B. als Arbeitslager, Außenlager, Außenkommando, KZ… They begin to hide. [150] Mandl and Hössler were executed after the war. [a], Harassment and economic pressure encouraged Jews to leave Germany; their businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden from advertising in newspapers, and deprived of government contracts. Józef Noji, the Polish long-distance runner, was executed on 15 February that year. [72] IG Farben paid the SS three or four Reichsmark for nine- to eleven-hour shifts from each worker. [230] He testified that the figure of over two million had come from Eichmann. Av hesum vóru 960.000 jødar, 140.000 póllendingar, 23.000 sigoynarar, umframt mangir aðrir minnilutar. Lejren blev oprettet i 1938 ved et teglværk som en underlejr af kz-lejren Sachsenhausen.I 1940 fik den status som selvstændig kz-lejr og fik med tiden 96 mindre arbejdslejre og "udekommandoer" under sig som underlejren Banterweg, hvor danskeren Gustav Alfred Jepsen var stedfortrædende lejrkommandant. Purple was for Jehovah's Witnesses (Internationale Bibelforscher-Vereinigung or IBV)'s and pink for gay men, who were mostly German. The first transport of German Roma arrived on 26 February that year. Some of the people made up a formless mass. "Selection" of, Gate with the camp remains in the background, 2009, The commandant's and administration building, Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II brick barracks, sector BI, 2006; four prisoners slept in each partition, known as a, Roll call in front of the kitchen building, Auschwitz II, Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz II, May/June 1944. [299][j] Extradited to Poland on 25 May 1946,[300] he wrote his memoirs in custody, first published in Polish in 1951 then in German in 1958 as Kommandant in Auschwitz. [63] Tax exemptions were available to corporations prepared to develop industries in the frontier regions under the Eastern Fiscal Assistance Law, passed in December 1940. [11] On 15 September 1935, the Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws. [321] A CNN-ComRes poll in 2018 found a similar situation in Europe. After its decommissioning as a gas chamber, the building was converted to a storage facility and later served as an SS air raid shelter. Auschwitz-Birkenau.Es wurde 1941 drei Kilometer entfernt vom Stammlager Auschwitz I auf dem Gebiet der Gemeinde Brzezinka (deutsch Birkenau) errichtet. (Birkenau) kamp za istrebljivanje, [293], The liberation of Auschwitz received little press attention at the time; the Red Army was focusing on its advance toward Germany and liberating the camp had not been one of its key aims. [160], Prisoners could be beaten and killed by guards and kapos for the slightest infraction of the rules. [255] Of the 802 escapes, 144 were successful, 327 were caught, and the fate of 331 is unknown. [8] Both during and immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, acts of violence against German Jews became ubiquitous,[9] and legislation was passed excluding them from certain professions, including the civil service and the law. Auschwitz I gehörte als Stammlager neben dem KZ Auschwitz II–Birkenau und dem KZ Auschwitz III–Monowitz zum Lagerkomplex Auschwitz. Brought to the camp as functionaries, this group did much to establish the sadism of early camp life, which was directed particularly at Polish inmates, until the political prisoners took over their roles. [278] Peter Longerich estimated that a quarter of the detainees were thus killed. Shortly after this, the SS removed nearly 2,908 from the family camp to work, and on 2 August 1944 gassed the other 2,897. They wrote later to Rudolf Höss apologizing for the loss of the vehicle. [68] Given the difficulty of moving them, including during the winter, IG Farben decided to build a camp at the plant. [176] The SS tried to liquidate the camp on 16 May 1944, but the Roma fought them, armed with knives and iron pipes, and the SS retreated. The court convicted 19 of the defendants, giving six of them life sentences and the others between three and ten years. An aerial reconnaissance photograph of the Auschwitz concentration camp showing the Auschwitz I camp, 4 April 1944, Crematorium I, photographed in 2016, reconstructed after the war, "Birkenau" redirects here. The Reich Citizenship Law defined as citizens those of "German or related blood who demonstrate by their behaviour that they are willing and suitable to serve the German People and Reich faithfully", and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriage