing a relatively safe job. The most sought-after were the so-called good Kommandos, employed indoors, performing relatively light work, or providing a chance to obtain additional food or other items, such as those working in kitchens, offices, warehouses, or baths. The worst units were those whose prisoners were employed in exhausting and dangerous physical labor, such as demolishing buildings, leveling ground, digging foundations, transporting building materials, etc. A particular work group was the Sonderkommando, forced to work in the crematoria and gas chambers. Working there was psychologically devastating not only because of the macabre nature of the work but also due to the awareness that its members, as direct witnesses to the extermination, were doomed to die.

Labor

In the German concentration camp system, labor was intended to be the basic instrument for the “reeducation” and “training” of prisoners. In practice, however, and especially in the initial phase at Auschwitz, labor was an instrument of destruction and was often performed without regard for its real efficacy. Prisoners were forced to perform labor that exceeded their strength carrying bricks, sacks of cement, and concrete fence posts from rail cars to the warehouses and building sites while Kapos beat them and urged them on the whole time. They excavated drainage ditches and the foundations of buildings; they pulled heavy rollers or used wooden beams to batter down the walls of demolished houses, without any kind of protective equipment or clothing.

Employment conditions improved insignificantly in 1942, when the SS began attaching greater importance to actual work performance that was connected which was associated with renting out prisoners as cheap labor to industrial enterprises.

Not including breaks, the working day lasted 10 to 11 hours in the spring and summer. It was reduced to 9 to 10 hours in the autumn and winter. Prisoners had a midday break to eat a meal. Theoretically, prisoners were not required to work on Sundays, but they often did additional work at the site of the camp or inside the the blocks.

Lagererweiterung

A complex of 20 buildings erected in an area adjacent to Auschwitz I as part of plans for expanding the camp. These plans, only partially realized, envisioned more than 50 new buildings, including a new commandant’s office. The new buildings were used as temporary SS barracks, workshops, and storage facilities for property plundered from the Jews exterminated in the gas chambers. From May 1944, women prisoners were moved there from block 10 and the SS laundry, as well as women employed in the nearby Union‑Werke plant. At the end of 1944 there were three to four thousand women prisoners in the Lagererweiterung. The last public execution at Auschwitz was held there on January 6, 1945.

Liberation of Auschwitz

Initial camp evacuation and eliminating the traces of the crimes

Camp liquidation

Liberation

After the final evacuation almost 9 thousand prisoners, mostly the ill and exhausted left behind in the camp by Germans, found themselves in an uncertain situation. Approximately 700 Jewish prisoners were murdered in the period between the forced departure of the last evacuation columns and the arrival of the Soviet soldiers. It was only a matter of coincidence that the most of the remaining prisoners survived.

On 27 January 1945 the Red Army entered the area of the town of Oświęcim, facing the resistance of the retreating German troops. More than 230 Soviet soldiers died while liberating the area. Approximately 7 thousand prisoners lived to see the liberation of the Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II-Birkenau and Auschwitz III-Monowitz camps. Approximately 500 other prisoners were liberated in the sub-camps before 27 January and shortly after that date.

The ill were taken care of by several Soviet field hospitals and the so-called Camp Hospital of the Polish Red Cross which was set up by Polish volunteers, mainly residents of Cracow and nearby towns. 4.5 thousand mostly Jewish survivors, including more than 400 children, citizens of more than twenty countries, were treated there.

Those prisoners who were in a relatively good physical condition left Auschwitz immediately after the liberation, going home on their own or in organized transports. Most patients admitted to hospitals did the same three or four months later.

“Lili Jacob Album”

An album of photographs taken by SS men in late May 1944. The photographs depict among others the arrival of Jews to Birkenau, selection on the ramp, walking to the gas chambers, the first moments in the camp for the persons left alive, the delivery of plundered property (plunder) and its sorting. The album was named after Lili Jacob, a Jewish woman from Slovakia survived from Auschwitz, who after the war found it in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.

“Little Red House”

(Bunker no. 1)

A gas chamber was activated at the end of March 1942 near the then-under-construction Birkenau camp, set up in a house previously belonging to a displaced Polish family. The unplastered brick building was called the “Little Red House” because of the color of its walls. Several interior partition walls were demolished during adaptation works, leaving two rooms. Hermetically sealed doors were installed, the windows walled up, and hatches installed through which Zyklon B could be dumped.

The floor space of both the gas chambers was over 80 sq. m, and about 800 people could be crowded in, according to testimony by Rudolf Höss. At first, most of those murdered there were Jews from Sosnowiec and the nearby ghettos, as well as sick prisoners from the camp hospital; later came Jews from other parts of Poland, Slovakia, and Western Europe. Sonderkommando prisoners used narrow‑gauge railroad push cars to carry the bodies of the murdered people to mass graves on the edge of the nearby woods; in August they began burning them in pits dug there.

The gas chambers in the Little Red House operated until the spring of 1943, when large crematoria with gas chambers built at the rear of the Birkenau camp started to be utilized. To obliterate the traces of the crimes, the building was demolished, and the site was leveled, even bricks from the foundations were removed.

“Little White House”

(Bunker no. 2)

The second gas chamber, after the so-called “Little Red House”, constructed near the Birkenau camp under construction. The decision to convert another building, a farmhouse of the expelled Polish owners, into a gas chamber was made in June 1942 as a result of the increased arrival of numerous transports of Jews designated by the Germans for extermination.

Because the walls were plastered, it was called the “Little White House.” Its interior was divided into four gas chambers with a total floor space of 120 sq. m. The system of interior doors and hatches for Zyklon B was the same as in the Little Red House.

