From 1940-1941, at any time, there were between 13,000 and 16,000 prisoners in Auschwitz I. By 1942, there were 20,000. Most of these prisoners were not Jewish, because most of the Jewish prisoners were sent to Auschwitz II.
At Auschwitz, the prisoners had to put marks on their uniforms to show why they were sent to Auschwitz. For example, Jewish prisoners had to sew two yellow triangles onto their clothes, in the shape of a Star of David. Homosexual people had to sew a pink triangle onto their clothes. The SS also gave each prisoner a serial number and tattooed the number on the prisoners' bodies. The SS never called prisoners by their names, only by their numbers.
The living conditions at Auschwitz I were very bad. Prisoners got very little food. There was no sanitation, which made it easy for diseases to spread. Many prisoners died from diseases, starvation, and freezing to death.
On Sundays, the prisoners had to clean their barracks, and were allowed to shower.
The SS built many types of rooms meant to punish and torture prisoners. These included:
Sometimes, the SS would tie a prisoner's hands behind his back and hang him by his wrists. This would break the person's shoulder joints. The SS would leave prisoners hanging like this for hours or days, sometimes until the prisoners died.
The SS also hung some prisoners by the neck, so they would die a slow and painful death.
The SS tried killing prisoners with Zyklon B for the first time at Auschwitz I, on 3rd September 1941.
In their first test, the SS used Zyklon B on 600 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and about 250 Polish people. When the gas killed these prisoners, the SS realized that they could kill people much more quickly with Zyklon B than they could by shooting them. They built a gas chamber, where they could kill over 700 people at a time. They also built a crematorium in block 11 of the camp.
From 1941 to 1942, the SS killed about 60,000 people in this gas chamber. After 1942, they made the gas chamber an air-raid shelter for the SS to hide in if Allied planes were dropping bombs nearby.
Today, the gas chamber still exists. It has been re-built, using its original parts. Now, it is a part of the museum at Auschwitz.
On 26th March 1942, the SS sent the first women prisoners to Auschwitz.
From about March 1941 to January 1945, Nazi Dr. Carl Clauberg did medical experiments on many women at Auschwitz. He wanted to find a way to sterilize millions of people as easily and quickly as possible. He tried using X-rays, surgery, and medications to sterilize women prisoners. The Nazis' plan was to get rid of everyone who was not "Aryan." As part of this plan, the Nazis sterilized many people so they could not have children who were not "Aryan."
In 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered the SS to create a brothel in Auschwitz. Non-Jewish women prisoners were forced to work in the brothel. Prisoners who were important to the Nazis, like kapos and chefs, were allowed to use the brothel as a reward. Heinrich Himmler also ordered homosexual prisoners to visit the brothel every week. He thought this would 'cure' them of being homosexual.
Johanna Langefeld, Maria Mandel, and Elisabeth Volkenrath were in charge of the women prisoners at Auschwitz.
Criminal Joseph Mengele did medical experiments on many prisoners, especially twins, dwarves, and people with physical disabilities. All of these experiments were very crude and painful. For example, Mengele castrated some prisoners without using any anesthetics. Many women and men died during these experiments.
Mengele was also in charge of Auschwitz's camp "hospital." This was not like a regular hospital. Prisoners who were doctors, like Gisella Perl, worked there. They tried to help prisoners who were sick or hurt, but they had no medications or medical supplies, not even clean bandages or running water. If patients did not get better quickly, Mengele sent them to the gas chambers, or Nazi doctors killed them by injecting them with phenol.
Auschwitz II was Auschwitz's death camp. It was also called Birkenau (pronounced "BEER-kin-now"), which means "the birch wood" (forest). Today, Birkenau is often just called "Auschwitz."
The Nazis began building Auschwitz II in October 1941, because Auschwitz I was getting too crowded. By this time, Adolf Hitler had decided to kill all of the Jewish people. The Nazis called this plan the "Final Solution." Soon after it was built, Heinrich Himmler ordered Auschwitz II to be used as a killing center. Its goal would be to kill every prisoner that was sent there.
Auschwitz II had four gas chambers. The Nazis made the gas chambers look like showers. They convinced prisoners that they were going into the gas chambers to shower. Then they dropped Zyklon B into the gas chambers and killed everyone inside. The dead bodies were burned to ashes in Auschwitz II's four crematoria.
Auschwitz II was the largest death camp run by Nazi Germany during The Holocaust. The SS killed more people at Auschwitz than in any of the other Nazi death camps. The SS built Auschwitz II's gas chambers so that 2,000 people could fit inside at once. This meant they were able to kill about 2,000 people every 30 minutes in the gas chambers.
Auschwitz III was also called Monowitz (pronounced "MOW-no-vitz"). At Monowitz and the 48 subcamps around it, prisoners worked as slaves in the IG Farben factory and factories that made weapons for the German Army.
The IG Farben factory at Monowitz opened in 1941. By October 1942, prisoners had been forced to build the Monowitz camp, so slave workers could live there. IG Farben paid for the camp to be built. This made Monowitz the first concentration camp in history to be paid for and built by a private company.
Between 1941 and 1945, about 35,000 prisoners worked at the IG Farben factory. Seven out of every ten of these prisoners (about 25,000) died from starvation, disease, and being forced to work so hard. The average prisoner lived for only three months after being sent to Monowitz.
Managers at the IG Farben factory were always trying to make the prisoners work harder. Often they threatened prisoners by saying they would be sent to the gas chambers if they did not work harder. Every month, 20% of the slave workers at the factory (one out of every five) died or were sent to the gas chambers.
Until the summer of 1943, Rudolf Höss was the commander of Auschwitz. After him, Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer became commanders of the camp.
After World War II, Höss wrote an autobiography. He gave many details about Auschwitz's camps. At the Nuremberg Trials, he received the death penalty. He was hanged in front of the crematorium at Auschwitz I.
By 1943, many resistance groups had formed inside Auschwitz's camps. These were groups who tried to fight back against the Nazis, any way they could.
Resistance groups helped some prisoners to escape from Auschwitz. These people brought information to the world about the killings happening at Auschwitz.
However, if one prisoner escaped, the SS killed many other prisoners. Sometimes, they brought the escaped prisoners' family members to Auschwitz. The SS did these things so that other prisoners would not try to escape. Overall, about 700 prisoners tried to escape from Auschwitz's three different camps. Of these 700, about 300 were able to escape.
Some of the "Sonderkommando" at Auschwitz fought back against the SS. For example, in 1944, some of the "Sonderkommando" at Auschwitz blew up one of the camp's crematoria.
Also in 1944, members of the "Sonderkommando" secretly took pictures inside Auschwitz. These are the only pictures that show the mass murder that was happening at Auschwitz. Members of the Polish resistance helped sneak the photographs out of the camp.