and extramarital relations between those with "German or related blood" and Jews. A flogging table called "the goat" immobilized prisoners' feet in a box, while they stretched themselves across the table. [21] Succeeded as commandant by Arthur Liebehenschel,[90] Höss joined the SS Business and Administration Head Office in Oranienburg as director of Amt DI,[90] a post that made him deputy of the camps inspectorate. [273], The last mass transports to arrive in Auschwitz were 60,000–70,000 Jews from the Łódź Ghetto, some 2,000 from Theresienstadt, and 8,000 from Slovakia. In 1940–1941 when there was one gas chamber, there were 20 such prisoners, in late 1943 there were 400, and by 1944 during the Holocaust in Hungary the number had risen to 874. [218], Just before cremation, jewelry was removed, along with dental work and teeth containing precious metals. [74] Deaths and transfers to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II reduced the population by nearly a fifth each month. [218] Some of the hair was examined by the Forensic Science Institute in Kraków, where it was found to contain traces of prussic acid, the main ingredient of Zyklon B. [110] About 100 survived to the camp's liquidation. [306], In the decades since its liberation, Auschwitz has become a primary symbol of the Holocaust. The victims undressed in the dressing room and walked into the gas chamber; signs said "Bade" (bath) or "Desinfektionsraum" (disinfection room). [103] Wielding tremendous power over other prisoners, the functionaries developed a reputation as sadists. Dwork and van Pelt write that a chimney was recreated; four openings in the roof were installed to show where the Zyklon B had entered; and two of the three furnaces were rebuilt with the original components. Main Camp Auschwitz I The victims were squeezed into the tiniest of spaces. [200], According to Polish historian Franciszek Piper, of the 1,095,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz, around 205,000 were registered in the camp and given serial numbers; 25,000 were sent to other camps; and 865,000 were killed soon after arrival. )[143] A third transport of 798 Jewish women from Bratislava, Slovakia, followed on 28 March. "[49] Construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau—called a Kriegsgefangenenlager (prisoner-of-war camp) on blueprints—began in October 1941 in Brzezinka, about three kilometers from Auschwitz I. [58], Use of bunkers I and 2 stopped in spring 1943 when the new crematoria were built, although bunker 2 became operational again in May 1944 for the murder of the Hungarian Jews. [151] In one experiment Bayer, then part of IG Farben, paid RM 150 each for 150 female inmates from Auschwitz (the camp had asked for RM 200 per woman), who were transferred to a Bayer facility to test an anesthetic. [140] The first mass transport of women, 999 non-Jewish German women from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, arrived on 26 March 1942. [77] The Allies bombed the plant in 1944 on 20 August, 13 September, 18 December, and 26 December. [212], The Zyklon B was delivered to the crematoria by a special SS bureau known as the Hygiene Institute. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. Inmates arriving at night, or who were too weak to walk, were taken by truck. [78] From Gliwice, prisoners were taken by rail in open freight wagons to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. Astor, Maggie (12 April 2018). [301] His trial before the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw opened on 11 March 1947; he was sentenced to death on 2 April and hanged in Auschwitz I on 16 April, near crematorium I. The virtual tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial includes over 200 high-quality panoramic photographs. [240] He was imprisoned there from 22 September 1940[242] until his escape on 27 April 1943. [209] SS officers told the victims they had to take a shower and undergo delousing. Soviet troops entered the camp on 27 January 1945, a day commemorated since 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. An individual visitor will be able to enter the Auschwitz Memorial in the first available time slot in between the hours for individual visitors without an educator. [134] The wooden bunks had blankets and paper mattresses filled with wood shavings; in the brick barracks, inmates lay on straw. Also see "The Budy Massacre—A grim anniversary". Following the camp's liberation, the Soviet government issued a statement, on 8 May 1945, that four million people had been killed on the site, a figure based on the capacity of the crematoria. [185] Before they died, they had been asked to write postcards to relatives, postdated to 25–27 March. [27] By March 1941, 10,900 were imprisoned in the camp, most of them Poles. 