The gas chambers in the Little White House were taken out of operation at the turn of April/May 1943; they were again put to use when the transports from Hungary began arriving in May 1944. The building was demolished in the late autumn, when extermination operations in Birkenau were halted. Traces of the foundations of Bunker no. 2 are still visible today at this location.

Living conditions

    • Diarrhea
    • Executions
    • Medical experiments
    • Phlegmon
    • Hygiene
    • Punishments
    • Muselmann
    • Labor
    • Selections in the camp
    • ”Sport”
    • Needle
    • Hospital
    • Typhus
    • Food

Medical experiments

In Auschwitz, SS doctors conducted experiments on prisoners of various nationalities, mainly Jews. The procedures were performed without anesthesia, causing pain to the victims and disregarding their fate afterward. Many of those mutilated and sick, being unable to work, were subsequently sent to the gas chambers. The experiments were conducted on behalf of the SS, the Wehrmacht, and some German corporations, and were also used by the doctors themselves to advance their careers.

The most infamous experiments were carried out by Josef Mengele and Carl Clauberg, but other SS doctors at KL Auschwitz also conducted similar research. Horst Schumann worked on developing methods of mass sterilization, using high doses of X-ray radiation. Several SS doctors, including Helmuth Vetter, Friedrich Entress, Werner Rohde, Hans König, and Bruno Weber, administered unapproved drugs to ill prisoners to test their tolerance and effective dosing, often resulting in bloody vomiting, painful diarrhea, and circulatory disturbances. If a prisoner died, an autopsy was performed to observe any internal changes caused by the drugs. Vetter and Entress also infected healthy prisoners with typhus to determine the incubation period and the virulence of bacterial strains at different stages of the disease.

Johann Paul Kremer conducted studies on the changes in the human body caused by starvation. He selected severely emaciated prisoners at different stages of starvation, conducted medical interviews, had them photographed, and then had them killed. Post-mortem, samples of liver, spleen, and pancreas were taken and preserved as anatomical specimens.

Emil Kaschub conducted experiments to determine the symptoms resulting from swallowing or rubbing various substances into the skin by German soldiers feigning illness to avoid frontline duty. His research caused inflammatory conditions, purulent changes, and hard-to-heal ulcers leading to tissue necrosis in dozens of Jews.

For most victims, these experiments resulted in loss of health, permanent disability, or death.

Meksyk

BIII

Mengele, Josef

(1911-1979)

Physician, doctor of philosophy and medicine. In 1937 he became an assistant at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene at Frankfurt University and began his research on twins. He was accepted into the NSDAP and the SS a year later. He was employed among others in the Main Office for Race and Settlement in Poznań, where his task was to assess the suitability of resettled people for Germanization. Severely wounded on the front, he was classified as unfit for front‑line service. Desirous of continuing his scholarly research, he requested a transfer to one of the concentration camps.

From the summer of 1943, he carried out in Auschwitz the anthropological research on various racial groups, mostly Roma, as well as research on multiple pregnancy, and on the physiology and pathology of dwarfism. He also studied persons with hereditary physical anomalies. The people he selected were subjected to numerous, often invasive and painful medical examinations, and some were also photographed, plaster casts of their jaws and teeth were made, and fingerprints of their arms and legs were taken. Afterward, some of them were killed by phenol injection so that they could be autopsied and their organs used for comparative analysis. Mengele also continued his pre-war racial and genetic research on Jewish and Roma twins as well as people with visible genetic defects. These prisoners, many of them children, were subjected to painful experiments without anesthesia and - if needed - killed so that they could be autopsied. At the same time, Josef Mengele conducted selection on the ramp and among prisoners in the camp hospitals.

After the war, like many SS men and war criminals, he escaped to South America, where he hid until his death in 1979.

Monowitz, Auschwitz III

Initially, it was one of Auschwitz sub-camps, created in October 1942 on the area of the expelled and demolished Polish village of Monowice (German: Monowitz), 6 km from Auschwitz I, in connection with the construction by a German company – IG Farbenindustrie conglomerate – of the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber and fuel plant.

In November 1943, Monowitz was raised to the status of concentration camp, to which all the “industrial” sub-camps in the Auschwitz complex were subordinated. Camp population grew progressively: from over 3,500 prisoners in December 1942 to over 6,000 in late 1943 and over 11,000 in July 1944 (mainly Jews). Prisoners were incarcerated in 60 barracks.

In January 1945, the majority of prisoners were evacuated on foot to Gliwice, from where they were transported by rail to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps. Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel and famous Italian writer Primo Levi were among others the prisoners of the Monowitz camp.

Auschwitz III-Monowitz camp was the first of three main camps of the Auschwitz complex liberated by the Red Army soldiers. It took place on Saturday, January 27, 1945 before noon. In the afternoon, the camps Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau were liberated.\

Mortality in the camp

At least half of the 400,000 prisoners registered in Auschwitz died (Prisoners of Auschwitz concentration camp). This figure can be arrived at by comparing the total of numbers assigned to prisoners with the figures for prisoners transferred to other camps (about 190,000), liberated (7,500), released (over 2,000) and escaped (200). Extant documents that provide a basis for calculating mortality in the camp during specific periods are in particular the death books kept by the Germans.