3.5K likes. Seite des Internationalen Auschwitz Komitees (IAK), Organisation der Überlebenden von Auschwitz.,Seite des Internationalen Auschwitz Komitees (IAK), Organisation der Überlebenden von Auschwitz. [334] The cross remained, triggering the "War of the Crosses", as more crosses were erected to commemorate Christian victims, despite international objections. [135] According to Miklós Nyiszli: Eight hundred to a thousand people were crammed into the superimposed compartments of each barracks. "Auschwitz" redirects here. ... And in the meantime, their voices grew weaker and weaker ... Because of the great crowding, people fell one atop another as they died, until a heap arose consisting of five or six layers atop the other, reaching a height of one meter. [298], Camp commandant Rudolf Höss was arrested by the British on 11 March 1946 near Flensburg, northern Germany, where he had been working as a farmer under the pseudonym Franz Lang. They would have suffocated from the lack of air within several hours. If their shoulders were too damaged afterwards to work, they might be sent to the gas chamber. This was the third set of serial numbers started in the camp. "[288], The Soviet military medical service and Polish Red Cross (PCK) set up field hospitals that looked after 4,500 prisoners suffering from the effects of starvation (mostly diarrhea) and tuberculosis. [330] More controversy followed when Carmelite nuns founded a convent in 1984 in a former theater outside the camp's perimeter, near block 11 of Auschwitz I,[331] after which a local priest and some survivors erected a large cross—one that had been used during the pope's mass—behind block 11 to commemorate 152 Polish inmates shot by the Germans in 1941. On 19 January 1945, the SS ordered that the site be evacuated, sending 9,000 inmates, most of them Jews, on a death march to another Auschwitz subcamp at Gliwice. [189], The first gassings at Auschwitz took place in early September 1941, when around 850 inmates—Soviet prisoners of war and sick Polish inmates—were killed with Zyklon B in the basement of block 11 in Auschwitz I. He was imprisoned in Heide, then transferred to Minden for interrogation, part of the British occupation zone. Pilecki compiled two reports after he escaped in April 1943; the second, Raport W, detailed his life in Auschwitz I and estimated that 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, had been killed. After escaping through a fence using wirecutters, they managed to reach Rajsko, where they hid in the granary of an Auschwitz satellite camp, but the SS pursued and killed them by setting the granary on fire. Once the bodies were stripped of anything valuable, the Sonderkommando burned them in the crematoria. Images from www.auschwitz.org may be used only in publications relating to the history of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau or the activities of the Auschwitz Memorial. [43], Women were at first held in blocks 1–10 of Auschwitz I,[144] but from 6 August 1942,[145] 13,000 inmates were transferred to a new women's camp (Frauenkonzentrationslager or FKL) in Auschwitz II. [242], The resistance sent out the first oral message about Auschwitz with Dr. Aleksander Wielkopolski, a Polish engineer who was released in October 1940. 29858) and Czesław Mordowicz (no. [138] Observant Jews tried to keep track of the Hebrew calendar and Jewish holidays, including Shabbat, and the weekly Torah portion. Pope John Paul II celebrated mass over the train tracks leading to Auschwitz II-Birkenau on 7 June 1979[329] and called the camp "the Golgotha of our age", referring to the crucifixion of Jesus. [20] Around 1,000 m long and 400 m wide,[21] Auschwitz consisted at the time of 22 brick buildings, eight of them two-story; a second story was added to the others in 1943 and eight new blocks were built. They were given serial numbers 31 to 758. [231] In his memoirs, written in custody, Höss wrote that Eichmann had given the figure of 2.5 million to Höss's superior officer Richard Glücks, based on records that had been destroyed. At least 802 prisoners tried to escape, 144 successfully, and on 7 October 1944 two Sonderkommando units, consisting of prisoners who staffed the gas chambers, launched an unsuccessful uprising. Da das Stammlager völlig überfüllt war, ordnete Himmler bei seinem Besuch im Frühjahr 1941 den Bau eines zusätzlichen Lagers an, Auschwitz-Birkenau. [168] The first executions, by shooting inmates in the back of the head, took place at the death wall on 11 November 1941, Poland's National Independence Day. The Polish government and Catholic Church eventually agreed to remove all but the original. Crematoria II and III were given new elevators leading from the stoves to the gas chambers, new grates were fitted, and several of the dressing rooms and gas chambers were painted. [311] It was the city's largest-ever political gathering, with over 45 heads of state and world leaders, including royalty. The first gassings—of Soviet and Polish prisoners—took place in block 11 of Auschwitz I around August 1941. [e] Saul Friedländer wrote that the Beuthen Jews were from the Organization Schmelt labor camps and had been deemed unfit for work. [253][i] He writes that most escapes were attempted from work sites outside the camp's perimeter fence. [264] Since the 1990s, other historians have argued that Allied bombing accuracy was not sufficient for Wyman's proposed attack, and that counterfactual history is an inherently problematic endeavor. The brother of the museum's director, Piotr Cywiński, wrote that Cywiński had experienced "50 days of incessant hatred". [175] Josef Mengele, the Holocaust's most infamous physician, worked in the gypsy family camp from 30 May 1943 when he began his work in Auschwitz. A racial hierarchy existed, with German prisoners at the top. On 6 July 1940, roll call lasted 19 hours because a Polish prisoner, Tadeusz Wiejowski, had escaped; following an escape in 1941, a group of prisoners was picked out from the escapee's workmates or barracks and sent to block 11 to be starved to death. [51], SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Bischoff, an architect, was the chief of construction. Welkom op de Stichting Auschwitz site - vzw Auschwitz in Gedachtenis Bienvenue sur le site de la Fondation Auschwitz - Mémoire d'Auschwitz ASBL Welcome to the website of the Auschwitz Foundation - Remembrance of Auschwitz Nederlands Français English. 27089), both Polish prisoners, escaped on 19 November 1943; Tabeau made contact with the Polish underground and, between December 1943 and early 1944, wrote what became known as the Polish Major's report about the situation in the camp. In January 1941 the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army and prime minister-in-exile, Władysław Sikorski, arranged for a report to be forwarded to Air Marshal Richard Pierse, head of RAF Bomber Command. [261] Written by Auschwitz prisoners in or around December 1940, the report described the camp's atrocious living conditions and asked the Polish government-in-exile to bomb it: The prisoners implore the Polish Government to have the camp bombed. Auschwitz (referred to as Oświęcim by the Poles) is a relatively small self-contained site, but we easily spent 2.5 hours there (without going to Birkenau). [207], The crematoria consisted of a dressing room, gas chamber, and furnace room. [196], From 1942 Jews were being transported to Auschwitz from all over German-occupied Europe by rail, arriving in daily convoys. "[188] The Red Cross visited Theresienstadt in June 1944 and were persuaded by the SS that no one was being deported from there. [192] The gas chamber and crematorium were reconstructed after the war. … Each washhouse had to service thousands of prisoners. [139], About 30 percent of the registered inmates were female. [15] By the end of that year, during what most historians regard as the first phase of the Holocaust, 500,000–800,000 Soviet Jews had been killed in mass shootings by a combination of German Einsatzgruppen, ordinary German soldiers, and local collaborators. [166] Several rooms in block 11 were deemed the Polizei-Ersatz-Gefängnis Myslowitz in Auschwitz (Auschwitz branch of the police station at Mysłowice). [40] The evidence for this and the February 1942 transport was contested in 2015 by Nikolaus Wachsmann. Seite des Internationalen Auschwitz Komitees (IAK), Organisation der Überlebenden von Auschwitz.,Seite des Internationalen Auschwitz Komitees (IAK), Organisation der Überlebenden von Auschwitz. 