Muselmann

The German word "Muselmann" (translated as Muslim) was commonly used in KL Auschwitz and some other concentration camps to refer to prisoners who were extremely exhausted, in the advanced stages of starvation disease. Physically, this condition was associated with a range of visible symptoms: the disappearance of fat and muscle tissue, dry skin highlighting the outline of bones, a facial expression resembling a mask, and glazed eyes. Due to muscle atrophy, the movements of the affected prisoner slowed down. Camp "Muselmänner" often hunched over, preferring to stay in a crouching position. Feeling cold, they covered themselves with blankets, rags, or paper from cement bags. Along with somatic changes, there were also mental disturbances. Initially, "Muselmänner" were hyperactive and irritable, with their attention focused solely on obtaining food, but over time they became completely indifferent to external stimuli. Typically, the advanced stage of starvation disease meant that these prisoners died shortly thereafter or were selected for elimination in the camp.

The etymology of the word has not been definitively explained.

Mutinies

    • Penal company
    • Sonderkommando
    • Escapes

Needle

In August 1941, the Germans began in Auschwitz the use of the “needle,” or putting prisoners to death by intravenous injection of phenol. The method was mainly used to kill sick prisoners who, in the opinion of SS doctors, were unlikely to recover quickly. The murdering was done in the so‑called procedures room of one of the hospital blocks of Auschwitz I.

Camp resistance movement documents show that in the late 1942, 2,467 prisoners were killed in this way in four months. Phenol injections were also used to kill Polish children from the Zamość region and pregnant Jewish prisoners in Birkenau. Over time the application of this method was limited because, once the gas chambers went into operation, they became the most common place for murdering sick prisoners after selections in the camp hospitals.

Number of prisoners in the camp

In total in the years 1940-1945 the Germans registered 400,000 prisoners in Auschwitz. Data about prisoners incarcerated in the camp in subsequent periods come from reports by the camp resistance movement, reports on the number of prisoners in different parts of the camp and in the camp hospitals as well as from German radio transmissions intercepted by British intelligence and deciphered with Enigma machines. In 1940, there were about 6,000 prisoners in Auschwitz. In mid-1944, there were 17,000 men in Auschwitz I, 47,500 men and women in Birkenau, 9,200 men in Monowitz as well as 17,200 men and women in sub-camps. These figures do not include tens of thousands of Jewish men and women incarcerated in transit camps in Birkenau (mainly BII c and BIII).

Number of victims

Ethnic origins and number of victims of Auschwitz

Oświęcim

Polish city located 70 km west of Cracow. On the eve of the war it numbered about 13,000 inhabitants, more than half of whom were Jews. When the city came under German occupation, it was annexed to the German Reich by administrative order and renamed Auschwitz. Many members of the local intelligentsia were sent to German concentration camps. From the spring of 1940, in connection with preparations for opening a concentration camp at the site of the old Polish Army barracks located on the outskirts of the city, expulsion operations were held. In 1941, all the Jews were taken away from Oświęcim by the Germans. German colonists appeared in Oświęcim as white‑ and blue‑collar workers at the IG Farben plant. Construction began on a new residential district for them, which was envisioned as the forerunner of the future Musterstadt Auschwitz—a German “model city.” Until 1944, workers from the General Government—Poles and Ukrainians—as well as others from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Croatia, Bohemia, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal, as well as from the parts of the Soviet Union occupied by the Wehrmacht, were brought in and quartered in camps in the eastern part of town.

An organized resistance movement existed in Oświęcim throughout the war, and more than a thousand people from the city and nearby localities provided aid to prisoners.

Partisans

The largest partisan unit in the vicinity of Auschwitz was the AK (Home Army) “Sosieńki” group. It had several score members and operated at a distance of a few kilometers from the camp. Similar groups existed also in localities farther from the camp. Unaware of the real forces available to the local partisans, the camp prisoners hoped that they would attack the SS garrison and liberate the camp. However, this was not feasible due to the significant superiority of German forces. In addition to the camp garrison, which ranged from just under a thousand SS men in 1941 to over 3,000 in 1944, there were also a thousand Luftwaffe soldiers manning anti-aircraft guns around the IG Farben factory, as well as hundreds of German policemen, gendarmes, and other officials equipped with handguns and machine guns. If necessary, they could also quickly receive support from military and police units stationed in nearby garrisons. Given these circumstances, members of the Polish underground near Auschwitz focused on smuggling food and medicine into the camp and on getting reports from prisoners about the situation in the camp and crimes committed by the SS, which were then passed on to the centers of the Polish Underground State and further to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London.

Penal company

(German: Strafkompanie - SK)

This was a penal unit to which prisoners were sent for offenses against the camp regulations, including contact with the civilian population, escape attempts, possessing additional food or clothing, or working too slowly according to the SS or Kapo. Prisoners in the SK were isolated from the others. They received reduced food rations and were directed to perform the hardest physical labor under the supervision of particularly brutal Kapos.

The male penal company was established in Auschwitz in August 1940 and initially, all Jews and priests from new transports were automatically sent there. Especially in the early years of its existence, the mortality rate within the penal company was enormous, and survival during the punishment period was almost impossible. For this reason, being placed in it was considered by the prisoners to be one of the harshest repressive measures. In June 1942, those imprisoned in the penal company attempted a collective escape. As a result, the SS murdered at least 250 prisoners. Only eight men managed to evade capture, although four of them were later recaptured.

The female penal company was established in June 1942. Initially located in the village of Budy, it was moved to Birkenau in the spring of 1943. Women prisoners assigned to the SK were employed, among other tasks, in road construction, digging drainage ditches, and cleaning fish ponds. Like the men, they were subjected to cruelty from the SS and functionaries. A particularly tragic event occurred in early September 1942, when German female functionaries, using clubs and axes, massacred several dozen French Jewish women imprisoned in the SK.