918), Stanisław Gustaw Jaster (no. Piper writes that this reflected Germany's increasing need for labor. [324] An exhibition opened in Auschwitz I in 1955, displaying prisoner mug shots; hair, suitcases, and shoes taken from murdered prisoners; canisters of Zyklon B pellets; and other objects related to the killings. "[171] The dead included Colonel Jan Karcz and Major Edward Gött-Getyński, executed on 25 January 1943 with 51 others suspected of resistance activities. Publishers undertake to indicate the authors and origin of the images: www.auschwitz.org, as well as to inform the Museum of the use of the images (press@auschwitz.org). [107], Because they were witnesses to the mass murder, the Sonderkommando lived separately from the other prisoners, although this rule was not applied to the non-Jews among them. [153] Interested in performing research on identical twins, dwarfs, and those with hereditary disease, Mengele set up a kindergarten in barracks 29 and 31 for children he was experimenting on, and for all Romani children under six, where they were given better food rations. [56], The first gas chamber at Auschwitz II was operational by March 1942. [181] The women and girls were placed in odd-numbered barracks and the men and boys in even-numbered. [222], The corpses were burned in the nearby incinerators, and the ashes were buried, thrown in the Vistula river, or used as fertilizer. 3419)—escaped successfully on 20 June 1942. [305] The 180-day Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, held in West Germany from 20 December 1963 to 20 August 1965, tried 22 defendants, including two dentists, a doctor, two camp adjudants and the camp's pharmacist. On 27 May 1944, Arnost Rosin (no. Kzauschwitz.de ist nicht die offizielle Website des Museums in Auschwitz. [126] Guards might force the prisoners to squat for an hour with their hands above their heads, or hand out beatings or detention for infractions such as having a missing button or an improperly cleaned food bowl. The images present the site of the former camp, historical descriptions, witness accounts, archival documents and photographs, artworks and objects related to the history of the camp. It was found in 1952, signed "A.Y.R.A":[215], It would be difficult to even imagine that so many people would fit in such a small [room]. [344], Earlier estimates included Raul Hilberg's 1961 work, The Destruction of the European Jews, which estimated that up to one million Jews had died in the camp. [115] An estimated 5,000–15,000 gay men prosecuted under German Penal Code Section 175 (proscribing sexual acts between men) were detained in concentration camps, of whom an unknown number were sent to Auschwitz. [226] In 1983 French scholar George Wellers was one of the first to use German data on deportations to calculate the death toll; he arrived at a figure of 1,471,595 deaths, including 1.35 million Jews and 86,675 non-Jewish Poles.[227]. Kapos were responsible for the prisoners' behavior while they worked, as was an SS escort. Anyone who did not want to go inside was shot [...] or torn apart by the dogs. No one did, and because the SS did not have their records, several of them survived. One prisoner was assigned to the latrines to measure the time the workers took to empty their bladders and bowels. [261] In May 1944 Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl suggested that the Allies bomb the rails leading to the camp. Auschwitz var en koncentrationslejr, og senere også udryddelseslejr, under Det Tredje Rige, der i dag står som et af de tydeligste symboler på de nazistiske jødeudryddelser og forbrydelser mod menneskeheden.Lejren blev i 1940 anlagt i byen Oświęcim i den sydvestlige del af det tysk besatte Polen, ca. Bunker 2 was temporarily reactivated from May to November 1944, when large numbers of Hungarian Jews were gassed. Most prisoners were gassed on arrival. [271] The dead included Zalmen Gradowski, who kept notes of his time in Auschwitz and buried them near crematorium III; after the war, another Sonderkommando member showed the prosecutors where to dig. German "career criminals" (Berufsverbrecher), the men were known as "greens" (Grünen) after the green triangles they had to wear on their prison clothing. [73] In 1943–1944, about 35,000 inmates worked at the plant; 23,000 (32 a day on average) died as a result of malnutrition, disease, and the workload. All the patients were later moved to the brick buildings in Auschwitz I, where several blocks became a hospital, with medical personnel working 18-hour shifts. [217] The hair was first cleaned in a solution of sal ammoniac, dried on the brick floor of the crematoria, combed, and placed in paper bags.