Phlegmon

An acute purulent inflammation surrounded by soft tissue, with symptoms of fever, sharp pain, and swelling. The condition occurred on a mass scale among prisoners of Auschwitz. It was caused, in exhausted prisoners with vitamin deficiencies (Muselmann), by the body’s inability to combat bacterial infections arising as a result of minor wounds, blisters on the feet, etc. An untreated phlegmon often led to fatal whole‑body infection. Effective treatment should rely on lancing the abscess, cleaning the wound, and applying sterile bandages and drains, all of which was usually impossible in camp conditions. Prisoners therefore tried to treat themselves by cutting the swollen skin with sharpened scraps of tin. Only in later years, when conditions in the camp hospitals improved slightly, did prisoner doctors begin carrying out the needed procedure on a larger scale.

Pipel

• Block elder
• Youths

Plunder

In the early days at Auschwitz, as in other Nazi German concentration camps, prisoner property was placed on deposit to be returned upon potential release or, in case of death, mailed to next of kin. From January 1943, all personal items left behind by Jews, Poles, and Soviet citizens who were killed in concentration camps began to be confiscated; a year later, confiscation was broadened to include the personal property of murdered Roma and Sinti. Jewish property was confiscated right after arrival.

The property taken in this way was sought to be put to maximum use. The clothing obtained in this way was generally recycled in the textile and garment industries, while currency and valuables were sent to the Reichsbank. The high point of the plundering occurred during the mass deportation of Jews to Auschwitz for extermination. The hair was cut from the corpses of the people who were murdered in gas chambers, and jewelry torn off, and all gold dental work extracted. Victims' luggage was taken to the so-called Kanada warehouses. Worn‑out clothing and shoes were either used by the prisoners or sent to industrial plants as raw material. Medicine was sent mainly to the SS hospitals. Foodstuffs, depending on their quality, were sent to the SS or prisoner kitchens. Clothing and shoes in good condition together with everyday essentials were turned over to German civilians.

Poles

The first transports of Polish political prisoners arrived in Auschwitz in June 1940. Until the autumn of 1944, Poles were sent to Auschwitz from all regions of the German‑occupied country, and until mid‑1942 Poles were the most numerous ethnic group in the camp. A large number of the Poles belonged to the intelligentsia. People involved in clandestine activity were also imprisoned in the camp, as were people arrested during street roundups, peasant families expelled from the Zamość region, and civilians from Warsaw during the Warsaw Uprising. In Auschwitz there were also executions of Poles not registered in the camp but sentenced to death by summary courts.

According to estimates, about 140,000 Poles were sent to Auschwitz. Almost half of them died. Throughout the whole time that the camp was in operation, some Polish prisoners were active in the resistance movement—at first in groups of their own, and with the passage of time in cooperation with secret organizations of prisoners of other nationalities. Many Poles were shot or hanged when the camp Gestapo discovered their activities.

Political prisoners

In 1933, the Reich President Paul von Hindenburg issued the Decree “for the Protection of People and State”, which “temporarily” suspended civil rights guaranteed by the 1919 Weimar Republic Constitution. On the basis of the Decree, the police took the decision to imprison people accused of “political” offenses in a concentration camp without trial or any oversight by the state judicial apparatus. “Political” offenses were understood in the broad sense as activity hostile to the Nazi regime.

At the moment when KL Auschwitz was created, the majority of Poles, and later some inmates of other ethnicity, including Jews, were marked with a red triangle and numbered among this category of prisoners. Aside from those suspected of participating in the resistance movement and belonging to forbidden organizations, the red triangle was also placed on people accused of such offenses as breaking curfew, arguing with German bosses, singing patriotic songs, expressing doubts about the ultimate German victory or illicit contact with German girls. Another charge that frequently landed Poles in concentration camps was “being an intellectual.” No concrete charges were ever formulated against many others, such as hostages or persons detained during street roundups or the pacification of villages. In August 1944, political prisoners, of whom 65 percent were Jews, constituted 95 percent of the total camp population.

Punishment by the post

(German: Pfahlbinden)

A frequent punishment in KL Auschwitz. It was initially applied in Auschwitz I, where prisoners were hung from hooks on high posts—this was the origin of its name. Prisoners had their hands tied behind their backs with rope or a chain that was then hung at a height making it impossible for their feet to touch the ground. When those subjected to this punishment lost consciousness due to severe pain, they were revived with cold water. A common result of this punishment was the tearing of arm tendons, rendering the prisoners incapacitated for work and thus vulnerable to being sent to the gas chamber.

Punishments

There were strictly defined procedures for punishing prisoners in German concentration camps. In Auschwitz, regulation penalties were assessed in writing by the commandant or camp director on the basis of reports submitted by SS men and prisoner functionaries. Offenses regarded as punishable included among others attempting to obtain additional food, for example by picking an apple off a tree at the work place; attempting to avoid work or malingering, for instance by attempting to change Kommando or warming oneself at a coke stove; performing various acts at a non‑regulation time or place, such as relieving oneself; possessing additional clothing or other personal belongings.

The most frequently applied punishments included flogging, jailing in the cells of camp prison in Block 11, punishment by the post, assignment to the penal company, or additional labor under supervision. Aside from regulation penalties, prisoners were punished on the spot by SS men and functionaries for actual or alleged infractions. On such occasions they usually received a savage beating and kicking, or so-called sport.

Rail ramps

Rail was the main means of transport used by the Germans for deportation to Auschwitz. In 1940–1941, trains stopped at a siding adjacent to Auschwitz I. They carried mostly Poles. A second siding, known as the Jewish ramp (German: Judenrampe), was located at the halfway point of the 3‑kilometer distance between Auschwitz I and Birkenau. Transports of more than half a million people, mostly Jews, arrived there from the spring of 1942 to mid‑May 1944. It was the place where SS doctors conducted the selection of new arrivals; strong, healthy people were sent on foot to the camp, while those regarded as unfit for labor were taken by truck to the gas chambers. In the spring of 1944, shortly before the arrival of about 400,000 Jews from Hungary, the ramp located directly in the Birkenau camp took over its role.

Reeducation prisoners, category

(German: Erziehungshäftlinge, EH)

Under a decree of May 1941 from Heinrich Himmler, “reeducation labor camps” were to hold workers “refusing labor or lazy individuals whose behavior is equivalent to the sabotaging of work.” In these camps, “intensive labor” would “reeducate them in the spirit of organized labor and in this way set an intimidating example as a warning to others.” Theoretically, the duration of their incarceration in the camp was predetermined, but in practice the punishment was often extended, or after the expiration of the sentence, the category of reeducational prisoners was changed to political prisoners and they were sentenced to indefinite time in a concentration camp.

First reeducation prisoners were sent to Auschwitz I in July 1941. Instead of triangles, they had letters “E” sewed on their striped uniforms. In January 1943, a separate reeducation camp was set up for them in Monowitz. They were treated just as brutally as the other prisoners, forced to perform hard labor and fed starvation rations. As a result, about 1,400 prisoners died out of the 9,200 prisoners in this category, mostly Poles but also Russians, Ukrainians, Frenchmen and Italians. Reeducation women prisoners, in total 1,800 of them, were placed in camp BI a in Birkenau.

Reports by escapees

In 1944, three reports by Auschwitz escapees reached international organizations and the Allied governments. The escapees were Jerzy Tabeau, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, as well as Czesław Mordowicz and Arnošt Rosin.

Polish men Jerzy Tabeau escaped from Auschwitz in November 1943. Afterwards, he wrote a report on the events he witnessed in the camp from the spring of 1942. He described the living conditions, methods of killing prisoners, and the procedures used in the extermination of the Jews. The Polish underground sent this document to the West through secret channels.

Slovak Jews Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from the camp in April 1944. Their accounts were sent to the West through secret channels, and revealed in the media. Under their influence, Allied and neutral governments began pressuring Hungarian authorities to stop further deportation of Jews to Auschwitz (Sonderaktion “Ungarn”). Relenting under pressure, Regent Miklós Horthy did so in July 1944.

Polish Jew Czesław Mordowicz and Slovak Jew Arnošt Rosin escaped from Auschwitz in May 1944. Their account on the beginning of Sonderaktion “Ungarn” in Birkenau was presented to the Allied governments, the World Jewish Congress, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. It also made its way into the media.

In November 1944 the three reports were published in Washington in a brochure titled German Extermination Camps—Auschwitz and Birkenau. The information it contained was publicized by the press and radio, and contributed to awareness in the West of the crimes the Germans were committing in Auschwitz, and especially the extermination of Jews.

Resistance movement

Clandestine activity in Auschwitz was initiated by Polish political prisoners. With the deportation of other ethnicities to Auschwitz, above all Jews, new formations sprang up in the resistance movement—Jewish as well as Austrian and German, Czech, French, Russian and Yugoslavian. Some of them, mostly leftist, joined some Polish leftists in 1943 to create the organization called Kampfgruppe Auschwitz (Combat Group Auschwitz). A year later, this organization and members of the camp AK founded the Auschwitz Military Council.

The main goals of the underground were among others acquiring and distributing food and medicine, providing the outside world with the information about what was happening in the camp (informing the world) and preparing escapes. The plans for an armed uprising against the camp SS garrison with the aid of the Polish resistance movement (partisans) outside the camp were also prepared. This never came about, however, because of the disproportion of forces and the impracticality of concealing tens of thousands of prisoners after their hypothetical escape from the camp.

Roma

The Nazis regarded Roma as a “hostile element” allegedly possessing an inborn tendency to crime and asocial behavior. From 1933 the Roma became, along with Jews, the objects of persecution on racist grounds, first through registration, then a ban on certain occupations and on contracting mixed marriages, then compulsory labor and, in the end, confinement in concentration camps and extermination.

At the outbreak of World War II it was decided to resettle German Roma to occupied Poland. Later, German police authorities began arresting and executing Roma in the occupied territory. This was also true behind the lines on the Eastern Front where Roma were murdered on a mass scale alongside Jews by so-called Einsatzkommandos.

After the issuing by Heinrich Himmler of an order that they should be sent to Auschwitz, Roma were deported there from 1943 mainly from Germany and also from Austria, Bohemia and Poland. They were placed in the so‑called Zigeunerlager (Gypsy camp) in Birkenau. A total of about 23,000 Roma and Sinti were deported by the Germans to Auschwitz, including 2,000 Roma murdered without being entered into the camp's records. 21,000 were registered in the camp, of which 18,000 died of starvation and sickness, or were murdered in the gas chambers upon liquidation of the Zigeunerlager.

Selection in the camp

During the first months at Auschwitz, sick and exhausted prisoners who could no longer keep up with the required working tempo were usually finished off by the Kapo or, more rarely, carried to the camp hospital. When the SS men decided that hospital rooms were overpopulated, from the summer of 1941 some patients were killed with the “needle”—injections of phenol to the heart. SS doctors selected the doomed patients while inspecting the hospital wards. In addition to overall emaciation, diagnosis of a contagious disease such as tuberculosis or typhus meant a certain death sentence. The doctors held selections of prisoners also in the showers and during “general roll calls”. Larger groups of patients were murdered with Zyklon B in the gas chambers. At first, all prisoners went through selection regardless of ethnicity, but from mid‑1943 selection was performed only on Jews.

Selection on the ramp

Regular selections among Jews deported to Auschwitz for extermination began in mid-1942. When the train arrived, the SS men ordered everybody to go outside. While forming up into separate columns of men and women with small children, the deportees listened to the assurances of the SS men that they would be placed in a labor camp and that trucks would carry the old and infirm there, while the others walked. The matter‑of‑fact tone of the speech and the feigned concern for the elderly usually had a calming effect.

SS physicians made the decision to send individual deportees to destruction or to work in the camp on the basis of their own impression of the person’s physical condition and age. Selection lasted from one to several hours, depending on the size of the transport. Initially, the trucks took the doomed to the makeshift gas chambers, so-called Little Red or Little White House or, from the spring of 1943, to the new, larger gas chambers by crematoria II, III, IV and V. From May 1944, selections took place on the rail ramp inside the Birkenau camp.

Sonderaktion “Ungarn”

(German: Special action “Hungary”)

The mass deportation of Jews from Hungary, within its wartime borders which also included parts of Slovakia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and Romania, occurred in 1944 after the change of government in Hungary in March 1944. With the cooperation of the Hungarian gendarmerie, the Germans began organizing transit ghettos from which transports were sent to Auschwitz. The first such transport departed at the end of April 1944; mass transports began crossing the Hungarian border in mid-May. According to a report by the German ambassador in Budapest, Edmund Veesenmayer, by July 9, when the deportations were halted by decision of Regent Horthy, over 430,000 Jews (out of the 725,000 planned to be deported) had been deported from Hungary. Almost all were deported to Auschwitz.

Sonderkommando

(German: Special labor detail)

Shortly after the mass extermination of Jews began in Birkenau in April 1942, the first Sonderkommando was formed there, consisting solely of Jewish prisoners. Some of them worked in the barracks, sorting the clothes and other belongings of the murdered victims, preparing them for transport to the so-called Kanada warehouses. Others were employed directly in the operation of the gas chambers: extracting corpses, cleaning the chambers before the next victims entered, extracting gold teeth from the deceased, cutting hair, and transporting bodies for burning. The Sonderkommando members were also forced to work at burying bodies in mass graves, and later at their incineration in burning pits and crematoria.

Members of the Sonderkommando lived with the awareness that, as direct witnesses to the crimes committed at Auschwitz, they were destined to be killed. In February 1944, when fewer transports were arriving at the camp, half of the 400-person group was murdered. With the commencement of Sonderaktion "Ungarn," the commando was increased to about 900 prisoners. In September 1944, the size of the Sonderkommando was again reduced by murdering 200 prisoners. Faced with another such attempt on 7 October 1944, the members of the Sonderkommando resisted. As a result of the revolt and the executions carried out by the SS that day, about 450 of the 660 commando members died. The prisoners managed to kill three and wound several armed SS men. Reduced to about 200 and later to 100 prisoners, the Sonderkommando remained in the camp until the evacuation in January 1945.

Sonderkommando manuscripts

Between 1945 and 1980, writings by six Jewish members of the Sonderkommando were discovered near the crematoria in Birkenau. The writings were varied, with some taking the form of farewell letters, and others containing descriptions of life in the ghetto, deportation to Auschwitz, and work in the Sonderkommando including the extermination of specific transports and the burning of corpses. Besides their important, unique value as sources—for instance, Lewental’s detailed account of how the October 1944 mutiny was prepared and carried out—they testify to the spiritual conflicts and psychological burdens inflicted on the prisoners employed in this Kommando.

Soviet prisoners of war

The first Soviet prisoners of war arrived in Auschwitz in July and August 1941. At the beginning of September 1941, about 600 POWs were delivered to Auschwitz. Together with 250 sick Polish prisoners, they were murdered in the basement of Block 11 with the use of Zyklon B. This was the first instance of the mass killing of people with gas at Auschwitz. In October 1941, the SS imprisoned about 10,000 POWs in a fenced‑off part of Auschwitz I. The main occupation of the POWs was building a new camp in the fields of the village of Brzezinka (Birkenau), whose residents had been expelled. Their death rate was high. The causes of death were executions, beating, harassment, excessive labor, starvation and sickness. Every day the death of several dozen Soviet POWs was registered. In March 1942, about 600 of the POWs who were still alive were transferred to the new Birkenau BIb camp.

According to estimates, about 15,000 Soviet POWs were deported to Auschwitz by the Germans. About 3,000 were murdered immediately after their arrival, about 12,000 were registered in the camp, of whom over 11,000 perished.

“Sport”

Prisoners were frequently compelled to perform exhausting physical exercises that the SS men and prisoner functionaries called “sport.” Despite the name, the goal was not improved physical fitness, but rather terrorizing the prisoners, forcing them to be submissive, and subjugating them to camp discipline. One of the most frequent “exercises” was squats (kniebeugen) repeated at a high tempo counted out by an SS man or functionary. A variation was remaining in a squat position for a prolonged period, often with the arms outstretched or held over the head, or with the hands clasped behind the head. Other popular forms of “gymnastics” were squat‑thrusts, frog‑marching (hüpfen) often for distances of several score meters, prolonged rolling back and forth along the ground (rollen) even when it was muddy or snow‑covered, and “dancing” (tanzen), which meant spinning around one’s own axis with the hands over the head or outstretched—at times, the “dancers” were also made to move from place to place. Prisoners who could not keep up were beaten unconscious.

SS Garrison

The size of the Auschwitz SS garrison rose systematically as the number of prisoners increased and consisted of about 700 SS men in March 1941, 2,000 in June 1942, almost 3,000 in April 1944, and 3,342 in August. It reached its peak of 4,480 SS men when it was strongly reinforced just before evacuation in January 1945.

SS men were sent to Auschwitz from concentration camp garrisons, regional SS replacement commands, and Waffen SS divisions. Many of them were transferred after some time to other camps or front‑line units; overall, there was twice almost a complete turnover of the camp garrison. Initially, Germans and Austrians predominated among the SS, along with “ethnic Germans” from the Sudetenland, western Poland, and later increasing numbers of Volksdeutsche from Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania. The educational level was low—over 70 percent of the SS men had attended only a few years of public school, and a mere 5 percent, mostly doctors and camp construction board engineers, had higher education.

The SS men had a hospital, rest and recreation center and military facilities including a shooting range at their disposal; they also had their own mess facilities. Rank‑and‑file SS men were billeted in barracks. Officers lived with their families in houses in Oświęcim whose prewar residents were expelled.

Among the 8,000 SS men who served in Auschwitz while the camp was operating, only about 10 percent were ever tried after the war.

Sterilization experiments

Dr Carl Clauberg

Non-surgical mass sterilization method developed by him in the German Auschwitz concentration camp consisted of introducing into female reproductive organs a specially prepared chemical irritant that produced severe inflammation. Within several weeks, the fallopian tubes grew shut and were blocked.

Heinrich Himmler remained updated on the progress and outcomes of Clauberg's experiments. In June 1943, Clauberg wrote:

“The non-surgical method of sterilizing women that I have invented is now almost perfected… As for the questions that you have directed to me, sir Reichsführer, on the time necessary to sterilize a thousand women in this way, I can today answer them in the way that I had anticipated: if the research that I am carrying out continues to yield the sort of results that it has produced so far (and there is no reason to suppose that this shall not be the case), then I shall be able to report in the foreseeable future that one experienced physician, with an appropriately equipped office and the aid of ten auxiliary personnel, will be able to carry out in the course of a single day the sterilization of hundreds, or even 1,000 women.”

Dr Horst Schumann

Also in 1942, Dr Horst Schumann, former head of the euthanasia institutes in Grafeneck and Sonnenstein, began sterilization experiments. Similarly to Clauberg, he searched for the most convenient way of mass sterilization based on the “scientific method”.

Groups composed of several dozen Jewish men and women prisoners were subject to sterilization experiments consisting of exposing the women's ovaries and the men's testes to X-rays. The exposure to radiation produced severe burns on the abdomen together with radiation inflammations and festering sores that were resistant to healing.

The results of the X-ray sterilization experiments were unsatisfactory. In the work that he sent to Himmler in April 1944, entitled The Effect of X-Ray Radiation on the human Reproductive Glands and based on the experiments conducted in Auschwitz, Schumann expressed a preference for surgical castration, as being quicker and more certain.

Strafkompanie

The men’s penal company was formed in Auschwitz at the beginning of August 1940. Prisoners regarded assignment to it, frequently ending in death, as one of the harshest means of punishment in the camp. Reasons for assignment to the penal company included contact with civilians; escape attempts; possession of additional food, clothing or too slow work—in the eyes of an SS man or Kapo. Prisoners in this Kommando were isolated. In June 1942 the prisoners in the penal company attempted a mass escape. As a result of the escape, the SS murdered over 350 prisoners. Nine men managed to get away.

The women’s penal company was founded in June 1942. The prisoners were employed building roads, digging drainage ditches and cleaning fish ponds. Like men, the women in the penal company were exposed to cruelty from SS men and functionaries. A particularly tragic event occurred in early October 1942 when German female prisoner functionaries used poles and axes to massacre about 90 Jewish women from France.

Sub-camps

Over the years, Auschwitz had almost 50 sub‑camps. The largest of them had extensive administrative structures, separate hospital barracks, showers and even small crematoria. In the smaller ones, prisoners were locked up for the night in rooms or cellars—there were no fences or guard towers there and meals were delivered from the main camp. The majority of prisoners were employed in the armaments and extractive industries, or agriculture. At the beginning of 1945, they held 35,000 men and women prisoners, more than Auschwitz I and Birkenau combined (31,000).

Tattooing

Auschwitz was the only German concentration camp where the prisoners were tattooed with their camp numbers. In the autumn of 1941 the camp administration decided to mark Soviet POWs this way. Initially the number was tattooed on the left side of the prisoner’s chest. Polish prisoners transferred to Birkenau from Auschwitz I in March 1942 were tattooed in the same way, as well as Jews arriving in the first mass transports. From the spring of 1942 the camp authorities ordered that incoming prisoners be tattooed on the left forearm. Jewish men arriving in new transports were marked in this way, together with Jewish women already incarcerated in the camp. In the first quarter of 1943, the tattooing of numbers began for all prisoners, both those already in the camp and those newly arrived. Some groups of prisoners were tattooed with additional designations in addition to numbers, such as: “Z” - Roma, ‘A’ - Jews and Jewish women brought in since May 1944, and then ‘B’ - only Jews.

German and Austrian prisoners, so-called reeducation prisoners, police prisoners (block 11), and Poles deported in the summer of 1944 from Warsaw during the Uprising (Warsaw Uprising) were not tattooed. Neither were Jews held “temporarily” in transit camps at Birkenau since May of that year, awaiting transfer to other camps in the Reich.

Triangle

(German: Winkel)

A triangle sewed on the striped uniform along with the camp number designated a prisoner’s category. Red triangles denoted political prisoners, green triangles—criminal prisoners, black— asocial, pink—homosexual, and purple—Jehovah’s Witnesses. At first, Jews were issued an additional yellow triangle pointing up; when a triangle in one of the colors mentioned above (almost always red in practice) was sewn over it, the resulting effect was a six‑pointed Star of David. Later, instead of the yellow triangle, a narrow band of yellow fabric was sewn above the red triangle. Letters on the triangles defined the nationality of the prisoner—P for Poles, R for Russians, U for Ukrainians, and so on. Reeducation prisoners (Erziehungshäftlinge) bore the letter E instead of a triangle, and Soviet prisoners of war had the letters SU (Sowjetunion) daubed on their clothing in oil paint. No letter designators were used on German prisoners.

Typhus

A severe and dangerous infectious disease which led to the death of tens of thousands Auschwitz prisoners, caused by bacteria transmitted by fleas that are parasitic to rodents, including rats and mice. The first symptoms, visible several days after infection, are high fever and a rash taking the form of red spots on the skin. Next comes damage to the nervous and circulatory systems, and to the heart. Effective treatment with antibiotics was not available during World War II. Surviving the illness thus depended on the resistance of the individual organism; recovery without treatment may occur after about four weeks. At first, SS doctors did not attach much importance to combating its causes. Only the death of the SS head camp physician in May 1942 and numerous cases among the garrison forced the camp authorities to take preventive measures. These included mass selection for the gas chambers of people with symptoms of typhus, more frequent fumigation of clothing, the disinfection of barracks, and showers for prisoners. The typhus epidemic was not brought under control until 1944.

Warsaw Uprising

An armed uprising against the German occupiers of Warsaw by the Home Army (AK), lasting from August 1 to October 2, 1944. During the fighting, the occupation authorities expelled the civilian population from the city in order to facilitate operations against the insurrectionists. Civilians were mostly directed to a transit camp in Pruszków, from where a significant proportion were later deported to conscript labor camps in the Third Reich or to concentration camps. In August and September more than 13,000 people, including 1,500 children and youths, were sent to Birkenau. They were directed to the camp and went through the complete registration procedure with the exception of the tattooing of numbers. The majority of them were soon transferred to camps in the depths of the Reich as part of the preliminary evacuation of Auschwitz that was already underway, and forced to labor in German industry.

Women

The first women were imprisoned in Auschwitz in March 1942.

They were employed in demolishing buildings, earthworks, construction, and transport work. They also worked in work units related to camp operations: in the hospital, kitchens, baths, warehouses, and sorting the property stolen from exterminated Jews. Hard physical labor and poor hygienic and sanitary conditions contributed to the spread of infectious diseases and were also a cause of rapid physical deterioration. Physically and mentally exhausted, the women prisoners were selected by SS doctors during camp selections for death in the gas chambers. From mid-1943 onwards, selections were discontinued for non-Jewish female prisoners, but selections among Jewish women continued.

In the early period of the women camp, all pregnant women were murdered as unfit for work or subjected to forced abortions. Women who managed to carry pregnancies to term in secret were killed along with their newborns after giving birth. Later, the killing of mothers after childbirth was ceased, but all children born in the camp were still ruthlessly murdered. From mid-1943, the killing of non-Jewish newborns ceased (usually, however, they died shortly after due to diseases and starvation). However, Jewish children born in the camp continued to be murdered immediately after birth, a practice that lasted until autumn 1944 (when the order to halt the extermination of Jews was issued).

In total, about 131,000 female prisoners were registered in Auschwitz, the majority being Jewish women (about 82,000), Polish women (31,000), and Romani women (11,000); the rest included Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, German, French, and Czech women. They accounted for about 30% of all prisoners registered in the camp. Several hundred thousand Jewish women, deemed unfit for work during selections on the arrival ramp – older women, the sick, mothers with small children, and pregnant women – were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival.

Youths

See children.

Zamość region

During 1942 and 1943, the Germans deported Polish families from the Zamość region to Auschwitz as part of their plans to Germanize the eastern territories, which they viewed as "Lebensraum" (living space). The displaced individuals were replaced by German settlers.

In three transports to Auschwitz, a total of 1,300 civilians from the Zamość area were brought in, including about 13% minors. All were registered in the camp as prisoners, but most of them perished within just a few weeks due to inhumane living conditions, diseases, starvation, and brutal treatment. The elderly, ill, and disabled were victims of selections and were murdered in gas chambers. Pregnant women and mothers with newborns, who gave birth shortly after arriving at the camp, were killed with phenol injections. In total, over 1,000 people from the Zamość transports died in Auschwitz; fewer than 200 displaced persons survived until the end of the war.

Zyklon B

A pesticide produced by the Degesch company, initially designated exclusively for eradicating insects. From the end of the summer of 1941, it was also used sporadically to put to death Auschwitz I prisoners and Soviet POWs; from the spring of 1942 it was used regularly to murder Jews in the Birkenau gas chambers. It took the form of granules of diatomaceous earth saturated with hydrogen cyanide, which was released at an appropriately high temperature (approx. 27 degrees C) and turned into a gaseous form. Its application produced so‑called internal asphyxiation of the victims by blocking the exchange of oxygen in the red corpuscles and impeding cellular respiration. At least 25 tons of Zyklon B were delivered to Auschwitz in the years 1942–1944. According to postwar testimony by Rudolf Höss, it took from five to seven kilograms of the pesticide to murder fifteen hundred people.